Ep. 624: Foundations - Where, Why, When, Who Freakin' Cares

from listening to the Exodus podcast a couple of weeks ago. No, those fellows over there at that company not only makes some pretty sweet trail cameras and some other outdoor gear, but they also have a great podcast as well. And in the episode I listened to, they actually talked about me, which was flatter ring and pretty sweet. But they also got onto the topic of where they hunt and the bucks they target, and it got me thinking. So now you get to hear I guess what I was thinking.

Perspective is important. You younger listeners might not quite grasp that yet, but but listen, trust me. As you get older and you get a little better at spotting the bs and a lot less tolerant of it, you start to realize a few things. One of those is that perspective is so important. Nuances to my old boss, Ben O'Brien, who has moved on to things beyond the mediator world, often used to talk about how he was pro nuance.

Ben's a smart guy, and he has dug into enough issues to know and probably believe the old saying about their being three sides to every story. You his mind and the truth if you will. And why do I say this, Well, there's many reasons. Life has an annoying habit of showing you how good life really is, or sometimes how bad it can be. I've mentioned this briefly

on a few different episodes. But the people who I look up to more than most in this world, they're not the ones that are known for their hunting skills. They happened to be a couple of my wife's relatives who lost the genetic lottery. When they conceived their second child. Their son, Jake, was born with mitochondrial disease. This isn't

a terribly common disease, but it is terrible. Period. Within the first two years of his life, it was evident he wasn't advancing on a normal toddler type schedule, and by the time he should have been in kindergarten playing with his peers, he was using a walker to barely get around. By the time he should have been in second grade, he was on a feeding tube and then

a breathing tube full time in a wheelchair. Basically, he needed twenty four hour care and often, well pretty often an ambulance to take him in to the hospital for respiratory issues or worse. Jake's life and subsequently the life of his loved ones, was dominated by the effects of that mitochondrial disease. How a few days before Christmas last year, his heart stopped. While medics eventually got it going, the

brain damage had been done. The outlook was not good, and it got worse as the scans and the tests rolled in. When they took Jake off a life support, he passed away a few minutes later at the age of fourteen. The weight of his death on his family's pretty heavy, real heavy stuff, my friends. It's hard to imagine a much worse hand to be dealt, although such hands are dealt every day in this world, and no one can say why. But it doesn't matter. If it

could be explained to be honest. When you see the dice roll a certain way for full and there's no escaping the gravity of those situations. It makes me feel an inch tall when I bitch about missing a deer or not having a very good hunter or a very good season. It makes me feel like a great a piece of ship for all the complaints to be honest,

and that's what this episode is about. When those fellows over at Exodus, Jake and Chad broke down this year on their podcast the way I mentioned at the beginning, they got into the topic of how it almost seemed shameful to shoot a buck anywhere but on public land these days, and they both agreed that was pretty stupid. You know what I do too, even though I'm as guilty of pushing the public land message, I don't know more than just about anyone short of the hunting Public

crew out there. But those guys, they're smart dudes that they are. They were right. It doesn't matter where you shoot your dear, you should be just happy to have places to hunt. Now. I know that's an easy a thing to say, but it's harder to live that life

in practice. This is because the jealousy thing is so real, and so is the reality that all of our egos are just a little more fragile than we'd like to admit to our friends, let alone thousands of strangers who listened to you ramble on for seventeen or eighteen minutes a week. It's also easy to be judging. Well, maybe not for you, but for me. It's a freaking breeze. I recently saw a thread on both site about an industry fellow who claimed to have killed his six white till.

I don't know the guy, but I do know his reputation, and I personally feel like he hasn't done US Hunters any favors, and I don't want to say his name. So that was an easy one for me, though I could think without training the old gray matter too hard that I don't know, maybe he shot it illegally or with a ton of advantages. I mean, he does, after all, have a track record of some citations. But here's the thing,

I don't know anything about him. I don't know anything about his dear I know I don't like what he stands for kinda although in the eyes of plenty of people, he and I have similar jobs. And probably look similarly do she. That's a bummer for me, But what am I gonna do about it? I don't know if the guy has any real hunting skill or not. It's easy again for me to think, well, I know he asked quite a bit of land, and I would have worked with and I held a lot of money to work with.

