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 Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by first Light. I'm your host with Tony Peterson, and in today's episode is all about the social aspect of deer hunting and why that can be detrimental to your hunting success. Absolute before I get into this one, I'm going to give you a heads up over at the mediator dot com. We have a giant season opener sale going on that ends on the twenty fourth of this month. If you need to gear up, this is your chance. You'll find white Tail staples like our Origin hoodie and pant for twenty percent off, and you can get thirty percent off our early season Trace and Yuma collections, as well as thirty percent off the Source jacket and vest, which are two items I will or a lot last season. Now, I know we beat you guys over the heads with these sales, but this is a good one, and if you're in the market for some new duds, you might as well just get a good deal on them. So check it out this week at the Mediator dot com. All Right, this is kind of a weird episode, but it's also a good preseason reminder of the things that can slip into our deer hunting world that hurt us when we generally view them as a neutral or positive thing. While having hunting buddies and relatives involved in your hunting can certainly elevate the experience, and no one would deny that the deer camp culture isn't without its merits, the same thing can cause us some damage that we might not understand until it's too late, or we might understand at all. Now that's no bueno, and it's what I'm going to talk about right now. Humans are social critters. We just are. We evolved in small groups and have depended on one another for safety for a long long time, I think hundreds of thousands of years. Here. It served us well enough to take over a dang near the whole world already, but it also can be used against us right now in the form of algorithms, rage bait, just a general understanding of our psyche that can be monetized thanks to our attention spans modern turmoil. Aside, we generally need contact with others and we need shared experiences. This is one of the reasons that one of the worst punishments we can dule out to one another is not only prison, but solitary confinement in prison. One fella who learned this lesson in a way that very few have is named Tommy Silverstein, who was sent to jail for armed robbery in nineteen seventy seven. After a lifetime of committing violent crimes on the inside, he managed to kill two inmates and eventually a prison guard. This behavior earned him a no human contact status, which meant that he spent eighteen years in elevenworth solitary confinement. When he was moved to a supermax prison in Colorado, his punishment continued and he spent twenty three hours a day day and a soundproof cell, with his one hour a day outside of that cell spent in a slightly larger cell but with no contact with humans. So all in all, he spent thirty six years in solitary confinement, which isn't even the record that's held by a guy named Herman Wallace, who spent forty one years in solitary and died three days after his release in nineteen seventy one, which had to be a real bummer. While you can argue all day long on that type of punishment and whether it's justified, some folks just prefer being alone. Most of you have probably heard of Christopher Knight, the dude in Maine who just up and walked into the woods one day and never looked back. Knight admitted he only spoke to one person in twenty seven years, and that was just a casual greeting with a hiker on a trail. Knight built himself a nice little camp with stuff he stole from vacation cabins and spent his free time playing Game Boy and getting hammered on Pilford liquor. Imagine spending twenty seven winters in Maine in a ten with your only option to have anything, to steal whatever you could to survive. Humans are pretty wild, but generally we just need each other. This is evident in the hunting community in a million different ways. This never going to end public land fight that raged recently is a good example. While we are a small minority in this country. We made a lot of noise and that's what got results. We have a history of hunting together which could be traced way way back to the point where we set out in small bands across the Bearing land mass to encounter short face bears and a host of other megafauna that certainly took deference to our presence. Hell, you could go a lot further back than that, but instead let's go back maybe sixty years. The history of the white tail is one that has seen its ebbs and flows, but modern deer hunting has its roots pretty firmly dug in around the nineteen fifties and sixties in many states. Back then, the US didn't have a lot of deer, and the primary hunting methods were either to get them moving with dogs or get them moving with people. I remember my dad telling me that he got pretty into bow hunting after returning home from Vietnam in the late nineteen sixties, and he said that at one point he saw four deer while he was hunting, and it was like seeing four sasquatches ride in the backs of four unicorns. Well he didn't say it exactly like that, but you get the gist. When I started hunting in nineteen ninety two, we had more deer than they did thirty years before that, but it was nothing like today. Seeing a deer wall hunting was a big win for us, and we mostly didn't see anything on any given sit. We also hunted with a group of guys that were all friends with my dad, and while they were all bow hunters, it was still very much like a traditional hunting camp that you would more likely find in the gun hunting crowd. It wasn't the same as you know, the hunting camps in the north Woods, or the groups of hunters who got together every year to put together drives for a few days and fill each other's tags whenever they could, but you know, kind of similar in a way. Now. If you were to think of modern deer hunting in terms of you know, breeding retrievers for all kinds of upland waterfall hunting, you'd say that our lineage as hunters is one that places a high value on being social around deer hunting. We were bred for it and exposed to it in our environment. We lean into it and it can be an amazing tradition and an amazing experience or it can be a total train