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Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light, Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host Tony Peterson.
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Speaker 2: Hey, everyone, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundation’s podcast, which is brought to you by first Light. I’m your host, Tony Peterson, and today’s episode is a little thought experiment on what the future of deer hunting could look like and what we can do as individuals to usher it in a direction we believe is best. I’m gonna be honest with you. I’m pretty stressed out at life, at this job, at a lot of stuff. And one of the things that has always helped me level myself off is hunting. But hunting has me worried too, and I hate that part. It’s not good when our escape suddenly become a source of major stress for us. I’m guessing you can relate, and I’m guessing you might feel like you don’t have any agency over the future of hunting. Maybe you don’t, maybe we all really don’t, and maybe that’s not true. Either way, It’s what I’m going to talk about right now, what is going on with people. I know it’s a joke sort of to talk about how COVID kind of broke us as a society, but it seems like things have been pretty rough since then. I’m sure if we could go back in time to the pre COVID days, there was plenty of stuff to bitch about then too. Who knows, But what I do know is that I have more conversations now than I ever have with people who just seemed to be stressed to the gills and who are wondering what to do with their lives to find a better baseline. This is something we just kind of accept in our jobs and often in our relationships, because neither are all that easy just to give up or change. Although that brings up the point of hard stuff being worth it. Maybe I’ll dive into that shit some other times. But we used to have coping mechanisms for the stuff. We’d walk into the woods and we’d haunt deer or pull the old lab out of crate and go try to find some roosters to flush something in the outdoors. Something that narrowed down our aperture down to us, you know, like a single pursuit and allowed us to give ourselves to something immersive for a few hours, where we could eventually surface on the other side, tired and content recharged, so we could go wade through the shit of everyday life. Now a lot of us are finding that hunting isn’t really the escape it once was, and that is messing with us. It’s like a trusted dog that suddenly snaps at you. Your brain knows what once was, you know what was comfortable and predictable, and then suddenly it becomes something that will never be the same. There’s always going to be a little doubt there, a little hesitancy. Even if it truly was a one off event, you won’t know that and your brain won’t let you forget it. With deer hunting, it should just be fun, you know what. Scratch that. Deer hunting should be something that is worth doing always. It should be something that when you do it, you are unsuccessful a lot, and you’re okay with that. But it can easily not be that. And when we slip into that territory, it’s like that family dog growling and lashing out at us. There are a lot of telltale signs of someone who has been bit by the deer hunting dog. So to speak, all of us have either talked to someone who shot a buck they regret because it’s too small, or we’ve been that person. I’ve done both, and now I just don’t care. If I see a deer and I want to shoot it, I just shoot it. And if people want to judge me for that, great, I truly believe that says more about them than me. The mental gymnastics we play on that front are often gross, and this happens a lot. What is there that says you are supposed to only shoot mature bucks? Who cares? And by the way, that mature buck thing is kind of bullshit because we can’t age deer the way we think we can. And if we truly cared about shooting mature bucks so they can pass on their jeans, we’d let them go until they were ten and not shoot them when they are five and coincidentally have their big set of antlers. That’s just trophy hunting in a slightly more palatable package, which was the point all along. The people pushing that message recognized how ugly trophy hunting is in a peer form to the masses, so they rebranded it very successfully. Now that’s how an awful lot of people talk about their hunting and how they set their goals. But there are a hell of a lot of people out there who probably should find a different path because that type of trophy hunting is largely unavailable to them or secretly unappealing. And listen again, I don’t care what you do if you want to grow and name bucks and farm deer and emulate the biggest names in the deer game donuts for donuts, but understand that a lot of people will never get there, and a hell of a lot of other people don’t want to turn their deer hunting into that type of game. And honestly, a lot of those people will kill smaller bucks than the name the buck crowd, but they will become better deer hunters for it. What I worry about with this is that the messaging around a lot of deer hunting and a hell of a lot of trophy hunting is shaping the future generations of hunters. