Ep. 558: Foundations - A Peek Behind The Curtain

I've never been so off leash with any company, And while it probably will get me fired at some point, it also allows me to speak my mind in a way that isn't quite as curated as some of the other platforms I've worked for. This is cool, but it also makes me hyper aware of the hunting industry and how it's presented to the audience. And it also reminds me of why I don't know a little peek behind

the curtain can be good for all involved. And if that seems evasive or weird, bear with me, because it'll make sense eventually, or at least I hope it will by the time I get to the end of this episode. My first lesson that the hunting industry is not what it seems. Happened not long after I got an offer to be the associate editor for Peterson's Bow Hunting magazine for a guy who was piecing together a weird living, selling wine, pushing fishing tackle at Cabela's, and working for

a financial company. It was a dream come true, and I mean that it really was. And one of my duties is the associate editor of that pub was to buy images for articles. This meant that I had to source out specific images like I don't know, I would need a hundred and forty inch high and tight buck eating an apple, or a super wide Texas looking deer nosing the butt of a dough in a swampy looking setting down south. I had to fit it with the content of the articles. And so I thought that's going

to be a difficult task. Because those were pretty specific asks. It didn't take me long to realize that what I thought the outdoor photography market was was vastly different from what it actually is. Now. Let me say this because it's the right thing to do, and I mean it. I'm not shipping on wildlife photographers here. Some of them are my really, really good friends, and I respect the hell out of them. In fact, some of them are the most nature knowledgeable folks I've ever met. And that's

the truth. But that market demands big bucks and big bowls and perfectly instruct turkeys and you name it. You can't really get there with wild animals all the time, at least well, I'll say that specifically in the white tail space. But this was news to me. I was naive, and as it was pointed out to me by a good friend who is a wildlife photographer who hangs his name and reputation on not photographing captive animals, it's just the way things are now. This distinction is interesting and

very prevalent in the hunting market. You can see it in d I Y only hunters, or in the public land movement, or really the general market, where folks will say they only hunt free range animals. We all have our line in the sand, but those lines are pretty blurry. That photographer I mentioned, for example, he's got a crab apple tree in the front yard next to a well

stocked bird feeder. He gets amazing images of songbirds and grouse and other animals munching away on his little buffet there and he shoots photos of them from the comfort of his house. They aren't captive, that's for sure, but the images don't tell the story of how they came

to be. When I first got to know him, he told me stories about many of the photos I had seen in my life that graced the covers of various hunting magazines or ended up in those eighties and nineties style prints of frame pictures of enormous bucks jumping barbed wire fences are standing perfectly next to multicolored maple leaves, and they were all staged with pen raise deer. If not that they were taken in parks or other refuges

where huge animals live a no hunting lifestyle. It seems dumb now, but then it kind of shattered my worldview. That was nothing compared to what I learned about the hunting industry as a whole. However, I naively thought that anyone who ended up writing articles or hosting a hunting show got there sheerly due to a love of the game.

I figured it would be a pretty weird situation where you could end up in either position without absolutely loving hunting and the wilds and the animals and the whole thing. Boy was I wrong. I started to meet people who looked at it like it was a pure business. And again, to be fair, that's not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. The hunting industry is full of businesses, and it's held to a weird standard when it comes to capitalism, because if you're a part of it, you're

under scrutiny from a personal and a business perspective. The person who ships on mediator for making money off of the industry may very well work in I don't know, insurance, or be a lawyer, or operate in their professional life in some way that boils down to peer acquisition of the Benjamin's. In that way, we are often blind to our own greed while lamenting the horrors of others and their similar desires. But I get it. Hunting is different.

It's a passion for most of us, and that falls into a weird space beyond just a career, just a business, the resources owned by all of us. I always felt it was a career that demanded some concessions to be made. You gotta make money, and you've got to feed the machine. Otherwise the jobs don't exist. That's a simple one. But because of that, there's an imperative to try to create compelling content, to try to show that deer aren't just dollar signs to us, and that everything about it isn't

solely important due to the fact that it might generate revenue. Well, that's not always the case. And the horror stories I've heard in the industry, they're not great. We've seen some of them go public with, you know, poaching convictions, but others that didn't result in broken laws were still pretty shitty and they're out there. But there's a third category that I really wanted to address I think is most important,

the curated, cultivated imagery and content. The picture of the picture, if you will, the slight of hand, the thing that we all actually do. But it's different if someone does it and a hundred thousand people see it versus a few of your closest hunting buddies. This brings up this