Those two things. Well, actually, just the money thing, they can get you to buck, maybe not six of them. It'll get you a hell of a lot faster than I don't scouting and whatever else will. But the real question is why should I care? Shouldn't I be happy for him? Or at least I don't know, agnostic about it. It's harder than it looks, and honestly is fairly muddied up when you consider the representation of our industry and

his legal issues. Fine, maybe that guy sucks and he deserves to be judged, But what about some other random hunter who happens to arrow a giant? What's the first reaction? Mine is often to assume, which is a bad idea, that they must have a great place to hunt. Many do, But does that really take away anything from their kill? And why does it make me feel better to find out it's some blue collar man or woman who happened to knock on the right farmer's door, or better yet,

get a little lucky on some state land. Why does that matter? It shouldn't, but I forget that all the time. It's hard not to get jealous. I had a conversation with a buddy of mine recently where he mentioned that it seems like everyone has more money than him, even though he knows that's not true. He's just perceiving the world that way. And I think a lot of us

do this in so many different ways. When I go up to the lake where we have our travel trailer, I see bass boats that would cost sure grand new. Now I see wake boats that cost double that, and I always think, where the hell do these people get their money, and why can't I have some of it? And then I realized, well, I have a bass boat. It's certainly not new, but a hell of a lot of people in a little aluminum deep v boats have commented on how much they liked the look of that boat.

I'm sure the folks I see paddling around in canoes kayaks might trade me for a day or maybe a summer too. When I was younger, and I couldn't kill a deer despite hours and hours and hours of effort. I always sort of hated the guys who wrote for magazines. I softly despised. I don't like the Real Tree crew, or the Monster Bucks crew, or the premost guys, or whoever was making the videos. I saw where they were routinely killing bucks way bigger than I ever saw, literally

ever saw in my life hunting or not hunting. But why because I was jealous. I wanted what they had. I don't actually want to wake boat, for example. In fact, I hate them, but I wish I got a forward one. I don't want to shoot a high fence deer without defences on a primo managed piece of ground either. I just want the offer, maybe the invite. I want to be able to look people in the eye and tell them I could have hunted someplace really sweet, but I'm

gonna go grind it out on public. Why does that matter? It doesn't. But it's a way of thinking. It's a stuck in the Rutt mindset, which is kind of damaging. It's like, right now, if you take five seconds to read about the economy, you'll be bombarded with negativity. Inflation has the cost of all the essentials in our life away way higher than a couple of years ago. The stock market isn't trending in a direction that produces tons

of millionaires unless you're really good at shorting stocks. Demand for housing is abating, people are putting more money on credit cards. On the surface, not so great. Underneath the surface, also not so great. Many people, especially young people, will look at this as another grand kick to the old nut sack from the boomers who control the whole machine, or some other such excuse which doesn't hold a whole

lot of water. It's a prime breeding ground for negativity and the mindset that once broke, always broke, or that you never get ahead in this world. But the folks who have weathered through a few bare markets are actually looking at it like it's an opportunity to follow the old oracle of Omaha into some discounted shares of solid companies. Maybe they're buying into the whole market, maybe some I

bonds or some other inflation protected asset. The mindset is, it's probably not as bad as it seems, if I can make a few good decisions from here until this thing starts to turn around, and these folks who own their mindset and can make a few disciplined decisions will probably end up pretty happy with themselves when the whole thing balances out and starts turning black again. In more often than it turns red, because the way we think

about this stuff matters so much. If you have a bad attitude, you're stuck on public land while so many people are growing and naming deer on sweet little pieces of paradise where the bucks never look up in trees and the genetics are hands selected by the big man in the sky himself to produce I don't know, top end typicals and gnarly points everywhere non typicals. I'll bet someone would still change places with you. Even if you're just pounding out on public land and you don't have

that dream scenario. Think about that. You might not get to hunt that. I don't know, easy babysat deer. That would make a great TV show, kind of buck. That's okay. Some people look into spots like that. Some people work their asses off somewhere else to buy into that world. If you won't or can't, that's okay. Ask yourself, what do you have that's still pretty sweet. Do you have land that you can hunt any time? That's pretty good,

