Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better dear hunting. Present it 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.
Hey, everyone, welcome to the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. Today, I'm going to talk about a whole bunch of random stuff that's related to white tails and hunting them, mostly because I want to. And this just happens to be the one hundredth episode of Foundations. You heard me right, Even though these episodes get lumped in with the regular Wire to Hunt episodes and the Fall Fresh episodes, so you can't easily see how many of these I've done just
by looking at the number. Trust me, this is the old century mark on here. Did you know what that means? Means? That means I've written approximately three hundred thousand words for this thing. That's a higher word count than most of the books out there, even the ones centered on pollinators that Kenyon loves to read. In fact, three hundred thousand words is like four or five times as much as an entire bull hunting public land White Tails book that
I wrote. That's how much you put into this thing. And what I plan to do today was just tell you some deer hunting stories. But lately I've been turkey hunting, which means I've had a lot of time to think, and I just want to go a different route with this one, because I think there's a better opportunity with this podcast than just me sitting here recounting some of
my past dear successes and failures. But before I get into that, I have to let you know about the meat Eater giveaway that is going on right now until May twenty. First, if you want the chance to win three thousand dollars worth of sweet hunting gear along with a personalized outfitting session with a Latvian eagle himself, you just have to head over to the meadeater dot com slash giveaway to enter again the meat eater dot com slash giveaway. It's free, takes about thirty seconds, and you
could end up with a boatload of kick ass gear. Recently, I got the old invite to be on the meat Eater podcast. Now I suspect I probably won't get invited back again, but that's okay. In the show, Steve and I debated a few topics, one of which was the recent trail camera ban on public land in Kansas. I bet most of you you probably have an opinion on this one way or the other. Either you think they
should be allowed or you don't. The reasoning behind the van, at least partially, was to reduce hunter conflicts, which I personally think is kind of stupid. In the white tail world. This isn't a super limited water hole in Arizona where you could wait twenty years to draw the elk tag of a lifetime only to scout a few tanks and walk into see seventy three cameras on every available source at h two. Oh. This is a different thing. It's
white tails. And while I'm actually pretty agnostic on cameras on public land or even private land for that matter, I am pretty sincere in my belief that we should be very careful about allowing or advocating for any type of outdoor opportunity to just go away. Listen, I've bitched about this a lot, so I apologize in advance, but I think we need to be honest with ourselves as hunters.
When we go after non residents for shooting all of our deer, or we just continually gripe about our hunting opportunities and how there's just nothing left but crowds everywhere and only terrible deer hunting. We are signaling that we need and want change. I mean, we really want it. As hunters, we are hard wired genetically to look for short cuts in some of these changes or shortcuts, I mean why work harder? Have to? Am I right, On every piece of ground out there that is public, there's
an opportunity to succeed or fail. Most will fail because that's the nature of our pursuit. But some people always find a way to get it done. They just do, and we all could, honestly, but it's easier to advocate for opportunities to go away. In the near term, you'll
have easier hunting. And that's good, right. I mean, it's not good for people who enjoy hunting new areas and finding a little adventure in their pursuits, just as it's not good if you, oh, I don't know, enjoy running a few trail cameras on public land and happen to live or hunt in Kansas. Here's the thing. When things in our world go, they are gone. Remember that. I remember at least ten years ago when in my home state of Minnesota the moose numbers started to become a
real concern. Wildlife biologists speculated on global warming being the cause brain worms from white tails mixing with moose tick born diseases. Hunters speculated quite vocally that it was our wolf population. You know, we have a population that was and probably still is second only to Alaska in quantity. When they shut down the season over population concerns. I didn't know any more than they did about why the moose were going downhill, But I knew something else. I'd
never hunt moose in my home state. I should have applied earlier, and I didn't. And now we are well passed a decade into this seasonal closure, and you know what, hunters don't even really talk about it much anymore. We have just become conditioned to not having moose hunts. And you know what else, I don't hear about the moose population anymore. I don't honestly know how well our bullwinkles
are doing. That kind of sucks. Things change. Interview folks out there that have a pensiont for pheasants like I do. And you're old enough probably remember the late nineties rooster numbers in some states. It was stupid fun and we didn't know what we had until the CRP come tracks started drying up and the crop prices decided to head north for a while. Grassland became far less profitable than eggland, and without grass your pheasants aren't going to be around.
I remember brook trout fishing a lot in my youth. I love brookies, and I think probably the most beautiful fish out there has to be the native brookie. They are the drake wood ducks of the fish world, if that makes any sense. Those spring fed streams of my youth don't hold much in the way of brook trout these days. Brown trout, yep stocked rainbows, sure, but brookies not so much. Things change, change is inevitable. You're probably like, Okay,
are you depressed or what? Well, let me tell you all through March I listened to a stupid amount of radiohead, So what do you think? But I'm not listing this stuff to just be doom and gloom. I'm setting up a larger point, which is this, we are going to lose hunting opportunities. As it is, land use practices change, urban swell isn't slowing down. We aren't beating the more public land drum enough because it's not an easy path and it's not a quick solution for most of us.