obligatory quote comparison is the thief of joy. This is often attributed to Teddy Roosevelt, but it's actually more likely an amalgamation of several quotes that might have come from Roosevelt and Mark Twain, and the author C. S. Lewis and even the Bible. It doesn't really matter who originally said it, I guess, partially because it just doesn't, partially because anyone who might deserve the credit is well past the worm food stage of existence. Anyway, the quote still

stands and it's still relevant. However, it's just a bad idea to compare yourself to anyone else. And I've talked about this before, but it's especially stupid when it comes to something like hunting. Now, I'm not saying hunting and stupid. It's one of the favorite things in the whole world, but it's stupid to think it matters to anyone else. I know I've said this a lot, but I believe it. Hunting is a personal thing, and it's best to try

to keep it that way if you can. If you look at the hunting industry, you will see people just like me who can't keep it that way. It's our jobs and maybe a bigger testament to our egos and hubrist than simply being a requirement of a punch in punch out lifestyle. But with all of us, and I mean all of us, you're only going to get a sliver the story. You might, for example, see one of your favorite celeb power hunting couples double up on as

on the same show in the same week. You might think, oh, man, with the right land in the right area, you and your sweetheart could do the same thing. You might even argue that the slebs are doing it without high fences, which you think is pretty incredible, And it is, maybe, but you can't deny the backstory or the parts of the story you're not hearing. So maybe I'll say the quiet part out loud, that hunt on the Outdoor Channel

is high fence hunting, just without the fence. It's the result of a lot of hard work, don't get me wrong, but also the ability to pour millions of dollars into developing big deer. And I'm not being facetious there. And also, let's be honest here, if you have that kind of money, you can make big big deer happen every single year. I heard a story recently about one of those big deer on a show that was killed by a young lady.

Apparently they had the bucks so dialed that they hung two separate camera stands, one on each side of the food plot so they could get unique angles of the buck getting shot. Then it got shot and they did get those angles. Does that sound like something you could do with, say, I don't know a H eight class, Dear, have you ever even seen a real hunter deer? Now again, I'm all for anyone who wants to do that, I really am. I don't care if that's how people choose

to create content or how to live their lives. But I think the audience should know to some extent that this is purely for entertainment on one end, and purely to make money on the other end. This isn't really about hunting all the time. It also goes without saying, but ha ha ha, I will anyway that the guided outfitted stuff you see in the hunting space is not really representative of what most of us do. I think for the most part, outfit are serving amazing purpose and

can be a conduit to unique outdoor experiences. That's important for a lot of people. When outfitters or organizations representing them lobby to siphon tags away from nonresidents by their clout and connections, that's a different story for a different podcast. But the benefits of their services to some hunters they're undeniable. They also happen to be way overrepresented in the hunting

industry for obvious reasons. If you need to get something killed for a show, why not go on a hunt that's free, to a place where someone is going to scout the animals for you and put you right on top of them. Hell, they'll even cook your meals and gut your kill. That sounds about like most of your

hunting right now. I know it doesn't. I'm joking. It is what it is, and the only thing that really bugs me about it is if someone is disingenuous about representing those opportunities when that type of hunt has passed off as a real struggle. Always feel my bullshit meter redlining. Maybe for mountain goats, but for why tales come on. The hardest guided white tail hunt is easier than a

single shopping trip with my wife. Probably. And before you think that I'm just a bitter loser who is still writing squirrel hunting articles while my competition is off yacht shopping in Barbados, I'll let you in on a secret. I do this stuff too, Maybe not to the extent of some of the other folks, but it is inevitable. Let me give you an example on this. When I decided to really focus on public land hunting for white tails.

I had two thoughts in my mind. The first was that it was going to help me make money, plain and simple. I was a struggling outdoor writer and I wanted more money. The second was that I felt like we owed it to the audience to hunt difficult places for difficult dear so I was really only like half of a greedy asshole there. I put my mind to public land white tales and I started arrowing them pretty frequently, and I told everyone who would listen what I was doing.

