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, brought to you by first Light. 00:00:24 Speaker 3: I'm your host, Tony Peterson. 00:00:26 Speaker 2: Today's episode is all the books, kind of just like staying in our lane when it comes to deer hunting, so that we can all have a little more fun this season. 00:00:34 Speaker 3: It's pretty hard. 00:00:35 Speaker 2: To put yourself in someone else's shoes or, in this case, I don't know, knee high hunting boots, I guess, but we should all try because the truth about this stuff is that if you love deer and all that comes with hunting them, you kind of have an obligation to try to treat others with a similar mindset the same way you'd like to be treated. 00:00:52 Speaker 3: The Golden rule. 00:00:53 Speaker 2: You know, this might seem like wishy washyps, but what we do affects others, and we do have the power to ruin other people's hunts with just our words. 00:01:03 Speaker 3: You know, let alone our actions. 00:01:05 Speaker 2: I think we can do better, and that's what this podcast is all about. A couple of weeks ago, I finished up a workout and walked into the locker room and changed up, walked out to the steam room. I generally keep my earbuds in when I'm in there because just often enough, someone, usually an older fellow who doesn't seem to have a lot on his plate for the day, will want to talk politics. The earbuds protect me a little bit from random strangers striking up a conversation that I don't really want to get into. You know, talking about some political thing that happened with strangers in a tiny room that is one hundred and sixty degrees is about as appealing to me as it would be to pass a gulf ball sized kidney stone while hornet stick me in the nostrils. No thanks, any huski. When I sat down, there were two people in there. One of them happened to be a woman that I used to see quite a bit and who always said hi, but who I never actually talked to in my life. I immediately noticed that she looked kind of unhealthy, skinny, and thought to myself, man, she looked super deconditioned. I figured she'd just taken some time off and hadn't been working out, which seemed pretty logical in my brain. But then we started talking and she almost immediately offered up the reason why she hadn't been to the gym in months. It turns out the weekend of Mother's Day, way back in May, she was driving along on a highway with her two year old son when a car that was supposed to stop at a stop sign didn't, and she got t boned on the driver's side by a vehicle going fifty five miles an hour. The impact pushed her car into someone's yard, where it was headed straight for a power pole when a septic mound slowed them down enough to stop. Now that collision broke both of her arms and her sternum and her collarbone, and she had a fresh semicircle scar on her cheek where she received thirty stitches. She said her son ended up bruised up but fine. Now was only because two days before that she had moved in from directly behind her to the middle seat. She then said that the scariest part was that when she was two, her dad died in a car accident in a very similar way after hitting a telephone pole. Think of that what you will, But it dawned on me that I had filled in her story for why she looks so skinny and honestly just not super healthy, and had chalked it up to kind of being lazy and just not going to the gym for months. That realization did not make me feel great. It's pretty hard to imagine not only having two broken arms, but a busted sternum, which has to be horrible amongst a bunch of other injuries. Now, around that same time, I got a phone call from a young hunter I know who was trying hard to kill a public land buck without help from anyone, who seemed less concerned with the process of finding and shooting a deer than shooting the wrong deer. Now, as you probably know about me, I don't give a shit if you shoot a giant or a spike, or a dough or a button buck. I don't know where anyone is on their hunting journey outside of a couple of close friends, and it's not up to me to decide what is worthy of someone else's tag. That young hunter on the public land quest tiptoed around this, But a big reason for all the anxiety was the shit storm that shooting a small buck and posting it on Instagram would draw. My solution to that was to just hunt for whatever, shoot what you want, and don't post it. But that isn't a reality for a lot of hunters these days, which is a shame. I can tell you this. I know that hunter situation and shooting a small buck on public land would be as big of a feat as shooting a really big deer on some of the heavily managed properties I've hunted, but that doesn't seem to matter. Nor does it matter that this hunter has exactly one bow kill on the old resume so far. That alone, to me, would be a green light to go try to earn a high odd shot without focusing on trophy potential too much. But you can't argue there isn't social pressure to shoot bigger deer. I'll never forget one of the first public land bucks I arrowed, which was an eight pointer down in Nebraska that came into a decoy. That hunt was fun, it was a lot of work, and after a few days of close put no cigar, that buck came in and I shot him poorly. 00:05:16 Speaker 3: The blood trail was a grind. 