Ep. 626: Foundations - All Of That For A Rabbit?

This winter started early, and it has been a real bummer for months now and we're only like a halfway through it, which is pretty depressing. I don't know about you, but I can only organize my hunting gear and tie up some swimming jigs for some spring bass, and clean the shotguns and stare it on x so long before I try to kill the boredom other ways, and one of those ways recently sparked an idea why we hunt and what we actually think about hunting, and that's what

this episode is all about. If you go to Netflix and you have search around looking for something to kill some time, you might see a docuseries called Human Playground. It's one that I recently started watching. The first episode is all about pain. Well, actually, a lot of the episode seemed to be about pain and how we as a species seek it out in unusual ways to show that we can handle it and that we deserve the bliss of not being in pain afterwards. Does that make

any sense? Probably not. Anyway, there are arcs to the first episode that involved a woman running a marathon in the desert, which, if it doesn't sound too terrible, means it's probably been since grade school since you laced up some running shoes. There's I don't know, like bullfighting. In the first episode, there's a bike race on super slippery cobble stones that results in a very high number of

broken ribs for a bike race. And then there's a woman and I recommend everyone watch her segment because it is wild. This woman uses a chainsaw to cut a hole in the ice of some lake and I think Finland. Then, on a super cold day in the winter, she walks out there in a swimsuit and dives under the ice to swim around for a spell. I'm not going to spoil anything for you, but watch it and watch how it's shot. It is wild. So now now that my Netflix referral checks are probably in the mail, I hope.

I'll say that none of what I talked about so far has anything to do with this podcast, really, except that if you keep watching those episodes in that docuseries, you'll see shows dedicated to all kinds of things that

us crazy woman's do. But the one that caught my attention and sparked the idea for this episode involved some dudes who are from Mongolia, I think, and these dudes get together in the winter with their trained raptors and a bunch of good buddies and proceed to put on small game drives where once a bunny takes off and exposes itself, they release their death eagles or whatever kind of bird they're using, and then it's lights out for

Commander bun Bunt. As I watched this play out, I actually set out loud to myself because I talked to myself all the time, even though I very recently found out that it is not that common or normal apparently. Anyway, I said to old ant tone, that is a lot of work for a rabbit. I even felt like a little bit superior to those Mongolian rabbit smashers with their

really cool birds. But then I realized something. Last February I drove nearly four hours to stay in a hotel room with a couple of buddies so we to hunt rabbits, and you know what, it was a freaking blast. We put on a few miles logging around various chunks of public land that looked like it might hold a rabbit or two, and we managed to shoot eight cotton tales.

We learned quite a bit about the deer that lived down there, flushed a pile of pheasants, and fought off some of the serious cabin fever that settles into your brain like a parasite. By the time February is nearly wrapped up and the old dreaded March is about to come roaring in. When my buddies and I left the sloes in our last hunt, cleaned our bunnies on the tailgate of my truck. It was honestly the culmination of

a really good day. In fact, we're going to spend another weekend bunny hunting and shed hunting and just not being in the house with our wives and kids and dogs while we try to stave off the boredom by walloping our daughters and Dr Mario because we just found a Nintendo that works. But that's a lot for a rabbit, right to drive that far. Hotel rooms aren't all that cheap these days, and they aren't given a a fuel.

It's a full weekend that we could be doing other, more responsible, more adult types of things than jumping on brush piles and taking our twenty gauges for a long walk through a lot of brush. But it's so fun and it's something to look forward to. And of course it begs the question from people who might not get it, who might say, all of that for a rabbit. But

it's not about the rabbit, is it. I mean it is in some ways, because where they live, how they hide from us, whether we like eating them, all of that factors into the equation. But a lot of people see it simply as a transactional affair. You're going to do all of that for a rabbit, or even a limited rabbits, which to most people might actually be worse than a single dead rabbit. When someone like one of my in laws, for example, asked something like that, listen,

