Ep. 1011: Foundations – Smarter Hunters or Dumber Deer?

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.

00:00:19
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 all about the two dominant types of hunting strategies and how we often get both wrong and how we can actually use both of them in almost all of our different situations. In the last twenty years or so, we’ve really watched whitetail hunting split into two factions. On one side, you have folks working the land of the best of their abilities to create places that bucks really like. And on the other side, you have people who say they are going to meet the deer wherever they are and get the best of them pretty.

00:00:57
Speaker 3: Much on their own terms.

00:00:59
Speaker 2: But most of the hunters I talk to kind of land right in the middle of these two ideologies, but don’t often seem to understand what that really means. Well, it kind of means everything to success, which is what I’m going to talk about right now. I know a lot of you find folks know that I am a pretty big fan of bird dogs. I love training them, I love hunting with them, and with one dog at thirteen years old and another coming into her prime at five, I’m really thinking hard about getting a puppy in twenty twenty seven, and I honestly love training puppies. If I could put it into perspective that deer hunters might understand, I’ll say this treat training a little pupster at eight weeks old to sit and stay and come when called is kind of like winter scouting for white tails. Both seem pretty far removed from the end goal, but without them doesn’t really get you where you need to go to achieve what you want. It’s the necessary steps now with a puppy, or I guess I should say a young dog, like anything under two years old, you can’t get results from a couple different training styles. Not too long ago, you know, I’ll say a handful of decades that puppy would have likely been trained with a lot more fear than you might see today. What I mean by that is punishment was a tool that was used judiciously, and a lot of working dogs understood that the behaviors they were expected to deliver were way down with the prospect of getting smacked, whacked, hit, whatever. Eventually, that punishment took the form of some electricity delivered right to their next via the first e callers, which, as you can imagine, didn’t have you know, tone or vibrate functions like modern e callers do. This doesn’t mean that all dogs were trained in a medieval fashion, but that it was definitely accepted as a route you could go down to get results out of your dog. But along the way, other folks figured out that getting a dog to work for a positive reward actually produced consistent results and seemed to improve the working relationship between man and beast. Today you won’t see the old school style shown much on Instagram reels, but it hasn’t gone away completely. The positive reinforcement style has definitely taken over, though, and I’m guessing that a lot of dogs feel that’s been a move in the right direction. Another thing about this is you can look at each style and say, matter of factory, that both can deliver the exact same results in the end.

00:03:15
Speaker 3: Because that’s kind of how it looks.

00:03:17
Speaker 2: But what that doesn’t take into account is a lot, and it matters to us and it matters to the dogs. There are different ways to skin the old kiddie, and this is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot. With deer, we have really split into two different factions, and either is something to aspire to.

00:03:34
Speaker 3: But I think that a lot of folks don’t quite.

00:03:36
Speaker 2: Understand the messaging and the reality of going down one deer hunting road versus the other. I’ll just start with an easy one here and one that is really attractive to a lot of hunters, which is the land management style. Now we call this land management partially because that’s exactly what it is. You’re trying to make some ground as appealing to deer as possible, so you change it. You know, you have food blots, hinge cutting, plant some fruit trees in a waterhole, whatever. You’re fixing up the place and looking for the best renters. This style looks so appealing because it will looks easy once the work’s kind of done. And we see it all the time in the hunting media. It’s a method that is designed to lull bucks into a false sense of security until they are big enough to get killed. You kind of actually are dumbing down the deer now. The other faction is the DIY crowd that hunts public land exclusively. Is a total gear junkie, you know, who wants to learn every aspect of a wild buck’s life and figure him out right where he lives all year in places where everybody is trying to kill him. That requires the hunter to level up through scouting, shooting strategies, and every other thing that doesn’t involve changing the deer’s behavior, which is what the first strategy kind of does. What we are drawn to in each style is probably a direct reflection of a couple of personal things.

00:04:54
Speaker 3: You know.

00:04:54
Speaker 2: One is money, and if you have enough of it, the land management style probably really speaks to you for obvious reasons. If not, you’re probably still paying off your layoway saddle from three months ago. You’re on the other side of the equation. Another is just probably an intangible that lives in all of us, which is how much we value the trophy aspect. Some folks like big antlers above everything else, and that’s great. Others place a higher value in the process by which the whole thing happens, and that crowd loves big antlers too, but not if there is an asterisk attached to them in their view.

00:05:28
Speaker 3: So who’s right?