00:05:18 Speaker 2: I ended up making a follow up shot and it all worked out in the end. But it was one of those core memory hunts that contained a hell of a lot of good moves on my part and a couple of really bad ones. That deer taught me a lot. And I wouldn't say it is a straight up good memory, but it is a very valuable one to me. Now, I was in the hunting industry as a freelance writer at the time, and I had a lot of industry contacts. I sent the kill photos to the bow company that had sent me the bow I used, and they posted a picture on their Facebook page. The very first comment was, dang, that buck is tiny. Mind you, it was a buck that wasn't a giant, but it was a pretty solid two year old deer that was out to his ear. 00:06:00 Speaker 3: Meant a lot to me. 00:06:01 Speaker 2: It was a throwaway comment on social media with a picture in a most zero context. An instant judgment thing, you know, is something that we have all done in our lives, and a lot of us still do it. We probably always will because of human nature. But we should think about this and we should think about how we view our own hunting. I rarely run across hunters who will admit their hunting is easy, just like I very rarely run across people who admit that their dogs aren't well behaved. Think about this, though, how hard you know? Do you think that your hunting is? Because I can bet you you know, if I wanted to, I could pick apart a lot of your arguments and evidence for why your hunting isn't actually that hard simply by comparing it to how hard I think my hunting is. 00:06:49 Speaker 3: But would that make me right? 00:06:51 Speaker 2: Well on the surface, maybe if you hunt private land and I hunt public maybe, But if that private land is in Tennessee and my public is in Iowa, not so simple. It's still may be true, but it's getting a little muddy anyways. Now, what if you hunt with a crossbow and I hunt with a compound. Now I've got you because your weapon is without question easier to use than mine. 00:07:15 Speaker 3: Check mate. But maybe not. 00:07:19 Speaker 2: What if you have a job that demands long hours is a physical nightmare, And not only do you just not have a ton of free time to hunt, you know, like I do, you're also wore out when you do have that free time, you know, And then you got me just pounding on a keyboard and drinking coffee while I plan a whole falls worth of time in the woods in multiple states. Who really has the advantage here. Let's take that a step further. Maybe you have killed a dozen deer with a bow in your career, while I've killed over one hundred. Would it be cool for me to judge your success based on mine or disregard how lucky I've been to hunt as much as I have and rack up such an amazing and awe inspiring resume. 00:07:59 Speaker 3: I mean, it pales in comparison to. 00:08:01 Speaker 2: Some people I know, But those folks have a lot more money than me because their grandpa started a business and created generational wealth. So even though they have more and bigger deer on their walls, mine just somehow become better because I'm not rich and I earn them. That's a solid way to live until I acknowledge how many people would kill to have the opportunities I've had, and if I conveniently forget that, there are quite a few people out there who are more concerned with finding a job or keeping their jobs than they are about killing deer that some stranger would approve of. This shit all gets super muddy in a hurry, And you know what it means that we can't really understand other people and the lives they are living. Some folks, you know, they make bad choices, and some folks just have bad choices made for them. Some folks are born with a huge head start, others not so much. That might not seem like it has anything to do with deer hunting, but it absolutely does. The trends of greater society bleed into deer hunting in so many different ways. You and I are losing hunting opportunities every single year to other hunters because we've been othered really well in this space, and if you live across the state line from me, you are lesser than I am. We can defend stuff like that easily because we want to be right and we want to have easier hunting for ourselves. But let's not pretend that we aren't totally okay with removing hunting opportunities from our fellow hunters because we can generalize them and shit on them very easily. Now, that might not be an exact replica of how divided we are as people right now. But it's close enough and it isn't doing us any favors. 00:09:47 Speaker 3: Now. 00:09:47 Speaker 2: That mindset also demands some level of cognitive dissonance to maintain. I had a conversation with an outfitter from Nebraska one time who bitched about non residents killing all of the young deers so there weren't any left for them residents. Never mind the fact that the outfitter has over ten thousand acres of ground locked up, which keeps non paying residents and non residents out of some really awesome stuff, Or never mind that the state's resource there is being hoarded to produce as much income as possible for that person. The argument about booting non residents in that case was that the value of the hunt for residents was reduced. But how do you measure that against one person paying to keep over fifteen square miles of good ground out of the hands of everyone who isn't willing to fork over a lot of money to set foot on it. Now, I'm not saying non residents should have equal access to the animals that residents do, anymore than we should just shut down all the outfitters out there. I don't believe either thing I just use those points to illustrate how easy it is to feel justified in our actions when it comes to hunting, actions which definitely impact our fellow hunters. 00:10:54 Speaker 3: It's hard to put yourself in someone. 