I get it. They'd rather go to a home and garden show or maybe a dinner theater player or some other event that would absolutely suck the soul right out of me and then stomp it around on the floor with muddy boots before taking a big, steaming dump all over it. I get it when the home and garden crowd looks at the scale and sees all the money and effort and time and then a dead rabbit, and they don't understand the balance. But when it comes to hunters, I don't get it quite as much. But we do

it all the time as white tail hunters, don't. We take the very casual rifle hunter who I'm gonna totally stereotype for a second here, this guy, he grew up with hunting check in the big woods up north to

drive his five hours up there. The deer hunting strategy consists of checking their stands, you know, which are all wooden ladder stands we affectionately refer to as widowmakers in the industry, and then opening morning, they get up, practice no scent control, ride four wheelers into the woods, sit on their stand regardless of wind or weather, crops or whatever, and they wait and cross their fingers. You know what, There's nothing wrong with that guy or that hunting style,

if that's what makes him happy. But that guy would also probably roll his eyes worse than my eleven year old daughters if you told him there are hunters who buy tractors to plant food just for deer, who plant fruit trees just four deer, who pay excavators to come

in and build them water holes just four deer. People who buy, for like five thousand dollars little houses built to put right in the middle of the deer food to shoot deer from houses that are somewhat soundproof, somewhat scent proof, and will keep him from getting spotted moving around until he opens a window and blasts and unsuspecting

buck in his lungs. That first hunter, the rifle hunter, would not surprise anyone to say something to the effect of all of that for a deer, and that guy with the food plots in the land or whatever else.

He might look at the case of the die hard public land hunter who scouts seventy five days a year and spends hundreds of hours every season in a saddle just to kill a buck that is three years too young in his opinion, and he might say all of that for a deer, and the person who doesn't hunt might look at all of those hypothetical hunters and say, well, you know, but it's not just for a deer, now,

is it. That's the thing about this stuff. If we boil it down to the end result of deflated lungs or not, it's pretty cut and dry, and it would probably never be worth it. I mean, most of us aren't starving, and if we took our hunt budget for the year and spend it on groceries, we probably put on a few pounds. It's not about just the food totally, although that's a great reason to hunt. It sad about

the antlers either, although they're pretty damn cool too. It's about something else that we have a hard time understanding sometimes. I think those horseback Mongolians with their hooded raptors on their arm, they aren't rabbit hunting just to rabbit hunt.

They're doing it because it's a tradition and it means something to them to engage in the whole process, not just the moment when bugs bunny flashes across the land and the big feathery murder machine takes flight, but the whole build up before it, the training, all the talking with their buddies, and the planning. It's a part of it, and there's probably so much more than I'm leaving out.

When my buddies and I go rabbit hunting, we'll text about it for weeks beforehand, we'll call each other, we actually eat, scout and pick spots, We build the whole thing up. Then we go and we give each other tons of ship and we work hard to push a few rabbits around, and then we relax afterwards and plan for the next hunt, or the next scouting trip, or maybe where we should apply for turkeys this spring. The thing about hunting is that if you really want to

enjoy it, you figure out these things eventually. If you really don't want to enjoy it, focus too much on the end goal. If you really don't want to enjoy it, focus too much on an end goal that you can't achieve for whatever reason. Like if you bow hunt for three years on public land in Louisiana and decide it's finally time that you move up to the mature buck League and make the declaration that it's a one fifty

year bus this year. Boys, when it comes to white tails and what you'll do to be around them come fall, it pays to think about why all of the parts are worth it, and how to make sure that you enjoy all of the parts enough to keep doing them so that you get better overall and the whole thing becomes more a part of your life. No, no, scratch that, more like a better part of your life. This is

tough to do during the off season. I recently had a conversation with a good buddy of mine named Aaron Hepler, who is a die hard public land hunter from Pennsylvania. We got on the topic of bow hunting, you know, the promised land that is Iowa, and he mentioned that he might have enough points to draw down dinner this year. I then mentioned that a great way to learn about public land in Iowa is to buy one of their last season tags and go running gun for some gobblers.

I've written about this many times and put it into practice many times. But he didn't seem to need an excuse to get down there. He said he had a stretch in April where he could make the thirteen or fourteen hour drive to Iowa to walk as much ground as possible and decide if burning his points and writing the big check it's going to be worth it. Now, a lot of people in Aaron's life would probably say all of that for a deer. But he loves scouting

and he loves new ground. It's not a chore to do the offseason parts for him because he loves it. He would do a lot more for a deer because it's not just about killing a deer. To him, scouting trips can be fun. They should be fun, finding shed ailers, shaking off the confines of your house to walk through the winter woods. That ship is fun. East scouting that can be fun, but not as fun as ground truth

in your East outing suspicions. Of course, it's all not as fun as that moment when a buck starts walking down the trail towards your stand. But the more build up there is, the more fun that can be too. It's fun when that happens, and it's not an accident or just an example of good fortune. That's important. So what do you need to do to be questioned by someone else in this all that? For a dear way?