00:05:30
Speaker 2: Well, you know how I feel about it, but my stance has softened a lot in recent years. This debate reminds me of growing up in a little dairy farming community in Minnesota and the music that we were exposed to then. Now, as you can imagine, country music was big for that crowd, but most country has never really landed well with me. Now, at a time when bands like Tool and Pearl Jam and Alison Chains and Nirvana were hitting the scene with some real anger, Garth Brooks and Alan Jackson and Brooks and Dunn and I don’t know who else, we’re doing their thing as well, the choice was so easy it was stupid, and it bothered me that more of my peers didn’t see things my way. Now, I don’t give a shit. Listen to what you like because it’s all subjective, like almost everything in life, and when we draw a hard line on it for some dumb reason, it doesn’t make sense. Very often, I’ve had plenty of folks, you know, shit in my choice. Elaborador Retrievers but that’s just not the dog for them, just like a Brocco Italiano just wouldn’t fit into my life.

00:06:27
Speaker 3: Who cares?

00:06:28
Speaker 2: Get the dogs you love, listen to the music that brings joy to your heart, and live and let live, I guess. But does that work with deer. It would if we understood how to make it work with the two competing factions. But we seem to misunderstand this a lot. Let me start with an easy to digest example here. When I first bought a little property in twenty eleven, I had huge, and I mean huge dreams about food plots and just working on the land. So that’s what I did, and I’ll tell you what, Bobby, I had a lot of fun. I still I’ll have a lot of fun with it when it’s March and there’s nothing to do, but you know, put on some work gloves and mix some oil and gas that start cutting down some trees. I am at peace with the world, and I’m not even joking. I love it. And I think the most understated part of owning any land you know that is primarily four deer hunting, is that it’s just so damn much fun to work on. But you know what, didn’t happen. I didn’t kill any big bucks on those food plots or those trails I cut. In fact, I didn’t hardly kill anything because of it, but a couple of my buddies did and later my kids did. You know, no big bucks, mind you, But we weren’t trophy hunting too hard, so it has been just buying for all involved. And the reason that we kill sports instead of one forties is because that area that I own the land in sucks for hunting.

00:07:43
Speaker 3: Mostly.

00:07:44
Speaker 2: The big deer are around, but they’re extremely rare and the hunting pressure is pretty intense. The properties are also just way too small for any sort of meaningful management.

00:07:53
Speaker 3: You see.

00:07:54
Speaker 2: I leaned pretty hard into the land management style because I had land, but it didn’t really change the arc of my hunting success a whole lot, because the overall situation didn’t lend itself to that style being the best choice. The deer was still few and far between and not strangers to hunting pressure. It wasn’t enough to have a quarter acre of clover, and we still had to hunt them and learn them and figure them out and fail a whole bunch. And we are still doing exactly that now. At the same time I was learning this lesson, I was spending most of my personal hunting time over there, running and gunning on public land, mostly unsuccessfully. I might add, I drive over there, have a weekend to hunt, get something going sometimes, then drive home and figure out when I could get back. Now, I’m no stranger to public land hunting, as you know, because I’ll tell anyone.

00:08:43
Speaker 3: Who will listen. I also have the best gear.

00:08:47
Speaker 2: I have a lot of experience in that realm, and I still mostly got my ass kicked over there. Because that style, when you really go deep on it, requires a lot of time and commitment, one that if you can’t make it, you won’t see. Mostly, you see, we are drawn to one style or another based on a lot of personal stuff. But the best hunters try to learn from whatever source they can and then imply that to their unique situations, and they go out to learn, not to just emulate someone else’s tactics. Let me break this down as simply as possible. Without enough land and enough money and time, you just won’t have results like Leelakowski does, no matter how much you try to emulate his style of land management. Just like if you don’t have enough time and enough discipline to scout your ass off and hunt whenever possible, like Andy May does on Public You won’t go broke paying for shoulder mounts. The key is to try to draw as much as you can from as many relevant sources as possible, and then look at what you’re willing to bring to the table. I look at this kind of like financial advice. In the last decade, we’ve seen people going full port with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies while shouting from the rooftops that this will dislodge and replace fiat currency. We’ve seen financial gurus explain how to get your hands on a dozen short term rental houses and really see your monthly cash flow go through the roof, even if the average person can’t even really get out of renting, or if they do, their own personal mortgage is about all they can handle. And then in the middle of all that stuff, there’s a set it and forget it bogel Head movement, where folks quietly put away what they can in broad market index funds over time, and they accumulate enough to exit the cubicle at a reasonable age and not have to stress too hard overtaking the grandkids to Disney World every year. But what would be right for you? Well, what’s your financial education, Like, what’s your risk tolerance, your partner’s risk tolerance, your job security, and on and on. The best answers for most of us often involve borrowing a piece from this strategy and that one until we have a full plan that allows us to sleep pretty well at night. I don’t think deer hunting is all that much different. Maybe you can’t put in a food plot because you only hunt public land, well that kind of sucks, But you can still learn about deer food, and when you do, you usually learn how to kill deer pretty consistently. Browse patterns and mass patterns are often a hell of a lot more subtle and harder to read than figuring out when the deer are eating in a kill plot with lush brassicas in it. But the results might not look all that different when you’re notching your tag. Just like the box blind center might have a real case of deer burnout going on in his spot when he could carry a lightweight hang on into the woods and surprise the bucks by showing up where.

