Killed My First Buck of the Season — Counted 23 Ticks Before I Stopped. 46 Years Hunting, Never Seen Numbers Like This.
You're doing everything right — permethrin on the clothes, tick checks, the whole drill — and you're still finding them on your wife, your kid, your dog, and your deer. The tick population in the Upper Midwest rewrote the rules under us, and the consumer playbook is fifteen years behind. Here's what's actually changed — and the layer that's been missing for the people in your house you can't put pesticide on.
My name is Daniel Reeves. I'm an industrial designer out of western Connecticut — 15 years building consumer hardware before this, the kind of products that show up at REI and Best Buy. I have two daughters, a golden retriever named Otto, and a backyard that backs up to county woods, same as yours probably does.
I'm not a hunter the way you are. I'm not going to pretend I am. But I spent the last three years on the phone with entomologists at UConn, Lyme researchers in upstate New York, and veterinarians in Sweden who've been recommending ultrasonic clips to dog owners for over a decade. I logged somewhere north of 1,800 hours of research and built 47 prototypes on my workbench before PULSE was something I'd put on my own kid.
The reason I went down the rabbit hole at all: my younger daughter Hazel got bit when she was six. We caught it. We pulled it the same night. The pediatrician said don't worry. Eight months later she was waking up at 3 a.m. with her lips swelling, and the panel came back positive for alpha-gal. Sky high. Permanent, lifelong. She was six.
Top three things I hear, in order, from the people who end up on this page:
- "I do permethrin religiously. It works for me. But the wife won't run it."
- "My buddy got alpha-gal. Can't eat venison. Can you imagine?"
- "Tick season used to be May to July. Now it's March to December."
If any of that sounds like your kitchen table conversation, you're in the right place. Let me show you what I found.
"I had permethrin on — and there were still ticks crawling above the line."
"The dog brings them in the house. That's the part nobody talks about."
"My daughter's due in March. She can't use DEET. She can't use permethrin. Then what?"
"Counted 23 ticks on the deer before I stopped counting. Never saw numbers like this in 46 years."
I've now heard from thousands of households across the tick belt — Connecticut, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Virginia, North Carolina. The hunter who runs Sawyer concentrate on a two-week soak schedule and still finds them on his calves. The wife who won't soak her gardening clothes and got one on her arm pulling weeds last Tuesday. The pregnant daughter whose OB said no DEET, no permethrin, period. The dog who can't be sprayed at all. The grandkid who isn't here yet but will be in March.
You name it. I've heard it. And what I keep hearing — over and over again — is the same sentence in slightly different words:
That's the conversation I built this for.
The Upper Midwest Tick Explosion Isn't Just Annoying… It Steals the One Thing You Built Your Life Around — and Quietly Threatens the People You Brought Into the Woods With You.
Here's the part nobody at the gas station, the sporting goods counter, or the doctor's office is putting together for you.
For most of the 20th century, when an American outdoorsman worried about ticks, he was worried about one tick — the blacklegged deer tick — and one disease, Lyme. That tick had rules. Entomologists call it a "passive quester." It climbed to the top of a blade of grass, held out its front legs, and waited. It moved slowly. It lived in specific microhabitats. It came out in specific seasons. You could see it. You could check for it. You could manage it with the tools your dad and your uncle taught you — long socks, tucked pants, permethrin on the clothes, a tick check at the end of the sit.
That tick is still here. But it has company now. And the new company doesn't play by any of those rules.
The Lone Star tick — historically a Southern regional pest — has exploded northward at a pace that has entomologists genuinely alarmed. It is now established in Connecticut. It is now established in Michigan. It is now established in Wisconsin. It is showing up in counties that, twenty years ago, would have laughed at the idea of a Lone Star tick problem. And this tick is what researchers call an "aggressive quester." Meaning it doesn't wait. It hunts. It actively pursues the carbon dioxide you exhale. It moves toward warm-blooded prey across distances the old deer tick never could.
And when it bites — this is the part that should stop you cold — it can leave behind a sugar molecule called alpha-gal that rewires the immune system to attack red meat for the rest of the host's life. Beef. Pork. Lamb. Venison. The gelatin in medications. The CDC now estimates as many as 450,000 Americans may already have alpha-gal syndrome and most don't know it yet — they just think they've been feeling weird after dinner.
