Ep. 1046: Foundations – How Big Bucks Make People Really, Really Stupid

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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 Wire 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 big bucks, poaching egos, and the dark side of this whole white tail thing. I’m always amazed at how often people tell me stories about poaching deer and other critters. Now I’m not talking about people in my life. We have your relationship with here, but strangers that shows and who I just run into throughout life. It’s wild, and a lot of it is kind of an inherited willingness to break some rules, it seems like, while there are just others that just seem to revel in coloring outside the lines whenever they can. It’s weird, but not as weird as the link some go to when killing a big bucket possible. That’s what this episode is all about, So buckle up. There is an ethical question that has floated around amongst humans for a long time, possibly in some form for as long as we’ve been able to communicate. It’s one that you’ve probably heard, which is basically, if a person is starving, is it wrong to steal a loaf of bread? Presumably the loaf of bread is owned by someone who has lots of bread. Most people answer this as a no, and it’s not that hard to argue with, although it can be done. This ethical dilemma is one that has been bent and twisted over time to absolve people of their guilt for stealing even when they aren’t starving.

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Speaker 1: Well.

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Speaker 2: Take something like password sharing on a streaming service, for example. This is real common and it is stealing, but it’s also easy to look at a company like Netflix or Disney and say that they make enough money they can handle it. I don’t know if there is a correlation between people who commit small theft like that and who have ever run a business for themselves, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there is, because when you run a business, you find out quickly that a certain percentage of people will rip you off every chance that they can. If you have a platform and somewhat of a voice, you’ll find another subset of people who will gladly try to use you for their own gains. It’s how people are. But the question of stealing bread to feed a starving family and will never have a totally correct answer, because depending on who you are, there are different ways to justify behavior. But what about if that loaf of bread is actually a one hundred and ninety inch buck and the bakery owner isn’t actually a bakery owner, but a landowner who won’t let you hunt where the big buck lives. Or maybe we can look at the state as the bakery, and all of the antler loaves of bread out there are baked to be distributed equally amongst the citizens of that state, and instead of taking their fair share, someone takes more because they really like the biggest loaf of bread, and lots of people will think they are really cool for eating it. All Right, enough of that desin grading metaphor, because you know what I mean. Poaching is an issue in deer hunting, and the cases that get the most attention are the ones you’d expect the most, the ones involving giant bucks, because well, we all love giant bucks, and we all recognize that giant bucks make people do really dumb shit. You might all have a somewhat fresh memory of that fella down in Ohio who in twenty twenty three killed a monster eighteen point buck that scored over two hundred and thirty five inches. While it’s crazy that a two hundred inch deer doesn’t really make headlines that much anymore, a buck that tapes out at two hundred and thirty five just does, and rightfully so. There aren’t more than a handful of them on the landscape in the whole country in any given fall, at least outside of ten foot high fences. That buck became the talk of the town, particular because the dude who shot it wanted to talk to everyone he could about how big it was and how awesome he was for killing it. But if you’re going to try to promote yourself for being a big buck killer, you should probably also be aren’t enough to lie competently if you didn’t kill it legally. This guy didn’t seem to have the mental horsepower to pull that off, and his story started to unravel pretty quickly. The twenty eight year old said he killed the buck on his sister’s property with a crossbow, but cell phone data revealed that he killed at ten miles away on a private chunk of ground he did not have permission, don he did have the wherewithal to bring the dead buck to his sisters in stage a kill scene, but it wasn’t enough to get away with the ruse now. He ended up getting charged with illegally hunting without permission and then taking possession of a deer under those circumstances, He got charged with a couple accounts of hunting without a license because I guess, why not go all in? He got charged with a bunch of other stuff too, including three counts of theft by deception. He also managed to rope in a couple other geniuses in his family and friend group to face charges themselves after helping him. The big deer cases always get a lot of attention and a lot of scrutiny, but so do the ones that seem to involve an almost serial killer level dedication to poaching white tails. A good Exams sample of this involves a fifty five year old dude down in Texas who is facing seventy four criminal charges and is staring at a real shit storm in his life for allegedly killing at least thirteen bucks in three counties over a time span of just eleven months between the fall of twenty four and the summer at twenty five. The whole investigation in this case started after people began to find headless whitetail buck carcasses in a couple of counties. Game wardens called onto the scene started finding crossbow bolts stuck in the carcasses, which is a real key piece of evidence to leave layer