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately with my daughters. In a recent conversation with the dude at the gym sort of buried the blade right up to the handle. For me, I hadn’t seen him all fall, but when I did, he strolled right up to me to talk about deer hunting. We’ve chatted in the past about hunting quite a bit, and I truly believe he’s just a hardcore outdoorsman who’s raising a few daughters himself and just loves the outdoors. So when I asked him how his season went, he said it was almost non existent. He had a lot of work this fall, and he did a lot of work on a cabin they bought, and his daughters are at the age where, at least if you live in the suburbs, they’ll be in endless activities. He then said he did get to hunt a friend’s place in Wisconsin, where he was told that he couldn’t shoot any bucks unless they were one fifty plus. He said the landowner invested huge money into having someone create and plant food plots and put out tower blinds and essentially said there were too deer on the property that could be shot this year. So this guy said it sucked, But that’s that’s the deal when you hunt someone else’s property. And I’m not blaming the landowner for setting his own rules. You make the money, you buy the land, you call the shots. I have no problem with that, But what bothered me was my gym buddy said that he took the landowner’s thirteen year old son out two Now. I said, was he restricted to one fifties as well? And he said not by his dad? But the kid was even more into trophy hunting than his dad. And I said, well, how the hell can that be? And he said, he watches a couple of guys on YouTube who kill multiple giants every year, like one eighty to two hundred inch types of giants, big money deer, if you get my drift. And I thought, that kid is never going to learn how to hunt, and he’s probably never going to learn how to enjoy hunting, because the minute a giant isn’t available to hunt, then the hunt is off. And what does that mean? I don’t know, but I’m worried about the deer hunting landscape that my generation is leaving for the next. I’m filling in the blanks right now because I don’t know that kid at all, but I think I can make a few predictions. He’s going to always have an amazing spot to hunt because his family has money. He’s going to focus on, you know, trophies pretty tightly above everything else, which probably means he might not be overly generous with his opportunities. If he sticks with it. He might not, though I don’t know, because even on super good ground, the neighbors can kill your buck, and a whole year of trail camera work and planning can go up and smoke the minute someone else sends an arrow or a bullet or across bow bolt flying not. If there aren’t any deer that someone views as worthy to hunt, then there isn’t a reason to hunt, which, if you look at it that way, seems insane to someone like me, but is very very common. If that happens enough, then it’s not crazy to think that kid could eventually just decide hunting isn’t worth it anymore. And I don’t want to sound like I’m picking on that kid. I kind of view that like I view you know, the dog that bit me on the ass a couple of weeks ago in the hotel. It wasn’t the dog’s fault, if you get my drift, And that’s where a lot of the responsibility lie. I think we are the ones who are creating the deer hunting culture and the broader hunting culture which we are handing off to the next generation. What are we doing with that responsibility. I recently had a conversation with one of our other forward facing personalities who is having trouble with the sales east side of our business. I said I didn’t have an answer for them, but for me, I figured out a long time ago that I have to hunt and portray hunting in a way that feels right and real to me. I don’t know how to put that any other way, but I know when I do a hard public land hunt, it makes me feel less gross to do the other parts of this job. But that’s not just the job. I don’t know why this is, but there are certain parts of hunting that I think are just important. I think you should burn some calories to kill an animal, because even though it doesn’t make a difference to that animal, for some reason, I think it should make a difference to us. I think that if you have the means in the time, which most of us do, then butchering our own animals just kind of closes the loop in an important way. Here’s the thing, though, what I think doesn’t really matter. I can pass on those things to my daughters and the folks I hunt with and their kids and my audience, and I hope that’s the right thing. But I also have to recognize that everyone draws their own lines in the sand. If you don’t want to butcher your own deer, who am I to say that you should? Just like? It would be crazy for me to force someone to listen to the kind of music I like or eat the kind of food that I like. Whatever, it’s none of my business, and that’s a good thing to recognize. What I think is a better approach is to ask all of us to consider what we have influence on and what that means for our interactions, and what could stick that either should or shouldn’t. There are hunting methods we can pass along, strategies, tactics, ethics, standards, and a lot of esoteric things we just kind of pull from the cosmos and decide to deserve a thumbs up or a thumbs down. There are things we are largely mobilized together that we all generally accept as good or bad, but those aren’t so simple either. The non resident hate thing is the one thing that I harp on all the time, and it fits nicely right here. We can justify lobbying to shut down non resident opportunities and are well within our legal rights to do so. We can cloak those arguments in many things and convince ourselves that we are for the resource and that’s that. But you’re also actively removing hunting on opportunities from your fellow hunters. Sugar coated all you want, but if you advocate for that, you’re pretty much doing the same thing that the anti hunters want to do. We just happen to be way more successful at it, to be honest, and while you might get easier hunting when the rat bastard hunters who live in a different state get booted out, there will come a time when you will need them and they won’t be there for you. That will create a net loss of opportunities for future generations. Should we never consider tightening things up or changing our management structure while standing on the throats of other hunters. I’m not saying that, but I’m also not comfortable knowing that when we take away opportunities from each other, they don’t come back, and