It really is. And even if we often bitch about public land and look down on it at least until we kill something on it and can brag away, the truth is it's better than living where you have no public land hunt. That's pretty simple, right. It's kind of like having a I don't know, a cheap fourteen ft aluminum boat with a twenty horsepower tiller steered motor on

It is better than fishing from shore. Having a spot to go to where you can at least theoretically kill a deer or two is a lot better than not having any place to go hunt better. Yet, with that land, you have the option of putting in some sweat equity to influence your results in a positive way. That's kind

of a bonus, isn't it. So What if your wife's cousin works in finance and has money to buy I don't know, fifteen thousand dollar landowner tag out west to hunt elk that bugles so much they sometimes pass out from the effort. What if you can't afford and over the counter elk hunt in a trampled unit, even if you lived on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for ten days, and someone spotted you the gas money to get there.

Find something else. Maybe the mountains are out of reach, but a couple of days across the state line with your buddies for some turkeys or small game or white tails or whatever that could be in the cards. Maybe you'll never get to fish the ocean, but maybe you have some pretty sweet little trout streams near your house that you can fish any damn time you please. That's not nothing, and it doesn't do us any good to focus on the asshole who can afford to fish in

the ocean. It doesn't do us any good to keep up with the hunting jones is because they probably aren't any happier than you are, or maybe they are, and it's on you to be a little bit happier about what you do have. That's what I'm trying to do. If you have a bad ass spot to hunt deer and never really see a reason to pick up your bow unless he's a one eighty year better good for you. Help every once in a while you take somebody out to hunt dos or shed hunt or something, because that's

a gift worth sharing. But The same goes for the public land hunter scraping by in an attempt to shoot a dough or a forky. It could always be worse. You could not hunt or not have a place to hunt, or have an accident at work that breaks both of your arms the day before the bow season opens up, or worse, an accident at home that breaks both of your arms because you're doing something stupid like spraying hornets on the eaves of your house and the ladder falls

over when you get stung right between the eyes. Or hell, you find out that you and your wife happen to carry a rare, recessive gene and occasionally, in that situation, when you make a child together, that child will live a short life with a horrible disease. Perspective, my friends, things could always be worse. So maybe we shouldn't be

trying to make things worse for ourselves or others. Maybe we should just be happy for the fortunate souls who happened to be born into a family that just happen to start buying southern Iowa ground in the nineteen fifties and now sits on a couple of sections of the

best deer dirt out there. We should be happy for the hard worker who saves up for the trip to the mountains to hear a real bugle at least once, or the person who talks his buddies into paying for at least to experience the deer hunting the way he and his buddies want to experience it. Life isn't fair, It isn't equitable in its distributional wealth and of opportunity. But if you're up walking and talking and capable of climbing into a tree stand and holding a bow up

to shoot it, you're probably doing all right. If you have a little cabin to go to for the firearms season where some good friends and a few year relatives will be and you get to play some cards and eat some chili and drag out a few deer, I'd say you're pretty damn lucky, and I'm happy for you. I'm happy for all of us. Honestly, those of us who love to deer hunt, we already have a leg up on the rest of the population. I truly believe that.

Do you know how exciting it is to see a good buck walking down the trail when you know he's going to eventually be in range and you're eventually going to shoot at him. That's what Daddy likes. And the folks who don't know that feeling, they're everywhere and they don't even know what they're missing. We do, you and I the hunters, So really, no matter where you hunt, why you hunt, or whatever, I'm actually happy for you white tail hunting successfully. And by that I mean in

a way that is rewarding. Whether you slay booners every year or couldn't kill a button buck on a high fence corn pile with a week's worth of effort, it's the goal, and it doesn't matter where we do it or what the final score is. Whether we notched a deer tag on private land or the most heavily hunted piece of public land out east somewhere, doesn't matter. It's all good and we should all be happy we still have some fellow hunters out there fighting the good fight

and living for the same reasons we live for. That's all I have for this up episode. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast, brought you by First Light. I'm Tony Peterson, and I sincerely want to thank you for the support and if you need more white tail wisdom, head on over to the mediator dot com slash wired and check out my latest articles, along with articles from Mark and Beau Martinic and Alex Gilstrom in a whole

bunch of white Tail Killers. And you can also view a ton of how to videos on our wire to Hunt YouTube channel, where Mr Kenyon and myself break down all kinds of deer hunting strategies.