00:00:01
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.
00:00:20
Speaker 2: Hey everyone, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundation’s podcast was brought to you by first Light. I’m heros Tony Peterson, and today’s episode is all about how we think about big deer and why that often doesn’t do us a whole lot of good. Metacognitive thinking is a way of thinking about our thinking. In other words, it’s the ability to examine our thoughts and beliefs and ask ourselves why we have them, why we hold them, and what they mean in the context of our lives. This is a broad topic, but when you start using it in the realm of deer hunting, you start realizing not only how we are often our own worst enemies, but also why so many of us never are rarely ever killed the big deer that we all want to kill. I’m going to talk about that right now, and I hope it helps you get into a place of looking at yourself as a deer hunter in a whole new light. Truly successful people tend to think about problems differently from people who just aren’t as successful. This goes for athletes, it’s relevant to business, it applies to relationships, and is generally true in any facet of life that can be measured through the lens of success. It works in deer hunting too, but I’m not quite ready to get there yet. I read a book recently that veered into the topic of thinking about how we think, and it offered up an example of how most people approach issues in their lives. They view them through a problem based filter. In other words, let’s just say you can’t afford to buy a house, not an uncommon issue in today’s world. A problem based thinker will acknowledge that not only is housing more expensive than it’s ever been, which is pretty much true on any given year no matter what, but they’ll also focus on why houses are more expensive. The value of the dollar sucks. The market has gone bonkers, and real estate prices are just out of whack when it comes to median incomes. Huge corporate entities bought up all the single family homes and they’re renting them out.
00:02:19
Speaker 3: My boss doesn’t recognize my.
00:02:20
Speaker 2: Work, so I’ll never get paid enough to afford a thirty year loan at six percent.
00:02:25
Speaker 3: Any one of these things might be true, or they might all be true.
00:02:29
Speaker 2: But what’s also true is that if you look at it as a huge, unsolvable problem, it will go unsolved. A solution based approach questions what would need to be done to be able to put twenty percent down and safely sign your John Hancock to those mortgage papers? The dollar has been devalued, how do I get more of them? Real estate prices right here are just out of touch with reality. But where are they more in line with my potential budget? Can I move to one of those places and find a job? What can I actively do to change my position in life to be able to be a first time home buyer? Now, look, I’m not saying that buying a house is as easy as changing how you think, but changing how you think will help you approach problems with solutions, not just an acknowledgment of the issues that coalesced to create the problem in the first place. Let’s plug this into the deer world for a second and use an easy example. If you talk to enough deer hunters across the country. You hear people say something like this, here in Texas, we don’t have any public land, so it’s not worth even trying, or I don’t know. Here in Nebraska, the non residents in the early rifle season causes all the up and coming two and three year olds to get shot before they are mature. If the problem for a Texas hunter is finding land to hunt, and they believe that there isn’t any public land, then they just need to knock on doors or find a lease. But everyone knows that leasing is expensive and knocking on doors is a lost cause. So it’s a done deal that that person will never have a place to hunt hunt, except that Texas has like two million acres of public land, and a better move would be to acknowledge that, figure out how to hunt it, and then go That Nebraska hunter wants an excuse to not kill mature bucks, and by Gottley, he has found it. After all, how can you, as one lowly residence stop the flow a non residence, You can’t, just like you can’t move the gun season out of the rut just because you want to. Of course, not too many years ago in Nebraska, win Ahead limited non residence anyway, which should be a win for that hunter, But there’s still that issue of the rifle season time, still a good problem to have to keep you from killing big bucks. A different way to look at it would be I see pictures all the time of people killing big bucks in my home state, but I can’t do it. It’s clearly possible. It’s also clearly true that some bucks reach maturity, because well, they just do, and the evidence is everywhere. So a better question to ask himself is if they can do it, why can’t I? What am mine not doing?
00:05:00
Speaker 1: That?
00:05:00
Speaker 3: They are the default.
00:05:03
Speaker 2: The problem based thinker would go to on this is to say, well, I don’t have access to that really good land, and you know my job is super busy, so I only get an a few nights a season whatever. Instead of looking for how to be more successful, he’s finding more reasons to explain why he’s not successful. But some non resident with four days of PTO in total can drive to Nebraska and kill a mature buck on public land. And I know this because not only have I done it, but so have a lot of people.
00:05:31
Speaker 3: I know.
