Ep. 610: Foundations - Gaining Whitetail Wisdom Through Weapon Choice

I grew up as a strict bow hunter. From the age of twelve until I think I was twenty four, I never picked up a gun to hunt any big game. Even then, the gun I picked up was a little to forty three because my dad and I had planned a trip out west to hunt Wyoming antelope. Now the little goat I shot on day two. That was my first big game animal with a rifle, and while it didn't exactly line me out on a gun hunter's path,

did actually open my eyes. It also made it easier for me to try out a muzzle order, which I just kind of fell in love with. And throughout this and through a brief foray in a traditional bow hunting and now crossbows for my kids, I've realized something hunting with a different weapon can make you a better hunter overall.

And now I'm going to tell you how many of you find listeners might not know this about me, but I am ubsessed with dogs, working dogs mostly, and the other side of my career, the one that doesn't involve white tails at all, involves dogs, training them, writing about them, photographing them, filming them, you name it. I freaking love

dogs that have a job. I also really look up to some dog trainers, and I've had the good fortune of becoming close friends with a fellow named Tom Dockin and Doc I don't know if he's not the goat of retriever training, he's definitely on the podium holding up a top three medal, and I know one have interviewed a pile of other legends in the sport too, and plenty of the up and comers who will probably unseat

the old names after a few decades. Do you know what you find when you embed yourself into that world of breeding and training hunting dogs. You find people who challenge themselves to level up, and you find people who choose an easier path to get really good at very specific aspects of dog training or specializing in a certain breed. Let me give you example of the former one trainer I know who is a certified badass is Jennifer Broom.

She owns q K Kennels in Connecticut and is not only a seriously talented trainer, but also a die hard hunter. She and I spent some time last You're chasing woodcock and grouse on public land in northern Wisconsin, and she explained her strategy of dog training to me, which is basically sort of like the Connor McGregor, you know, heyday of UFC, Take them all, take on everybody, or maybe Nate Diaz or whoever. She wouldn't turn down a dog.

She'd take on super well bred hunting breeds, she'd take on Mutt's shelter dogs, and just generally any dog that came her away. She takes the dogs that have already been trained very well but also might need a little polishing for upper level work like triple blinder trees or hand signals. She take dogs that I don't know, wouldn't know if peasant if it picked him on the nose. She'd take dogs that need basic foundation work at three years of age because they never received an ounce of

training until that point. Now, anyone who knows dogs knows what a challenge that is to unravel all of those bad habits and then start from scratch and build in those positive behaviors you want. In fact, if you ask most trainers what the biggest problem they have with any dog is, it's undoing the bad work the owner did

or allowed. A trainer who chooses to work with those type of dogs, and dogs that are bred for various random tasks and dogs that are just supposed to be well behaved house dogs is a trainer who is going to have a hell of a lot to work with in the old toolbox. Now, the other side of this in the training world are you know which you could kind of call it the specialists. They love the British labs,

so that's all they work with. Or they love pointers, so it's English pointers or gsps or whatever, and that's the lane they stay in. And you know what, they get really really good at breeding and training those specific dogs. Now, if you have a British lab and you want to ring every ounce of prey drive out of it, you might want to go to that specialist because they're probably gonna have an answer for you. But if you come to them with a nova Scotia duck toler maybe not.

Or if your spouse brings home a dog from a back alley litter of hunts and you can't take it back and you need it not to chew on your furniture or bark at the walls or whatever, maybe not. The broader experience solving problems with a huge range of dogs make some trainers so good it's almost unreal. The people who work with a huge variety of challenging dogs just keep getting better because having to solve every random problem that comes your way is going to force you

to think and work through those problems over and over. Hey, and the specialists are great, but they are also the kind of people who I don't know in the dear world, hunt only one spot their entire life. They may get very good at that specific property, but they might not get real good at generally hunting deer through a variety of conditions. Do you see where I'm going with this? This podcast leans heavily towards the bow hunting realm for

several reasons. First off, it's mine and I primarily only bo hunt, so that's a per a big factor. It's also not much of a secret that the folks who are most likely to consume content like this in the deer space also tend to mostly be hardcore bow hunters first, but as being only a bow hunter the best choice if you want to get better at deer hunting, I

don't think so. I do believe in my heart of hearts that the close range game of bow hunting will make you better than the long distance buffer you get with rifle shotguns and muzzle leaders. But that doesn't mean that picking up a weapon that makes a little more

noise when it goes off isn't a good thing. In fact, a couple of weeks ago, I drove on over to the Cabella's by my house to buy some muzzle oader powder and bullets when Cabella's didn't have anything because for some reason that store is turned into mostly a clothing shop where you're constantly pressured into opening a credit card under the threat of getting water boarded in the warehouse by a clueless eighteen year old sales associate in a