out. Not only did this MENSA member allegedly shoot a whole pile of extra bucks from his vehicle with a crossbow, he kept the heads in his freezer at home, which maybe could have been explained away somehow, although I don’t know how, but a hell of a lot of them were in velvet still, which doesn’t really jive with the Texas hunting seasons much now. As a side note here, this hugely beneficial to society fella also had nearly six grams of meth on him when the warden’s caught up to him. To be honest, this one might be less about big bucks making people stupid and more about the intersection of someone who is already really stupid and some whitetails. Maybe A better example a big bucks turning normal brain function to sludge can be found in the story of the Hollywood Buck, which isn’t about a black tail out in the hills of California, but instead involved a monster non typical white tail that liked to spend his time in the Hollywood Cemetery out in Virginia, presumably because he felt he was safe from real hunters and only probably had to dodge the ghosts of hunters past that night. Well, one reel hunter, I guess if you can call him, that decided that giant graveyard creeper was too big to let live, and he shot it with a fifty caliber muzzleloader. The thing about this one is it’s like most of the giant bucks that are poached, the boacher couldn’t help himself but seek the limelight. Now, let’s say you shoot a two year old eight pointer in a cemetery and post a picture of it. You might not get busted, but you’ll also won’t get tons of praise and digital high fives from people you will never meet and who actually don’t care about you at all. But if you kill a true giant with a crazy, unique rack and a whole pile of stickers and kickers that has been seen by tons of people for years and photographed extensively. And then you submit that picture to a Facebook page that has over seventy thousand people follow it and which is dedicated to showing off hunters kills, you might find out that quite a few people will recognize the buck. It’s almost mind boggling to dig into some of the more high profile cases of poaching that have hit the news in the last ten years. I guess it’s the way of the criminal mind to think you can out smart law enforcement, and I’m sure there are a few crafty people out there who have figured this out. But I happen to be buddies with a conservation officer, and I have no reason to believe he’s way above average intelligence for conservation officers. Now that might sound like it a dig at him, but I mean the opposite. He’s a very smart guy, and the way he thinks about his job and his approach to busting bad guys is just clever. I’d wager than in mental chess. He has a significant advantage over the kind of person who would kill a two hundred inch buck illegally and try to get away with it while also trying to get tons of credit for being awesome at hunting. One such case that happened pretty close to where I grew up in southeastern Minnesota, happened like fifteen years ago when a nineteen year old killed a twenty one point buck with his bow that was, by all accounts, a frickin’ toad. I mean, like the kind of deer you or I will never see in the wild. Well that’s because it wasn’t a wild deer. It was a pen raised buck that he whacked through the fence, tagged, registered, and even brought to the taxidermist before someone made the connection that a deer farmer was missing his antler livestock and had a hole in his fence. Big bucks don’t just make dumb people poach more either. Big bucks are a big problem for a lot of things in our lives. Just think about this. If you’ve ever had a disagreement with a neighboring landowner over deer, what did it involve? That conservation officer buddy of mine, who is pretty sick of what big bucks do to people, told me a story one time about getting a call from a landowner who said his neighbor had picked up a dead head but hadn’t gotten a possession tag for it. A lot of people don’t know this, and it’s not consistent in every state, but in some states, like Minnesota, we can’t just pick up a deadhead we find in the spring while shed hunting. If it has part of the skull attached, it needs a possession tag. This is one of those laws that people look at like jaywalking or going sixty in a fifty five. Sure it’s technically illegal, but who is going to call the game warden for a tag over a skull they found out in the woods. Well, this guy called because his neighbor found one, and you know why, because it was from you know, the big neighborhood buck that everyone had on camera and everyone wanted to kill. When the one landowner found it, the other wanted him punished for not following the law. So my buddy did an investigation, and while I don’t remember the exact details, I think he just confiscated the skull without issuing a ticket since the guy cooperated. But then he drove over to the landowner’s house who had made the call. In the first place, and while they were chatting, my buddy noticed a whole bunch of skulls in the guy’s garage. Guess who also had a bunch of dead heads that got confiscated that day. Big bucks make people dumb, and this is not something that is a problem only outside of the hunting industry either. Nothing riles up the masses and pushes the hunting population into single aligned tribe quicker than a hunting celebrity getting busted for killing a deer illegally or in some cases, many deer illegally. One case you might remember involved a guy who was real popular for a short amount of time on outdoor television, but who then shot a buck on camera, and while doing his post shot interview, saw a much bigger buck and he shot that one too. The problem was that he only had one buck tag. Well, that was one of his problems. He was also a grade ad beg who treated his cameramen like they were trash people, which isn’t a great idea if those trash people also happen to have digital proof of you shooting extra bucks just