00:10:55 Speaker 2: Else's shoes, you know, or, in this case, like I said, hunting boots. The world is full of people who are miserable projecting onto other people because it's easier to try to blow out someone else's candle than to try to get ours to burn a little brighter. I don't know why I think this, but I just do, And as hunters, I just think we can do better, and I think we should try. So how do we do this well? We can try not to be pricks to each other. That's about as simple as I can put it, and I guess maybe that's as simple as it needs to be. It's kind of like something I heard once in the fitness world where someone said they could write the shortest and most true dieting book ever, the only line in it would be burn more calories than you consume, or something to that effect. In a nutshell, some stuff actually has an easy solve, but that's generally only true if you don't take into account human nature, which is pretty hard to not account for when you're talking about humans. So the next best thing is to step outside your comfort zone and try something new. You know how much I love to preach about hunting somewhere different, some foreign deer ground somewhere, because I do think it's one of the best. 00:12:00 Speaker 3: Ways to level up as a hunter. 00:12:02 Speaker 2: I believe that, But I also believe that it's sort of the antidote to becoming overly xenophobic and myopic when it comes to deer hunting. The more you go to different places and meet different people and put yourself in a situation where you have to figure things out on the fly and you have to learn or you'll fail spectacularly, the easier it is to start to understand other people's or in this case, other hunter's perspectives. I know that's easy to say but hard to do. A great example in my own life is that I can't understand why so many vertical bow hunters immediately by a crossbow when they become legal. But that's kind of the same thing, you know, I feel when I get into my buddy Adam's truck and he plays the worst country music known to mand. He's not my decision to make for someone else, and I just like different things. I get why people want an easier weapon. It kind of only makes sense. Some people don't enjoy shooting bows a whole lot, or have the time or whatever. Some people just want more confidence that when it does walk in, they're actually going to kill it. I can't really fault anyone for that, even though that's my initial impulse quite often. I also can't really fault someone for liking the music they do, because the hell of a lot of the people in this world would absolutely hate the music I love, and I understand that. I think it's better to recognize that people find value in their own taste of music, just like the guy who shoots a crossbow can walk into the woods for the same reason I do and walk out feeling the same way, and evenings spent hunting deer really does for me. I had a recent conversation with a hunting buddy who lives where I grew up, and he told me a few stories about people I used to know from my hometown who are into the trophy deer thing in a major way. He said it made him not want to talk to hardly anyone about deer hunting, and I get that, but I don't think it has to be that way. And I think, as woo woo as this sounds, it starts with all of us as individuals. We can come together to try to keep public lands in the hands of the general public in an amazing way. I think we can make the decision to recognize that we are hunting rabbits with antlers, and it's cool if someone wants to do it in a way that doesn't appeal to us. I think to put a fine point on this, I'll tell you what I've said to a few random strangers over the years, including some lady at Target a few years ago who was losing her mind over a mispriced item. It clearly wasn't the checkout lady's fault, and she was trying to sort it out. 00:14:24 Speaker 3: But this woman was just so over the top about it. It was gross. 00:14:28 Speaker 2: So I said to her, we know a woman who had a baby that was born with cancer. I didn't even know that was a thing until it happened to someone in our little world. Imagine that for a second. Anyone who has had a child knows that the fear you have one that is always riding shotgun with all the positive thoughts, is what if something is wrong, like really wrong. So this woman looked at me and she said so, and I said so, this isn't that big of a deal, not big enough to act this way. 00:14:58 Speaker 3: It's not that important. 00:15:00 Speaker 2: And I can tell you that I've said this very thing to a few people in my life. None of them looked at it like they wanted to hear it. But it doesn't make it untrue. I know that I go on these rants from time to time, and I'm sorry. I just think that we are damn lucky to do what we do and we should just try to treat each other with some decency. This feels important to me when the example from our favorite politicians all the way down to rando strangers on the internet is to just be nastier and nastier by the day. So that's all I want to say on this and next week I'm going to talk about something I think helps people kill more big Bucks than anything. And I think if you listen to it and you follow the advice I'm going to give, you will kill more big Bucks. 00:15:42 Speaker 3: It might take a few years, but it will work. And it's not magic. 00:15:46 Speaker 2: It's damn close when you really put it under the microscope. 00:15:50 Speaker 3: That's it. I'm Tony Peterson. 00:15:51 Speaker 2: This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. As always, I want to thank you for all of your support. It means the world to us here at meat Eater that you guys just show up for us. Without you guys were nothing, So thank you for that. If you want more hunting content, which you probably do right now because we are in the thick of it, you know, maybe you need a recipe, Maybe you want to read an article on some kind of news story that's coming out about a poacher or some law change or something. Maybe you just want to listen to a guy like Brent Reeves tell some stories with his beautiful voice on this. 00:16:27 Speaker 3: Country life podcast. 00:16:28 Speaker 2: Whatever, go to the meeteater dot com check it out. We drop new podcasts, new videos, new articles every single day there. 00:16:37 Speaker 3: Thank you,