00:05:32
Speaker 2: The issue isn’t you know that there aren’t any big bucks? On public land or private land for that matter, anymore than it is due entirely to the amount of time and an individual gets to put into hunting. There are solutions to everything, but we often don’t look for them. A metacognitive person would look first not at what the problem really is and what the solve is, but why they believe that the problem exists in the first place. They would examine their own thinking and going, so, why do I believe that there are no mature bucks out there? Is it because I never kill them or worse, never see them while I’m hunting? If the latter is the most important contributor to that belief, what’s the solve?
00:06:13
Speaker 3: Is it?
00:06:13
Speaker 2: To keep hunting the same way as I always do. If you think about how you think about things, you can’t help but learn if something isn’t working and you don’t change your approach, it will pretty much I always just not work. I would say that almost every deer hunter in my life thinks this way, and I did too for a long, long long time. A good way to frame this up is this. Let’s say you hunt ten days a season and you never kill bucks over one hundred and twenty five inches, which is your goal. An easy way to address that is to say I need to spend twenty days a season hunting. It’s only a matter of time. But a metacognitive approach would be more like, I’m putting in enough time to at least see one, but I’m not. I’m not making progress. So is it the amount of time I’m spending, or is it where I’m spending my time? Or is it my effort with the time I do spend out there. Now it gets a little muddy. It’s not just a matter of more time, or at least it’s often not that, but it’s generally a matter of where and when that time is put in and how that time is used. For example, if you spend every sit in the same stand on the edge of a cornfield all season, your problem could be solved by sitting a few more, just different spots. But instead of that, we often ignore the reality you know, of bucks fighting and buck to dough ratios and decide that the solution is to rattle in that spot we want to hunt. But you’d have to ask yourself why you believe that what’s going to work when you’ve never rattled in a buck in your life, let alone ever seen two bucks really fight in person? Why would you believe that is the solve for your problems over some other tactics. Likely because it’s so easy to spend most of our energy focusing on what’s wrong instead of acknowledging the problem and then being honest on how to fix it through a series of different actions. Now, this isn’t about ignoring problems, because that doesn’t work at all, pretending problems don’t exist. It’s probably why we have a fifty percent divorce rate in this country. Solution based thinking. It doesn’t change the problem, but it changes the questions we ask ourselves about the problem. Instead of saying, why is this happening to me? In reference to eating tag soup again versus saying I don’t know what factors contribute to my crappy performance and which ones can I influence for a more positive outcome, Maybe a better one is instead of saying who’s to blame, say what needs to happen next. The thing about us pesky humans is that we often know what we need to do, but we also just don’t do those things. We should shoot arrows every week of the year, but we don’t because we just don’t. We should scout more, but we don’t because well, we just don’t. We have to put into practice what we know will help us, but that’s really hard. Because we are creatures of habitat. We have definitive patterns to our behaviors that we generally aren’t willing to change. This is why most hunters don’t kill big bucks, and I don’t know how to put that any other way. It’s also true that most hunters won’t look for active solutions to their problems and will instead dwell on those problems and use them as the guiding force in their hunting decisions. If you want to kill big bucks, a huge step in the right direction is to actively try not to think like the average hunter. Where this gets wonky is that most hunters believe that there is a way to think about deer and big bucks specifically that will reveal some truth on how to kill them in a way that capitalizes on weaknesses in a buck’s game. If only I understood buck betting as well as this guy, or I understood the early season game as much as this super successful fella. That’s great, and learning about you know, buck betting and early season hunting will help you be a better hunter. But those hunters didn’t become bed hunting experts or early season hunting experts by just thinking about those things as problems. They thought about them in a way that led them to try to find solutions. If you don’t know much about buck betting, the strategy won’t suddenly be totally understandable and actionable because someone tells you how.
00:10:26
Speaker 3: They do it.
00:10:28
Speaker 2: That might not hurt, But we have to ask yourself, is how can I learn more about this to implement it into my hunting strategy. There are a lot of solutions here. You can scout more at all times of the year. That’s an easy one. And if you scout to locate beds and then try to figure out why beds are where they are in January and then in July, you’re going to be better off for it. If you run a whole bunch of cameras and start paying attention to where the bucks go in the morning and where they come from in the evening, you can start to understand what betting behavior is happening during the day, different types of the year and during different conditions. The problem is buck betting is often a mystery, but the solution isn’t to just declare it unknowable and then never put in any efforts of figuring out what’s really going on. Instead, there are lots of actions you can take to start to get a better handle on not only where bucks bet and when, but how you can more accurately predict buck betting behavior. Let’s use another one that has come across my radar a lot lately.
00:11:26
Speaker 3: Wind.
