August 19, 2025 • 18 mins
This week Tony breaks down the reality of how being too social of a deer hunter can hinder your chances of success and suck the joy right out of your time afield.
Connect with Tony Peterson and MeatEater
Tony Peterson on Instagram and Facebook
MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Youtube Clips
MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube
Shop MeatEater Merch
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
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
(00:41):
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
(01:02):
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
(01:24):
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.
(01:52):
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
(02:12):
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
(02:33):
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
(02:54):
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
(03:17):
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.
(03:38):
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
(03:59):
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
(04:20):
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
(04:40):
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.
(05:02):
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
(05:23):
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,
(05:45):
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
(06:07):
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
(06:30):
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
(06:52):
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
(07:14):
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
(07:35):
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
(07:57):
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.
(08:18):
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.
(08:40):
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,
(09:05):
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
(09:25):
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
(09:46):
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
(10:07):
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
(10:28):
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,
(10:49):
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.
(11:10):
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
(11:32):
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
(11:53):
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
(12:16):
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
(12:36):
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
(12:58):
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
(13:20):
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
(13:40):
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
(14:01):
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
(14:23):
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.
(14:44):
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
(15:06):
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
(15:29):
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
(15:49):
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
(16:10):
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
(16:32):
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
(16:54):
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
(17:16):
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
(17:40):
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
(18:01):
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.
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.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
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
(00:41):
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
(01:02):
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
(01:24):
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.
(01:52):
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
(02:12):
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
(02:33):
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
(02:54):
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
(03:17):
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.
(03:38):
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
(03:59):
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
(04:20):
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
(04:40):
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.
(05:02):
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
(05:23):
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,
(05:45):
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
(06:07):
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
(06:30):
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
(06:52):
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
(07:14):
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
(07:35):
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
(07:57):
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.
(08:18):
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.
(08:40):
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,
(09:05):
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
(09:25):
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
(09:46):
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
(10:07):
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
(10:28):
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,
(10:49):
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.
(11:10):
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
(11:32):
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
(11:53):
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
(12:16):
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
(12:36):
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
(12:58):
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
(13:20):
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
(13:40):
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
(14:01):
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
(14:23):
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.
(14:44):
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
(15:06):
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
(15:29):
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
(15:49):
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
(16:10):
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
(16:32):
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
(16:54):
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
(17:16):
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
(17:40):
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
(18:01):
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.
Host
Mark Kenyon
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.