So here's the reframe. The tools you trust — permethrin, picaridin, the careful sock-tuck, the tailgate tick check — those were designed for the tick that waited. They are still good tools. They still work. You're not wrong to keep using them. But they were never designed for the tick that hunts your dog, your wife, your pregnant daughter, your grandkid.
You haven't been doing it wrong. You've been doing it with a playbook written before the threat changed. Your grandfather didn't have to think about this. Your dad barely did.
You are the first generation of outdoorsman that has to defend a family — not just yourself — against a tick that actively hunts and can take venison off the dinner table for life.
The question, then, isn't whether you're doing enough. The question is whether the missing piece exists yet.
It does. It just wasn't built in America. And until eighteen months ago, it wasn't built for the people in your house at all…
The layer you've been missing wasn't on the shelf at the sporting goods store. It was in a veterinary clinic in Sweden.
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"Look, I'll be straight with you. I run permethrin gospel — Sawyer concentrate, two-week soak rotation, fifteen years deep. Don't need to be sold on what works for me. Bought this because the wife won't soak her clothes, my daughter's seven months pregnant and her OB said no DEET no permethrin period, and the dog gets a topical I don't fully trust anymore. Counted 23 ticks on the buck I shot last Saturday. That was the morning I ordered. Three weeks in: wife pulled one off her sleeve gardening — it was crawling, never bit. Dog has been clean on three grouse hunts in a row. Daughter wears hers on the strap of her diaper bag when she comes over. I'd rather have a backup than not. Not a miracle. A layer. That's exactly what it says on the tin."
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Here's the part of the mechanism that flipped a switch for me, and I'm going to explain it the way the entomologist at UConn explained it to me, because I think it'll do the same for you.
Ticks are nearly blind. They don't see the world the way a deer does, or a dog does, or you do up in the stand. They navigate almost entirely through a tiny, exquisitely sensitive organ on their front legs called Haller's organ — a sensor that reads vibration, heat, CO₂, humidity, and a very narrow band of ambient frequencies. That organ is how a tick identifies a mammal. That organ is how it decides a passing warm body is worth latching onto. That organ is also their single greatest vulnerability — and it's the vulnerability the chemical playbook has never touched.
When you introduce a specific ultrasonic frequency band — roughly 9 to 21 kilohertz, completely inaudible to humans, dogs, cats, and wildlife — into the tick's sensory field, the Haller's organ effectively short-circuits. The mammal it was approaching no longer reads as prey. Researchers call it "sensory static" — the targeting instruments go haywire, the read fails, the tick disengages and looks elsewhere.
You don't kill the tick. You don't poison the woods. You don't put a single drop of anything on your wife's skin or your daughter's belly or your dog's coat. You simply make the people you love invisible to the part of the tick that decides who to bite.
This is not a chemical. It is not a fragrance. It is not an essential oil. It is physics applied to a sensor — the way noise-canceling headphones don't make sound disappear, they just feed the brain a signal that tells it to ignore the input.
Here's how the modern household actually does this — without throwing out a single thing you already trust.
Keep doing what works. Keep the Sawyer concentrate. Keep the two-week soak rotation on the hunting clothes. Keep the tailgate tick check on the dog. Keep the gaiters and the tucked pants. None of that goes away. The CDC, ILADS, every credible voice in the field says the same thing — no single defense is one hundred percent. Layer up.
Add the layer you couldn't add before. The layer for the wife who won't soak her gardening clothes. The layer for the pregnant daughter who can't use chemicals. The layer for the dog who's covered in fur and can't be sprayed in the eyes. The layer for the grandkid in March. The layer for the back deck at dusk when nobody bothered to suit up because it's just the backyard.
The big spray companies aren't going to tell you about this. They sell DEET, picaridin, and permethrin — three molecules of chemistry. They are not going to introduce you to a fourth tool that isn't chemistry at all. That's not how that industry works. Luckily, the rest of the world figured this out years ago. It just took eighteen months and 47 prototypes to build the version designed for an American household — including the dog and the deer hunter.
PULSE doesn't have an ingredient list. That's the whole point. There's nothing to absorb, nothing to inhale, nothing to wash off, nothing to refill.