that thing we lobby to take away will never be there for some kid just learning to hunt now in a different state. If you don’t want hunting to truly become a rich man’s sport, then don’t remove affordable opportunities, because the well healed will always find a way to do what they want. They’ll just lease the land you used to hunt, buy outfitter tags, whatever. I’ve bitched about this stuff enough and I think it’s time to go a different route for the rest of the show. How can we try to hand off this thing we love to new generations of people who might just love it and nurture it the way we would want them to. Well, let’s start with ourselves. If we handle ourselves the right way and accept some personal responsibility, that goes pretty far. I saw a comment recently on an article at the Mediat’s site about taking an out of state trip, and the comment are essentially spent a paragraph bitching about how South Dakota has been mismanaged so poorly that there are no mature bucks there anymore. First off, if you can’t find a mature buck in South Dakota, look inward first. Secondly, instead of bitching, what are your options? How many buck taggs do you get per year or use in that state, in particular, the residents aren’t shy about going after non residents, and I get it, But guess who is next when you boot the non residence out and the hunting still is an Iowa quality, Say goodbye to your opportunities because there will be enough residents who have some money and power who can lobby to keep you from their critters. And that shit is coming. Where are the solutions? I get the desire for a good bitch session, hell I get paid to bitch, But we have to look for solutions to this stuff. Does it involve a season structure change we can advocate for, or maybe a license price increase that goes directly to opening up more private land to the public. How about a better system to monitor that land so we aren’t giving landowners a big tax break or a payment for land that is essentially unreachable or unusable to the hunting public. There’s plenty of shit like that out there, and it sucks to see. But maybe it’s simpler than all of this though. Maybe it’s about us learning to do more for ourselves, like but you our own deer, and then passing along that knowledge to other hunters who might learn to appreciate that process. Maybe it’s about looking hard for all the deer we hit, not just the big bucks, and then spending some time pondering why we made a bad shot and how we can do better next time. I’m in that stage right now with shooting on film, and it pisses me off because I feel like I’m going through something I went through a long time ago and was hoping wouldn’t rear its ugly head again. But life doesn’t work that way. I’m trying to get my daughters to understand why and when bad shots happen, and how to follow through the best way possible. Sometimes it’s as simple as thinking about how we talk about this stuff. I remember hunting in Texas one time, and a guide there referred to every buck that wasn’t a shooter for the ranch as a shit buck. Not If that dude has kids, do you think they’ll be the kinds of hunters we want representing us in rear the next generation. I don’t know, man, but you might think, well, we are surrounded by assholes, and sometimes we are the assholes and that will never change, and you’d be right. But that’s kind of like deciding that a whole state doesn’t have the kind of dear you deem worthy to hunt and then throwing your hands in the air and saying, well, it’s beyond my control. I don’t know how about lowering your standards or raising your game to the point where those bucks become in play because they do live out there. How we do this stuff, how we speak about it, the messaging we send out in the world is shaping the future of hunting. Whether we take responsibility for that or not. It’s happening regardless of our consent. That doesn’t mean we have to accept the responsibility. But I’m willing to bet most of the folks who listen to this podcast and who consume quite a bit of what Mediator puts out, feel something in the direction of trying to do better when we can look. I hate that this sounds so preachy, Probably not as much as you do. I just keep bumping into this world that we’ve created and realizing once again that we are real freaking lucky to have deer to hunt it all, and the chance to slip into the woods and experience something that most of the population will never get to experience. That’s their loss. Let’s not make it everyone else’s loss if we can help it. Let’s think about the white tail world, the hunting world that we are passing along to the next generation, and try to shape it into something that will mean to them what it either used to mean to us or still does, or what we wish it meant to us. Okay, that’s my ted talk. I’ll get off my soadbox now. I’ll get back into something lighter and more strategy friendly next week. Maybe something on late season hunting and trying to wring the last hunts out of the year, get something done, makes something happen, something like that. It’ll be lighter than this one. I promise you that that’s it for this week. I’m Tony Peterson. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundation’s podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. Thank you, thank you, thank you so much for all of your support. It’s truly incredible. I’ve worked in the outdoor industry a long time and I’ve never been anywhere that had an audience like we do here at Meat Eater. It’s truly special. We have nothing without you, guys, so thank you for that. If you want more content, you know where to find it. Go to the medeater dot com. Tons of podcasts, new hunting films all the time, articles you know how to stuff, newsy stuff recipes, all kinds of new content going up every day at the mediator dot com. Check it out and have good holidays.
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