Bizarre academic paper about releasing ticks resurfaces amid surging bites

An estimated 31 million people living in the U.S. are bitten by ticks annually, but this year, the number may hit a record. If a pair of radical professors had their way, then the surging bites would go unchecked, leaving multitudes of Americans sick — and unable to eat meat.

Citing its Tick Bite Tracker dashboard, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced late last month that visits to emergency rooms for tick bites were higher than normal in many parts of the country and that in all but the South Central U.S., “weekly rates of ER visits for tick bites are the highest for this time of year since 2017.” The Midwest is the most affected region.

This is especially concerning because tick bites can lead to various serious and potentially debilitating diseases including Lyme disease, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and every carnivore’s nightmare: alpha-gal syndrome.

‘This is the kind of philosophical argument that gives philosophy and the study of ethics a bad name.’

Amid this surge in tick bites and hospitalizations, a July 2025 academic paper defending the intentional spread of AGS via genetically modified ticks is once again in the spotlight.

AGS is a serious, potentially deadly allergy to alpha-gal, a molecule found in most mammals including cows and pigs. According to the CDC, the body of an afflicted individual registers alpha-gal in red meat and other mammal products as a threat and triggers an allergic reaction. This allergy can develop after a bite from a tick, most commonly the lone star tick.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans are believed to presently be affected by AGS.

A pair of professors at Western Michigan University School of Medicine said in an article titled “Beneficial Bloodsucking,” which was published in the journal Bioethics, that tick-borne AGS should be regarded as a “moral bioenhancer if and when it motivates people to stop eating meat.”

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Eating meat, as humans have done for millions of years, is — according to Professors Parker Crutchfield and Blake Hereth — supposedly bad for the world because it contributes to “climate change” and harms animals.

“AGS promotes in the people who have it a resistance to eating mammalian meat,” wrote the professors. “Thus, they eat less mammalian meat, which is an improvement in their capacity for moral behavior.”

Crutchfield and Hereth not only argued that efforts to prevent the spread of tick-borne AGS are impermissible but that “promoting tickborne AGS is strongly pro tanto obligatory” and that promoting the proliferation of tick-borne AGS by genetically optimizing the disease-carrying capacity and adaptability of ticks is “morally obligatory.”

“Today we have the obligation to research and develop the capacity to proliferate tickborne AGS and, tomorrow, carry out that proliferation,” added the radicals.

The professors claimed — in the paper that Crutchfield subsequently said was a hypothetical ethical framework for discussion — that intentionally infecting people with a syndrome that prevents them from eating meat does not violate their rights but is rather analogous to mass “vaccinations.”

Crutchfield argued in a 2019 paper that such “moral bioenhancement” interventions in pursuit of imagined moral improvements, not health gains, ought to be not only compulsory but covert.

“This is to say that it is morally preferable for compulsory moral bioenhancement to be administered without the recipients knowing that they are receiving the enhancement,” he noted in the abstract for the 2019 paper.

Crutchfield and Hereth are hardly the first on the scene to discuss possibly using bioengineering to render the population incapable of eating meat.

For instance, Taiwanese-American “bioethicist” S. Matthew Liao discussed over a decade ago not only reducing humans’ average height to reduce their “footprint” but artificially inducing “intolerance to red meat by stimulating the immune system against common bovine proteins” by way of a medical device resembling a nicotine patch or other means.

H. Sterling Burnett, director of the Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy, told the College Fix in response to the 2025 paper, “It is never morally right to promote a disease which harms people, robs them of choice, literally makes them sick, and, in extreme instances, kills them.”

“Whether to fight climate change or promote animal welfare, preventing the eradication of a disease that causes human harm — indeed, promoting increased infection — is morally abhorrent,” continued Burnett. “This is the kind of philosophical argument that gives philosophy and the study of ethics a bad name.”

Bioethics published a critical response in March to Crutchfield and Hereth’s paper that challenged the professors’ assumptions that introducing AGS would reduce overall animal suffering, that intentionally infecting humans would not violate fundamental moral rights, and that intentionally infecting people with AGS is comparable to vaccination.

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