What it has instead is a 150 mAh rechargeable lithium battery driving a calibrated 9–21 kHz wide-band ultrasonic emitter — engineered specifically to disrupt the Haller's organ of the tick species expanding across the Upper Midwest and Northeast right now, including the Lone Star tick. The frequency band sits comfortably outside the documented hearing range of dogs (which drops off well above 21 kHz) and cats, and is fully inaudible to the adult human ear (which tops out around 17–18 kHz). Your dog will not hear it. Rye will not hear it. Your wife will not hear it. The ticks' targeting system will.
The frequency band itself isn't new — European veterinary clinics have been recommending ultrasonic clips to working-dog handlers across Scandinavia and Central Europe since 2009. Millions of units have been sold over there. The research lineage is veterinary, not consumer — which is exactly why most American outdoorsmen have never heard of it. It wasn't widely available on this side of the Atlantic until very recently, and when it was, it was being sold as a pet product, not as a household defense for the people you couldn't put pesticide on.
I partnered with a Swedish veterinary acoustics engineer named Lars Henriksen to bring the frequency calibration up to spec for the Lone Star expansion specifically — that tick has a slightly different Haller's organ response profile than the European castor bean tick the original work was done on. Eighteen months. Forty-seven prototypes. One pediatric ergonomics review. One pregnant-safety review. One dog hearing-range review. Then we shipped.
Introducing PULSE™ — the first American-engineered ultrasonic tick layer built for the people in your house you couldn't protect any other way.
Not a replacement for permethrin. Not an alternative to picaridin. Not a substitute for the tick check you do on the tailgate. A layer. The layer that closes the gap between what your spray covers and what it doesn't.
- 11 grams — the weight of three quarters. About the size of a guitar pick.
- Triangular geometry that clips flat against a backpack strap, a dog harness, a diaper bag, a belt loop, or a kid's shoelace without flopping or snagging.
- One button. Long-press to activate. Auto-sleep when it's tossed in a glove compartment.
- 2–4 days of continuous runtime on a 1–2 hour USB-C charge — same cable that charges your phone.
- Built-in over-charge protection. TSA carry-on compliant.
Available in two finishes — matte Black for the hunting pack, clean White for the diaper bag, garden tote, kid's backpack, or the dog harness that's already got too much going on. Pick whichever fits the carrier it's clipped to.
I'll keep this honest because that's the only kind of review worth reading.
My wife and I have been on the same eleven acres outside Hayward for nineteen years. Sawyer County. Backs right up to county forest. I've watched the tick numbers here go from 'see one once in a while' to absolutely unreal. Tick season used to be May to July up here. Now it's March to December and I'm not exaggerating.
I run permethrin gospel. Concentrate, not the spray. Two-week soak rotation on the hunting clothes. Haven't had one bite me in three seasons. So why am I writing a review about an ultrasonic clip? Because my buddy Doug got alpha-gal three years ago from a Lone Star bite up by Spooner. Doug can't eat venison anymore. To a man like me that's an existential crisis. And because my daughter Madison is seven months pregnant, due in March, and her OB said flat no DEET, no permethrin, period. And because I just shot my first buck of the season — gutted it on the tailgate at dusk — and I counted twenty-three ticks on that deer before I stopped counting. Forty-six years of hunting. I've never seen numbers like that.
My cousin's wife mentioned ultrasonic at the gas station a couple weeks back. I went home that night, sat at the kitchen table with Rye at my feet, and read on this site for forty-five minutes. The thing that sold me wasn't the science page. It was the founder writing that this is the layer for the people you can't put permethrin on. That's exactly the problem I had at my own kitchen table and nobody else was naming it.
Bought a 4-pack. One on my hunting pack. One on Rye's harness — that dog brings them in the house, that's the part nobody talks about. One on the wife — she clips it to her gardening apron and actually wears it, which is a small miracle. And one I gave to Madison for the diaper bag when the baby comes.
Three weeks in. Wife pulled one off her sleeve last Saturday — crawling, never bit. Rye has been clean on three grouse runs. I still run my permethrin. Still do the tailgate check. This didn't replace any of that. It's the backup I didn't have before.