I didn't shy away from anyone who wanted to tell me that that was impressive. But I also had some insane advantages that I didn't really talk about as much, kind of pushed them to the back burner, like for starters. Even as far down on the totem pole as I was then, I wasn't buying hunting gear was showing up on my doorstep, which is pretty nice, and it wasn't like bargain basement stuff either, so having that advantage was real. Obviously, I also had time and the motivation to hunt that

way for my job before we had the girls. I could just go on long hunts and stick around until a dumb buck made a bad mistake. That is an advantage that can't be overstated. Time is so important to this stuff, and maybe that's the message that is most lost in hunting content these days. The folks creating it tend to have a fair amount of time, amongst some

other very real advantages. They might also have more local intel on hotspots than the average hunter could imagine, or they might buy their way into an opportunity that can still be present It as d I Y even though it's d I Y with a big asterisk. There's a lot of gray area here and maybe it doesn't really matter, but I think it does. I think it's worth acknowledging, especially with this new digital reality where we can all share our highlight real lives every second of every day.

We not only get to choose what we show people, but we can edit photos to look even more amazing. We can add supersweet hashtags, We can use filters. We can be a way better version of ourselves without having to actually be way better versions of ourselves. We can drop an awesome scouting photo that shows how hardcore we are even when we are in the dentist office waiting

to get called in for an annual cleaning. We can all cultivate our images and sell whatever audience we have on the notion that things are pretty damn good in our world. In some ways, I don't know, maybe this

is harmless. In other ways, it's probably pretty damaging. I know it doesn't do any favors to enter into the hunting season and just start to have a clunker go of it while seeing pictures of big dead early season bucks every five seconds on social media that were killed by people who are obviously way less skilled than I am. Yet somehow they got it done and I can't, and that really sucks. But that's dumb, right. What good does it do me to fret about what someone else killed,

no matter how they killed it? Does that change what I need to do to get on the board. No, it does not. Someone else's success or hell, their failures doesn't really mean a thing to my journey as a hunter. And that applies to you find folks as well. Now, I know there's an argument for inspiration, and I'm not going to deny that. I think the best way to get better at something is to be around people who are better than you at it. That has changed my

life in so many ways. It's changed my life when it comes to fishing, hunting, playing, guitar, running, being a parent, lifting weights, sports, and probably about five million other things I can't think of right now. If you can't physically move in with Andy May to learn about his scouting and his hunting strategy, maybe the best thing to do is just follow him on social and listen to every podcast he's on. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. It's not a bad thing to consume hunting content in

any form either. You'll probably be entertained at the very least, and maybe you'll learn something valuable. But it's worth being careful with this stuff too. If you feel those ugly stirrings of too much envier jealousy, maybe it's time to do something else. If anything you consume in this space makes you feel inadequate or uninspired, then it's probably bad for you. It probably just is. I don't know, and

maybe that's the best take on this whole podcast. Acknowledge what this all is, take the pieces that matter to you somehow, let the rest go. It's cool to be totally eaten up with a white tail bug or the hunting bug and want to immerse yourself in it. I've said this a lot, but you do you. I did

a whole episode on that. Just be careful with the content you consume, is all I'm really saying, because when you peep behind the curtains of a huge production or even a little production, you realize there's a lot more going on that has very little to do with the spirit of the hunt. When you read a throwaway article on some digital site. The same rules apply. When you see social media posts from the biggest names in the industry, well,

you get my picture. And of course when you see just about anything anyone posts about hunting, remember you're only getting a sliver of a story that might be good enough, or there might be some weasel maneuvering going on. Pay attention and ask yourself what you're getting out of it. If it's entertainment, or it's educational, or just makes you want to scout a few more days each year, or try out your first all day sit, or maybe just still hunt for a dough in October when the lull

should be in full effect. Then it's probably pretty good for you. If you find yourself disliking the content. That's a big red flag, but not as big of a red flag as it is when the content makes you dis like yourself. That's dangerous dumb territory there, and it's worth thinking about because it's a no bueno. Now, next week, I'm gonna keep this depression train rolling right down the tracks with an episode about the future of hunting. It might be a little bleak, but there'll probably be some

hope tucked into that episode as well. And then I'll get off of this and I'm gonna start talking about taking some kids hunting and some other late summer scouting stuff and get us back into a happier place. That's all for this episode of Wire to Hunt Foundations, which is brought to you by First Light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and I just want to say thank you, thank you, thank you so much for all your support. I really appreciate it, and so does the rest of

the Meteor crew. If you haven't gotten your fill of white tail content yet, head on over to our wire to Hunt YouTube channel and check out our latest how to videos and go visit the meat eater dot com slash Wired to read articles by me Mark Spencer Play, Andy May, Alex Gilstrom, Beaumartinic, a whole bunch of white tail killers and you'll get your fix there. I promise you