because a bigger one stepped out after you shot a really great deer, which you didn’t work for at all. By the way, I hear stories often and have no real reason to doubt them. Of the links some industry folks have gone to in order to keep Bucks on their properties. It’s kind of mind blowing things like high fencing two or three sides of a property to keep bucks from wandering onto the neighbors, but also being able to still claim your hunting free range deer and are super awesome at it. You hear about feeders set at a foot past the minimum allowable distance from stands, that kind of stuff. All this behavior leads back to ego and something that is perceived to be gained from killing big Bucks. That might be a one off event where you can get your name in the history of books and maybe get some praise and adoration at local deer classics and sports shows. Or it might be really lucrative sponsorship deals in partnerships if you have a big enough name or brand. But it doesn’t have to manifest itself in criminal behavior or even just kind of deceitful behavior that is still legal but definitely wouldn’t look great if you bragged about it. There’s also the hard truth that big Bucks can make us all dumb in a bunch of different ways for yours. Truly, giant deer have the tendency to shut off most of the parts of my brain that I need in order to complete simple tasks like I don’t know, drawing and aiming a bone in the same way I’ve done literally thousands and thousands of times in my life. I won’t bore you with the stories of my buck fever troubles over the years, because I’ve talked about that enough, but I will say that at no point in my long white tail career have I ever consistently, over a long enough timeline involving enough encounters, not eventually totally fallen apart on a shot on a big buck. I’ve killed a fair amount of them, but I’ve let far more of them go out of my life unscathed or lightly scathed, or in some cases very scathed, but also capable of walking great distances and hiding really well. They just do something to us that we can’t control, mostly because they are so rare to encounter and so likely to get the best of us when we do have one. Walk. In almost every encounter with a big buck that I’ve had, at least ones that were close enough to get me to grab my bow. Have reminded me of the times when I’ve been out in the spring turkey hunting and just looked into my decoy spread randomly to see a full strutter just doing this thing. It’s like, you know what they look like, you’ve killed them before, but when they’re suddenly ten or twenty yards away in real life, it’s almost hard to believe. And from the moment that first sighting happens until they are dead or out of your life for good. The brain melt just happened. I don’t know how to describe it any other way. I’ve had encounters with big bucks that left me physically exhausted. If I have to watch them for a long time and they seem to be generally on a path in my direction, I almost get to the point where I’m mentally begging for them to come in so we can get the whole thing over with. That happened to me once on a booner on public land in Iowa, and last year when I killed my best Wisconsin buck while using a decoy. By the time the arrowflies, I’m ready for it to be over, so my nervous system doesn’t just factory reset me. Honestly, you know, I’m a space geek, and I firmly believe there’s a lot more life out there in the universe than some people do. But I wonder if some of the alien abduction incidences are just from people who had, you know, a reaction to something the way I react to a prolonged encounter with a big buck. You know, you black out, you wake up with you’re hunting, boots on the wrong feet, can’t remember what day it is. In some cases, your buck’s a little sore, you know, the usual stuff that happens when a really solid deer walks in. But it doesn’t even have to be one hundred and eighty inchure to cause that level of mental delamination. It just has to be a deer that you really want to kill. You might be just starting out like my kids and lose your mind over a big wood spike or a tiny basket rack six or eight pointer. The same rules apply according to your definition of big. You might be a public land hunter who sees three deer a year and who has never killed a deer who suddenly sees just a nice, long nosed, old dough heading down the trail in your direction and then the firecrackers in your brain are gonna get lit. It’s wild what they do to us, and honestly pretty cool as long as it doesn’t send you into the kind of territory where you break in every law out there just to get a big set of antlers in your hands. In fact, that feeling of losing our minds and having a giant adrenaline dump over something we think about all year but almost never ever happen to see an encounter is one of the biggest reasons to go out there. Even if we know that it’s most likely going to break the bucks away. Once in a while it doesn’t, and even when it does, it’s just the thing that simultaneously breaks our hearts but keeps us coming back for more. And speaking of coming back for more, that’s what you should do next week, because I’m going to talk about how I start to build my fall plan this time of year and what you can do to set yourself up for a successful deer season while we are still a couple months out. That’s it for this episode. I’m Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast. As always, thank you so much for listening. And for all your support. If you need some more hunting content, maybe you’re taking a long road trip out to Yellowstone with the family, something like that. We drop new podcasts every single day practically on the Mediator network. Here there’s something for everyone. We drop some new films every month. We drop new articles, new news on conservation, corner crossing, public land issues, whatever. Tons of content, fresh stuff, all the time at the Mediator dot com. Go check it out. H