wreck. In the last maybe fifteen years or so, we've seen a huge shift from large groups of hunters valuing the social side above everything else to fracture groups looking to produce the best possible chances to kill giants. Now that's a generality, of course, but that doesn't make it totally wrong. The old guard might suggest that we are losing our identity, as one northern Wisconsin farmer told me a few years ago, when he looked me right in the eyes and said, you, young guys have no idea how to hunt deer. You need to get out and get them moving. You can't just sit and wait for them, because you'll never kill them. Now, I just nodded in agreement and kept on hunting doves with my pupp I know what else to say. Here's the thing about the social aspect of deer hunting. It can be awesome or it can totally pull you under. The latter is what you want to avoid, obviously, and it all stems generally from ego and greed. So I guess it's not so much keeping company with other hunters, but exactly what other hunters you tend to keep company with. I have a small group of buddies who I'll share a camp with at any point, and if I think about what they have in common with me, it's that they are all at a place with hunting where they don't care if someone else kills a good one or a dink or whatever. They are confident enough in their own skills that one will walk by them so much so at least that they don't view it as something being taken from them or a reflection on them if someone else kills something where they hunt, or even not where they hunt. I have a long list of friends who I won't hunt with anymore, and that doesn't mean they aren't good people and good buddies, but they have different priorities than I do in the woods, we just don't match well. And there's nothing worse than someone who takes it a bit too seriously and will hide trail camera photos or sightings or not talk about their encounters or missus or whatever. That kind of behavior is poisonous and it can make the whole group sick without anyone really pinning down what's going on. When my dad met up with that group of buddies I mentioned in the beginning of this episode, I wasn't quite old enough to hunt. I did get there while he was still hunting with those guys. My first experience of that group dynamic was weird. There was one fellaw who had a cabin there that a lot of us stayed at from time to time, so he kind of became the default leader. He was also a one eyed lunatic who, despite being very short and very around, felt like he was the toughest dude on the continent, probably because he never had to prove it. He also was dead set against shooting doze. He wouldn't allow it, and that was rough for a twelve year old who just wanted to shoot his first dear let alone my dad and the rest of the dudes in that crew. So that group of guys hunted only bucks, and they shot generally one year old basket racks. The antlers, regardless of size, were a big status symbol. But it just created a weird dynamic because killing a young buck then wasn't that easy either, because there just weren't that many deer around, and then we weren't that good at it. Literally everyone in the group wanted to be free to fill their tags as they could, but no one felt good enough about it to color outside the lines and see what happened if they did shoot it. Dope, it wasn't fun. We still do this today, we just do it on Instagram, and it isn't fun. And what's worse is that we often feel compelled to hunt with people due to tradition or whatever. But just hunting with other people generally makes our own path less productive, or at least it really can't. Now I don't mean to say that's always the case. I have one good buddy named Eric, who I talk about a lot on here, and who I've hunted with for a long time, and when we work together these days on the deer, deer usually died, and if they don't, we have a pretty good time trying to make them die. Anyway, But there is something to be said about the solo endeavor, and it's one of the reasons that I'm such an advocate for expanding and hunting opportunities in any way possible. If you have a lease with a couple of buddies, for example, that's great, but you'll probably never leave that lease to go hunt public land down the road. You should, though, because when you free yourself from whatever rules are established on the lease ground, you free yourself to try new things. You'll free yourself from whatever pressure comes with that shared social hunt, and that is important. I've talked about this before on this podcast and on my Dog Focused Houndation's podcast that's over on the Cattle the Wild Feed. But the best thing you can do to develop a young bird dog is to hunt solo. I believe that with all my heart, even though a lot of folks still believe that hunting a young dog with an old one is the way to go. The old dogs don't take young dogs under their wings to explain where pheasants hide or grouse like defeat. They just don't. And another dog in the mix can create competition and usually does, just as other hunters in the mix and other hunters with dogs can as well. The pace of a solo hunt, where the dog is to figure things out without the pressure of keeping up with anyone else, matters so much helps everyone relax. Dog and hunter slow down, which means you'll get into more birds and take better shots. That leads to the dog having more bird contact and generally getting to figure out the wounded and dead bird thing more often, again without the pressure of maybe losing their feathered prize to some canine competition and pressure. It's kind of everything. Well it's not, but most of us put a fair amount of pressure on ourselves to be successful in the deer woods, and then when we allow others and their views on the whole thing into our smooth brains, it gets way more complicated. We've all seen the news stories about the dudes who have killed giants, and then we're found out to be poachers. You know, it's the same old story, and it's just greed and ego manifested in its worst forms. But that trickles down too. While your hunting buddies might not shoot one over a spotlight at night in the wrong state because it's a two hundred inch er and the temptation is too great, what about hiding trail camera photos or info on sightings are signed. There's a lot of ways