tan shirt. I went elsewhere, I found the supplies, took my muzzle leader out, and that sucker dialed in. I just have a soft spot in my heart for muzzle or hunting, and since the timing worked out. I knew I was either going to go to Wisconsin or stay in Minnesota, or maybe both. Now the states I hunt these days allow for scopes on muzzloaders, and that changes the game. Before Minnesota legal eyes scopes, it was an open sight deal. Only I still loved it because it

was kind of like bow hunting on easy mode. Anything within a hundred yards was fair game, and anything within about seventy five, as long as I had a really good rest, was in serious trouble. I learned this after learning mostly what not to do with the muzzloader, because you see, as a lifelong bow hunter, I felt like I would almost be cheating when I picked up a gun, even a gun that is a relatively short range weapon compared to many of the firearms we take into the field.

So instead of hunting deer like I do with a bow, I started just walking around trying to find one to shoot. After all, that extra horsepower should have allowed me to still hunt my way to a ton of filled tags, and honestly it did well. Not really some tags, for sure, but it also led me to watch an awful lot of deer run away and reminded me that there are good stocking conditions, and there are conditions where you'll never ever get anywhere near a deer. That's the time when

you got an ambush. It taught me that muzzle order hunting on a huge chunk of ground was a different deal than hunting a tiny parcel. It made me realize that what I thought would be easy due to the obvious advantage over archery tackle, was almost always mitigated by something.

Now that might have just been a crunchy layer of snow out there, or some early winter rain, or mostly just the effects of a ton of hunting pressure from bow and gun season, but I always, no matter what it seemed like, the whole thing kind of leveled off pretty quickly. And what I didn't see coming when I started that was that I still had to hunt smart.

I had to figure out what the conditions we're going to do to the deer, what the pressure was going to do to the deer, and how I could intersect with them on the properties I was hunting at one muscle or hunting brought me to a few different states on public and private land, and it just gave me an education I didn't know I needed. Rifle hunting did

too once I started doing it. Now you would probably be better off growing in Miami vice Mark Kenyan mustache for good luck than you would listening to me give rifle hunting advice. So take that for what it's worth. But rifle hunting taught me a lesson that I needed to learn and I needed to be reminded of every year. And you've heard me talk about it a ton on here, which is cover as king. The bucks I've killed with a rifle, they've all been in cattail slues or the

thickest parts of the biggest woods. They've all been closer than I thought they would be, and they've all showed me that the deer weren't all gone, they weren't all nocturnal. They were just being damned sneaky in places that offered them serious advantages. Going from being a strict, pompous, look down your nose at everyone else kind of bow hunter to a deer hunting generalists who would gladly pick up a gun taught me how to be a better deer hunter,

and it could teach you as well. But here's the thing, though, it's easy to go into default mode sometimes, no matter what your weapon of choices. If you have that box blind on the edge of the pitcornfield and have gone from a four yard weapon to a four hundred yard weapon, it's pretty easy to grab your little buddy heater and some Swiss cake rolls and go live the good life.

But what does that teach you. It'll probably teach you that by gun season the big boys aren't much into running across open fields when the masses are out there with serious firepower. What would the third day a gun season teach you if, instead of crawling up into a tiny house built to shoot deer from, you slipped into some cover and saddled up for an afternoon sit. Or what would you learn about doing two man drives on

the public river bottom down the road? What could you learn if you muzzle it or haunted during a serious cold snap when the bed to food patterns should be cranking up. What if you don't see them on the food even though it's zero degrees and they should be carving up in the cornfield. What if you decided to take your muzzle leader to an area of your state you've never hunted, Maybe to a place that is grassy plains, maybe full of cat tails, losing tiny woodlots and couldn't

look more different from your typical big woods hunt. Or what if you went from a place you couldn't glass because it's just too thick to a place where you could see whole sections of land with the right optics or vice versa. What would that change about how you hunt? This is the thing about weapon choice, my friends. It puts us in a new mindset and allows us the chance to hunt just a little bit differently. And this

is so much harder than it looks. When you turn on the outdoor channel these days, you'll mostly see people hunting easy stuff, regardless of weapon choice. That box bind on the food plot in southern Iowa will be just as good for the bow opener as it will be for the final days of the season. No matter what weapon you've got, it'll be good for whatever weapon they pick up all season long in most of the places

they choose to hunt and film for you. And those people have learned to get to the deer to do exactly what they want them to do. That's their secret. But you don't have that, and honestly, you probably don't want that, even though it would be nice to kill a buck without having to burn a calorie. That's not going to happen, though, But you can get a lot better at deer hunting by switching things up. This is one of the easiest ways I know to prompt yourself

