Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nope! Their suggestion (last time I had a tick bite) was to keep the tick for testing, because there are a number of different pathogens, with different approaches to treatment, you can get from ticks. Naturally, there's a latent period, so you don't retain them for very long , but that's the advice I got from a woman who works with forestry workers in NC on tickborne illness.
So how do your friends suggest that they store the hundreds or thousands of ticks per season that your average farmer or outdoorsman might pull off themselves? I guess we'll need some sort of rolling catalog system, labels for the dates etc. Perhaps a dedicated lab freezer with specimen vials would do the trick. Of course, if there are ever any symptoms, we'll have to have hundreds of ticks checked. I wonder what tha…
Two other notes: I'm highly skeptical that "thousands" of ticks is your average outdoorsman, especially given the seasonality of ticks, and the reported volume of tick bites in forestry workers, which wasn't that high and my colleagues did consider appalling.
Second: "The South" which you keep mentioning is not made up of just farmers and outdoorsmen. It's also made up of major urban areas with large forest fragmentation issues.