Are you already there? Probably to some extent if you listen to this podcast, because I can think of a lot better ways to use your time. I mean, hell, listening to me Drone on every week. It's probably enough torture for most people to think maybe all of this for a deer really isn't worth it? Or are you not there yet but you wish you were? Then what's holding your back? What parts don't you enjoy? That's the real question, and that answer will help you figure out

how to enjoy the whole thing more. And since we're in the off season now, let's talk about this because winner scouting is not that common, even though guys like me talk about it all the time. Do you not really like winter scouting? Do you think instead you can buy a couple of cell cameras and put them out in the summer to get enough intel? Do you feel that the work now is so divorced from the potential fall results that it's not worth it? Listen, I get it,

I really do. The work can suck, but if it does, you might be doing some of it or most of it wrong. So let's say I don't know, you want to hunt some new public land, but the idea of going out and walking five miles through the snow to look for rubs just not doing it for you. Well, have I mentioned rabbit hunting is pretty fun? So is squirrel hunting, and an awful lot of states have open small game season. Still, when it was the last time you carried around a scope twenty two or seventeen and

tried to snipe a few bushy tails? All right, What if you don't want to hunt small game? Do what I do. Sometimes. Sometimes when i'm east scouting, I'll find an edge on a property, or some thicket or swamp or something that just interests me, just catches my eye. I'll try to figure out where I think deer might bed specifically exactly in those areas, or where they might rub or stage or hell, where they might just have

a really nice trail. Then I'll go in and check just for a couple of hours, and a lot of times I'm wrong, But sometimes I get it right. Sometimes I find an oiler, or sometimes I just find a spot I might hunt this fall or three falls from now. Sometimes I don't find anything but a pastured woods that wouldn't hold a mature bucket a thousand years. Maybe it's just a testament to neural hardwiring. But I like dopamine hits a lot. I've been chasing them my entire life

in a variety of productive and damaging ways. One that is pretty productive is finding a great big rub or a lone bed somewhere on a new property where I've called my shot via east scouting pre rewarding. Some times a trip to the woods right now is worth nothing more than to give you a better look at every little fold in the train, every dip on a ridge, every little up and down feature that might play into

a deer's life or their decision making. For some reason, I like seeing spots I hunt in all of the seasons, even though I don't really know why, But I do like seeing the land as it is now, because it's sort of like playing with a cheap code on If you want to know why bucks travel one way and not another, the world might show you right now, but that window will close about the time when the turkeys start nesting. Do you enjoy that stuff? Or I don't know,

do you enjoy finding antlers? Okay? How do you work that into some winter scouting. The thing about all this stuff is that if you're going to be a successful hunter, you're going to have to learn how to do the things that tell the non hunters and some of your fellow hunters that you'll do all of that for a deer. You want to be the person who puts in the effort and who loves it, because then the effort is

part of the process, a process that you'll love. You want to be the one who knows the secret about getting the most out of a season and how even if you can bow hunt for three months, the other nine offer you a hell of a way to get your fixed too. Listen, this applies to shooting, tinkering with gear, and a pile of other aspects of the white tail process as well. It's all encompassing. If you want it to be, or if you just want it to be a little bit more dear crazy than the next guy. Whatever,

that's all right too. The point is figure out a way to get people talking about you like you're just a little bit crazy, show them what you'll do for a deer, and then you know what, do it and then tune in next week because I'm gonna talk about shed Antler's how to find them, why we love them, and what good they really do us as hunters. That's it for this week, my friends. I'm Tony Peterson and to spend the wire to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is

brought to you by first Light. As always, thank you so much for listening, and if you want more white tail content, feel free to head over to the metator dot com slash wired for plenty of deer hunting articles written by Mark myself and a whole bunch of other absolute slayers, And if you want go visit our wire to Hunt YouTube channel as well because we've dropped all kinds of how to content on there. And as always, again, thank you so much for listening and supporting us.