00:11:43
Speaker 3: They least expect him.

00:11:45
Speaker 2: That style is the cornerstone of most public land, deer hunters foundations, and it works. Human nature is geared toward finding easy. Our whole society, hell, most of our economy is built on easier, easier, easier. It’s gene deep in us, because, after all, why would we work harder than we need to. But with deer, the appeal of easy often leads us into a more difficult path, because what is easy for one person to accomplish is close enough to impossible for someone else that it just counts that way. I saw a video of a guy juggling bowling pins while skiing recently, and to make it more impressive, he hit a jump and did a backflip, which he landed while still juggling. When you see someone shoot a one hundred and ninety three inch deer in a food plot on YouTube, or someone else killing one hundred and sixty three inch deer on public land in Indiana or wherever, it’s kind of like the hunting version of juggling while doing a backflip off a jump on skis. There are a few people who can do it, but it’s mostly unavailable to the rest of us. Or even when something looks easy, if it’s impressive, it probably isn’t. So instead of looking to certain hunting styles or tactics as a way to make hunting easier, which is the surface level promise, use that stuff to try to make yourself better. And this is maybe the most important part I can think of. Borrow from whatever tactics and strategies could benefit you specifically.

00:13:10
Speaker 3: Then figure out how to develop them for yourself. Think of it like this.

00:13:15
Speaker 2: No one thought about bed hunting, I mean really figuring out where specific box bed and when they bed in certain spots and how that can be exploited until dan Infold really blew up that world. But you might not be in a position to go find a giant loan bed tucked into a willow patch on the edge of a cattail slough and use that to kill a one p forty on public. But maybe instead the principles of bed hunting, like wind direction, location advantages and all of that jazz play into your deer lease and you can use that to figure out when to hunt a certain pinch point stand or maybe where to slip in some early October morning to catch one munching on acorns before he heads up to a hillside bench to snooze the day away. Maybe you think that the box find over the food plot with name deer Hunter doesn’t represent your style in any way, but you see how they use sell cameras to pin down daylight movement, or you watch how they manage scent, and you realize that you could borrow from that style for when you take the kids out in a pop up to try to shoot any legal deer. We are in a tribal mess as a society right now where we really want to belong to certain groups and all of that shit that goes along with it, and that has bled right down through into this world of white tails. But the truth is you’re not really part of any deer group. You’re just doing your thing, and your situation isn’t really like a lot of other folks. It can’t be, because even though you are a public land hunting saddle junkie, you also work second shift and have limited pto the constraints on our hunting, you know, or maybe the guardrails, I should say, don’t exist just when we leave the truck behind and we hit the woods. Our lives outside of hunting influence our success far more than we care to admit. But so do our hunting styles and our preferred tactics. We often hunt exactly how we want and then hope the weather or the seasonal timing will rescue us from a largely easy, but mostly doomed to plan, when instead we should be trying to figure out how to not have to worry about the weather or the seasonal timing, putting deer in front of us where we want to hunt. A better way to look at is to figure out how to hunt in spite of what we perceive as something working against us, no matter what our personal situation allows. What that ultimately means is that you should take ideas and thoughts from anyone who might be able to offer you up something actionable, and then try to put it into action in your own world, because what you take away from someone just won’t encompass your whole life and hunting situation. But it can be a spark that lights a fire you just didn’t expect, or it can just be the little curiosity see that grows into a good reason to winter scout real hard for the first time in your life. Then you just have to remember that nothing is static and the growth doesn’t stop just because you kill a good one two years in a row. Eventually something will change and you’ll have to try to figure things out again.

00:16:10
Speaker 3: That’s what this process really is.

00:16:12
Speaker 2: It’s not a destination but a long and winding journey with some really sweet stops along the way. So pay attention to the food plot guys and the saddle folks and whoever you need to use their help however you can while forging your own individual path to get a little better at this stuff. It’s not a choice between dumb deer and smarter hunters. You can do all of it. So do it and come back next week because I’m going to talk about the reality of traveling to hunt and why if you want to you really need to actually start planning for it. This is a thing I talk about a lot, but it’s coming to a head out there, fellas. Pay attention to the next one. If you have any desire to travel to hunt for anything at all. That’s it for this episode. I’m Tony Peterson. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundation’s podcast, which is brought to you by First I know you found me, so you know where to find us at Meat Eater, But if you haven’t been over there in a while, take a little trip over to the mediater dot com and check out all of the content we’re dropping.

00:17:13
Speaker 3: I mean we literally drop new stuff every week.

00:17:15
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