out of a hunting rut. We all do this, and it's not good for our success or, more importantly, our skill set. We go to places where we are comfortable sitting, We default where we think we are most likely to see the deer. We make excuses, especially as the season drags on, We'll get complacent, and honestly, all this stuff's okay. Hunting isn't supposed to be hard work for everyone. If the ladder stand over the food plot is where you

want to sit, go for it. But if you find yourself wishing you could have more encounters with bigger deer, or you find yourself not wanting to do the same old thing because you're pretty sure it will deliver the same old results, then consider shaking things up now. It might be too late for that this year, but it's not too late to start thinking about how you do that next year. It's not too late to consider what

you might want to buy yourself for Christmas. That might just require hearing protection when you use it, because once you decide that, you know what, screw it. I've worked my ass off for a long time and I think I deserve a new muzzle loader. And anyway, we always have some free time during the beginning of December, and why shouldn't I just do it. Listen, I say treat yourself, because you know what that's gonna do. It's going to get you thinking about what you'll have to do to

be successful. Your bow only strategy isn't going to totally cut it this year or next year. When you head out with a brand new Blaze Orange vest on, You're going to have to think about what it's going to take to be successful. And you know what else, it'll open up opportunities you might not see coming. One of the most challenging hunts I've ever been on, it was also one of the most fun. Was in when a buddy and I drove to Nebraska in December and muzzleloader

hunted deer on an enormous chunk of public land. The two year old I shot that year after hunting all day the first day we got there and not seeing a single deer. By the way, it was a trophy that I was pretty damn proud of. He brought me across miles of sand hills and so many good looking spots that simply didn't hold a single deer when I was there. That kind of hunting, while I could be done with a bow, was not something I had ever

done with a bow. It took a gun to get me to make that eight or drive and do that hunt, and I'm so glad I did. In fact, I'm pretty happy every time I switched weapons and tried to hunt white tails in some different way, you know, whether I'm at home or headed on on the road somewhere. I love having to plan differently and think about my approach and my setups. I also love knowing that if we get eight inches of fresh powder and I've got enough land to work with, I might be able to channel

my inner upper Northeastern hunter and track one. The first dough I ever killed with a muzzle. Order gave me that chance, and it's still one of the few white tails I've ever shot in it's bed. It's also the biggest dough I've ever shot. Do you have a chance to do something like this, to take something other than your usual weapon of choice out to try your hand at the same game with different rules. If so, I'd

consider it if I were you. The secret to leveling up as a deer hunter isn't gaining access to the best ground out there, because while that will certainly help you fill up the walls of your man cave with sweet mounds, it won't necessarily make you a better hunter. Hell, easy deer hunting often makes us worse, even though it can be a hell of a lot of fun. What a weapon switch instead could do for you is actually make you a better hunter, which is pretty fun by

the way. It will open up new styles like still hunting or drives or whatever. It will allow you to ambush from the ground in spots where your bow would be worthless, or allow you to sit up over a valley that you've never hunted because to bow hunt it you'd have to get so close to the deer and contend with all the swirling wind. But maybe you can play it safe at the top of the ridge and maybe you'll see the deer do something you didn't think

they do. Maybe they'll walk past a tree to get into that valley that you could hang a stand in. Next bow season, shaking things up and challenging ourselves sort of the name of the game. And you know what else, it's pretty damn enjoyable. I know some hunters who have no desire to try anything different, and good for them. But if that's not you, or you're looking for a way to force yourself to try new things, this can

be a pretty good move. And it probably won't be as easy as you think it'll be, which is exactly how it should be. And if it is, I don't know, a little too easy, then maybe that will prompt you to get out of the box blind and head to the public land with your buddies to do a few little drives. Or maybe instead of sitting in your favorite stand, you'll still hunt I don't know, the fresh snow in

a river bottom on that public land. Maybe you'll learn doing any of those things, while directly influencing your success in the moment, will also benefit you a whole lot throughout the rest of your life as a hunter. So I guess who doesn't want that? Try something new, my friends, and be sure to tune in next week as I break down late season hunting for people who don't have good places to late season hunt. That's all I have for you this week, as I always, thank you so

much for tuning in. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast and I'm your host, Tony Peterson and you know it's brought to you by First Light. Feel free to visit them eatier dot com slash wired to read our latest articles, or head on over to the wire to Hunt YouTube channel to see how our how to videos that we drop every week. And again, thank you so much for the support. All of us here at meat Eater sincerely appreciate it. M