I'd rather have a backup than not. That's the whole review.
Quick one. I take my 11-year-old to deer camp every November up in the U.P. We do the permethrin thing on his pants and jacket but he's a kid — he sheds layers, he sits weird in the blind, he wipes his face with his sleeve. There's always gaps. Last four years we've come home from camp and pulled ticks off him in the bathtub. Every. Single. Year.
Ordered the 4-pack on the recommendation of a guy on the forum. Clipped one to his backpack, one to mine, one to my brother's pack, one to the cooler we keep at the cabin. Spent five days at camp. Three sits a day. Same woods we've been hunting for a decade.
Came home. Stripped him down for the tick check. Zero. Not one. First time in five years.
I'm not going to claim it was the device because I'm not a scientist. We also did the permethrin like always. Could've been a low year. But four years in a row of finding them, and the year I add this thing we find none? I'll take the pattern. The 4-pack stays on our gear from now on. Already ordered a second 4-pack for my brother's family.
This isn't a thousand reviews from chemical-skeptical Brooklyn moms. This is 11,847 verified households across the Lyme belt and the Lone Star expansion zones — including a lot of guys who look like you.
No more white-knuckling the back deck at dusk because the grass is six feet away.
No more watching your pregnant daughter walk from the car to the porch and silently counting the steps.
No more bringing the next generation into a backyard you can't make safe with chemicals.
All it takes is one long press of one button in the morning. That's it. Clip it on the pack, the harness, the apron, the diaper bag. Take it off at night. Charge it twice a week with the same cable you charge your phone with. No soak schedule. No two-hour reapplication alarm. No "did I get the back of her neck." Nothing to remember. Nothing to ration. Nothing your wife has to commit to a routine to use.
99-Day Money-Back Guarantee
Run them through one full tick season — clip them on the wife, the dog, the kid's backpack, your pack. If your household isn't finding fewer ticks, send them back. Full refund. No argument. That's the deal.
Here's How to Get PULSE™ Into the Hands of Everyone in Your House This Week
5 Pulse™ Devices
Wife, dog, daughter, truck, camp cooler
Buy 2 Get 3 FREEJust $16.00 per device
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2 Pulse™ Devices
You and the wife — or you and the dog
Buy 1 Get 1 FREEJust $19.98 per device
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8 Pulse Devices™
Extended family, deer camp, multi-dog households
Buy 3 Get 5 FREEJust $14.99 per device
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This is a one-time order. No subscription. No refills. No consumables. No recurring charge on the card. You buy them once, charge them on Sundays, replace the battery in 2–4 years when it eventually wears out. That's the whole product.
99-day household guarantee. Run them through one full tick season — clip them on the wife, the dog, the kid's backpack, your pack. If your household isn't finding fewer ticks on the people, the dog, or your gear than you did the season before, send them back. Refund. No argument. That's the deal.
Remember… This Isn't Really About You.
You're covered. You've been covered for fifteen years. You run the concentrate. You do the two-week soak. You tuck the socks. You check on the tailgate. You've made peace with the tick numbers the way a man makes peace with bad weather — you dress for it and you go anyway.
But the woman pulling weeds at the edge of the yard isn't covered. The pregnant daughter walking from her car to your front porch in March isn't covered. The dog who sleeps at the foot of your bed and brings them in on his ears isn't covered. The grandkid who's coming in March isn't covered. And if you do nothing different, the woods you grew up in — the woods you taught your kids in, the woods you were planning to teach the next one in — won't be safe for them the way they were safe for you.
You can't spray your way out of that. You already know it. That's the part that's been sitting in the back of your mind every time Madison's name comes up on your phone.
This is a small thing. Eleven grams. A button. A clip. It's not the whole answer. It's a layer. But it's the layer for the people you couldn't protect any other way — and you've been carrying the weight of that gap by yourself for a while now.
Order the 4-pack. Put one on Rye's harness. Put one on Jeanette's apron before she remembers she doesn't want you fussing. Hand one to Madison when she's over for dinner Sunday. Keep one in the truck.
The first one you'll really care about is the one that's still in the package in March, waiting for a kid you haven't met yet.
Frequently Asked Questions
Everything you need to know about PULSE™ Ultrasonic Tick Repellent
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