this stuff can go, and it doesn't even have to be some shady shit like that. What if you just really aren't very good at this stuff yet, but you hang with some folks who are. Their success will bleed into your mindset and so you might learn a lot from them. But you might also be at the stage where whacking a two year old on opening day would make you real happy. But your buddies are going to hold up for one forties because that's where they're at and their journey. The company we keep influences our decisions, not always in a good way. I realize something recently while dealing with a landowner who I hunt with, who by all accounts, doesn't have an impressive deer hunting resume. I'm super grateful to hunt his place, and I happily provide stands and blinds in general direction for how the whole thing should go. But that comes with some extra bs, as permission based hunting usually does. And it's just a different hunt altogether from some of my solo adventures to public land somewhere else. And while we generally get stuck in the mindset that private land always beats public land, we don't factor in the freedom of making all of our own decisions and doing our own thing at our own pace without any arbitrary rules created by someone else, you know, hunting regulations aside. Of course, now I won't turn down the chance to hunt that property because it's both convenient and well. I like hunting anywhere I can but there's an aspect of having just one other hunter in the mix, especially one who controls the land, where the whole thing takes on a different flavor look. It's part of the game, but also makes me appreciate driving across the river and walking into thousands of acres of public land in northern Wisconsin, even if the deer population there is much lower and the hunting is generally way tougher. There's more to this stuff than finding easy and convenient, and a lot of time times our social hunts are not all that easy or convenient, at least not as easy and convenient as we'd like them to be. I also think that we aren't meant to be as busy as we are generally in life, and that we are experiencing low grade burnout from work and life, in the kids' sports, and just generally having so much shit to do. Hunting is supposed to be an escape from that stuff, but the more people who become involved in it, the more it resembles the parts of life we are trying to escape. Here's the crux to the whole thing, and something I've realized has been a huge benefit to my success in the field. If I don't have a lot of thoughts bumping around in my brain about other people and what they are doing or thinking. I generally hunt more relaxed. I generally hunt in a way that allows me to follow a process that I truly enjoy, and that generally means that I get more shot opportunities. Going solo has made me a better hunter without question seeking out opportunities whereas just me versus the deer, even on public land where other hunters definitely factor in, has kept my freezers pretty full and made a hunting much more enjoyable. Now, that might not be your jam, or you may not have ever actually sought that out. A lot of us don't, because we get into hunting through someone else. Maybe we are born into a traditional rifle camp, or maybe you marry into it, or maybe a friend offers you an invite to a property that you can bow hunt with him in a handful of other folks. Whatever. A lot of us have that type of thing as our primary conduit to time in the deer woods. And it's great and you might not ever need anymore, or you might find yourself wishing you could shoot what you want or hunt whenever you damn well feel like it. You might just find that you spend more time thinking about where someone else might sit or how they might mess up your deer patterns, and just realize that you need a reprieve to do your own thing. I'm not saying you need to put yourself in the equivalent of deer hunting solitary confinement, but at least consider your sphere of influence when it comes to this part of your life. Is your hunting always impacted by someone else? Because if so, you just might want to seek out a solo opportunity somehow. I know that doesn't sound easy to a lot of us and might not sound productive because it'll take place on new land somewhere, but that's the wrong way to look at it. Freeing yourself from the influence of others to just do your own thing will change how you look at deer hunting. It might not make the hunting seem any easier at the start, but it will make you better at hunting, and that eventually makes all of it seem a little bit easier. It'll also help you find your lane as a hunter just a little bit better, which might mean that you're actually pretty content to still hunt around and try to arrow one, even though that would be severely frowned upon on the least that you share with your buddies. Or maybe it'll allow you to hunt late September or early October as hard as you please without the nagging feeling that you're supposed to leave the deer alone until the pre rut, which is a common belief that works for killing deer, but also robs a hell of a lot of us of time in the woods, which isn't so great sometimes, So at least consider it as we enter the immediate preseason now with all of the target practice and stand hanging and camera work that we have going on, and come back next week because I'm going to talk about a few new experiences I've had with deer recently that have forced me to think about how wrong I often am about deer and what that means for me as a hunter, and what it'll mean for you too. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. Go check out our season or opener sale over at the mediater dot com. I know you heard me talk about it at the beginning. I'm going to talk about it just a little bit right now. Awesome discounts on some of our just white tail staples, the Trace Collections, Uma Collections, some of the Source products twenty thirty percent off. Good deals. Go check them out while you're there. If you need some more hunting content, you can find it. We're dropping new articles, new recipes, new films, new podcasts on the network every day of the week. You're not going to get bored. If you need to get your fixed or you need to learn something about the outdoors, the mediator dot com has you covered. Thank you.