00:11:27
Speaker 2: I’ve written and talked about wind a whole bunch of my life, but I still hear folks say that bucks won’t move when it’s windy. There’s nothing in the deer research that supports this, and there is nothing in my life, you know, anecdotally that supports this, because it’s not true. Bucks do move when it’s windy, because they have to. Now, if you look at a windy forecast solely through the lens of that being a problem that will suppress buck movement, what’s the action you take?
00:11:51
Speaker 3: Not go hunting.
00:11:53
Speaker 2: Of course, that’s an easy one, and it’ll protect you from learning the truth. Now, if you look at high winds as a reason for bucks not to move, and you do go hunting anyway, what are the odds you put in max effort? Again, how you’re thinking about this very common factor in hunting influences heavily how you approach hunting. Now, let’s say you have that windy forecast and instead of saying, well, shit, this sucks now the bucks won’t be moving and it won’t be worth hunting, you say that wind is going to be smoking from the northwest for a few days. How do I find deer in this near tornado level weather? The first solve is to sit somewhere where a northwest wind is good for you and not so good for the deer. But maybe you want to go deeper, and you say, if I were a deer that had to live out here.
00:12:38
Speaker 3: What would I do in this wind?
00:12:40
Speaker 2: Maybe bed on a ridge with a stout wind at my backs and no predators can sneak up on me from behind. Or maybe it’s October and the acorns have been drying up a little, but that wind comes in, and if you were a deer that was really trying to pack on the pounds before the rut hits, you’d go work through an oak ridge and check some of the trees that were hot for a few weeks earlier in the month. Maybe that wind is just the dinner bell ringing when it comes to hard masks or soft mass. Instead of declaring all of the deer down for the count when the wind is blowing, ask yourself why you believe they won’t move in the wind. If you still believe that to be true, ask yourself if that’s the same in Kansas as it would be in, say, I don’t know, Pennsylvania or Georgia. Then ask yourself if that were also true, would it still be true on November seventh in southern Iowa? Or would you think that the rut would be enough to get those bucks cruising even with sustain thirty mile per hour winds. If we can get beyond what we believe to think about why we believe what we believe, as muddy as that sounds, and we try to figure out ways in which we might be wrong, we put ourselves on the path to learning how to actually be right about these things. And look, it’s a hard thing to do. I’m not going to sit here and tell you I’ve mastered thinking, because I can be as pessimistic as the next guy, and I can find a lot of problems to dwell on. Believe me, I can find someone to blame for a lot of things in my life that aren’t going the way I want them to as well. I don’t know if there is anything easier for me than to point the finger outward before taking a look inward. But it’s also true for me that, at least in the realm of deer hunting, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to kill deer when on paper, it’s a better time to stay out of the woods. And what I found that it’s mostly in my head when I decide that there is an unsolvable deer problem out there. I firmly believe that most deer hunters would be better off to approach this thing with the attitude that they’re going to hunt when they can, and because of that, they need to try to solve for the issues at hand with each sit in the best way possible. In fact, a great way to do that would be to think about what you’d have to do if you didn’t have any calls or sense or lures or decoys or anything extra like that. If you just had to hunt, maybe with a mobile set up, maybe on the ground, and you didn’t have that box blind on the food plot or that go to grunt, call to lean on. How would you set up to be close to deer in September or October or November or whenever. What would you do if you didn’t have any crutches but you really needed to get in range of a deer? How would you hunt if you needed to kill a big one to feed your family because there was no other protein available. Would you go sit the same field a stand over and over because it’s easy, or would you try to think about the deer and how you think about the deer and come up with an actionable plan that would put you in a position to learn and learn until you got it right.
00:15:29
Speaker 3: I bet you do that.
00:15:30
Speaker 2: And while that part would take work and action, it wouldn’t come without thinking about the best options for solutions given your hunting situation. Mull on that because the truth of how we can all kill big bucks exists out there in the woods, and it’s a matter of how we plug ourselves into all that nature over and over until we just get it right. Think solutions, my friends, not just problems, and come back next week because I’m going to keep talking about our favorite game animals and why it’s so dang hard to hunt them Sometimes. That’s it for this week. I’m Tony Peterson. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast. Thank you so much for all of your support. We truly appreciate it here at meat Eater. Without you guys, we don’t have anything, so thank you so much. If you want more hunting content, maybe you want to learn about the latest issues in conservation, Maybe you just want to see a good film move somebody hunting in Alaska for bears or something. All that’s at the mediator dot com. We put up new content pretty much every single day. Articles, videos, podcasts.
00:16:28
Speaker 3: You name it. It’s all there.
00:16:29
Speaker 2: Go check it out at the mediator dot com and thank you once again for your support.
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