It's not like signing a new lease. It takes time. Things are not really changing for the better out there, in my opinion, And you know, it is an unforgivable sin to me, at least an unforgivable deer hunting sin that we so quickly advocate to take away our opportunities from fellow hunters. When Steve and I were going back and forth on the Kansas ban, I mentioned that I would stand up for the opportunities to trap, because I would even though I don't trap, and I have zero
interest in trapping any kind of fur bear. It doesn't appeal to me at all. And I don't even really like trapping the four mice a year that come into my house. I mean, if it wasn't for my wife's constant complaining about it, i'd probably just live with them. But I don't anyway. Even though I don't want to trap, I don't want it to go away. I know it's a good thing for nest predators. I know it's more
effective at controlling predators than any other method. And more importantly, I know there are a lot of people out there who love doing it. They're passionate about it, and this shows because they do it even when the fur prices are in the crapper. And if those trappers feel even remotely connected to their pursuits, as you and I do to our pursuit of white tails, why would we not fight for that? Who better to understand why we do this stuff than ourselves. But the thing is, it's so
easy to be selfish when it comes to hunting. If you're a private land hunter in Kansas, why should you care what they do with public You have your lease or your grandpa's land, and probably a couple of feeders, complete with trail cameras monitoring every deer that happens to come in for a little breakfast or dinner. Does it sound like I'm being condescending here because I'm trying not
to be, I really am. But if you think that those public land hunters will be on your side, if at some point the powers that be deemed baiting or the use of sell cameras or live feed cans on private land just a little too unethical, and they come after it. I don't know if they're going to stick up for you, after all, what's good for the goose? So on. I look at this like cancel culture. It's intoxicating for some people until the mob comes after them.
The appetite in that beast is never satisfied, never satiated, and it's always going to look for more people to chew up and spit out. There's always going to be a type of hunter who you think doesn't deserve the same opportunities as you. And let me tell you that's dangerous, dangerous ground, because when those opportunities go away, they don't come back. Now, I'm going to take this a step further because I'm on a roll. The tightening of tags for non residents in any given state is a precedent
set in stone. It's going to keep happening, and game and fish agencies are addicted to those non resident dollars. They aren't going to take a budget cut without a fight, and right now they don't have to fight because the demand is super high. So even if they change the rules of the game, when you've bought points for years and have been promised an opportunity people keep buying in. I do think that tie it's going to turn a little bit, largely thanks to some spotlight shining on you know,
tag systems and places like Wyoming and Iowa. But so far that demand is plenty high, and it doesn't appear to slow down at all right now, like the cash cow will just keep giving up the good stuff. But what if it eventually doesn't. What if people realize that this whole thing is set up in such a way that it's inevitable it becomes a rich man's game. That's where we are headed, my friends. And the problem with it is, so many of us haven't been forced to
pay a high price to hunt. Yet what are we going to do when that happens to more and more folks. What if the residents of I don't know, South Dakota eventually have to pay double or triple their price for their resident tags because some of the non resident demand dies down those people, I think, oh, good, right, I'm happy I'll pay that. I mean, it's honestly a small price to pay. I mean, sure, it'll kick some weakended warriors out of the game, but who cares they're not
serious hunters like you. It also might increase the likelihood that some people find a lease. Maybe they lease up a farm that I don't know. Grandma used to let you hunt on, but now she needs the money. At some point, this thing will go from an US versus them thing, meaning resident versus non resident, to an US versus us thing. And if you don't have the money, you're gonna lose to somebody who does. And if you don't your kids will you know where else we're gonna lose.
When the funding starts to dry up, the non hunting public might be asked to pony up for wildlife management. Imagine this scenario in Colorado, which is the best and kind of the last holdout for getting an over the counter ELK tag. I'm not going to get into the weeds too much here. Colorado is a referendum state meeting. Citizens have a route to get initiatives placed on a
ballot in any given year. Back in nineteen ninety two, Colorado Amendment ten was placed on the ballot which allowed the voters, and by voters, I mean hunters and non hunters to decide whether they should allow baiting and hound hunting for black bears and whether there should even be a spring season for black bears, and those citizens said nope, to the tune of over half a million votes, more
knows than yeses. And guess what but bye. I've had a few bear tags in Colorado over the years while ol hunting, and you know what I couldn't do to fill my tag some thirty years after that referendum, bait or hire an outfitter to run them with hounds. Now I don't really care about that, because bears are not my priority when I head to Colorado. But the lesson stands, when something goes, it's gonzo and we have enough problems
without so quickly advocating away our fellow hunter opportunities. Now, maybe it's because I'm getting old. My little girls are eleven now, but I find myself thinking more about phishing for my future because I know the hunting opportunities are going to get harder to come by, but phishing seems pretty safe and that comforts me. I like that. I don't like thinking about the world that the next generation
of hunters is going to inherit from us. I know they're going to end up with fewer chances to hunt, but I don't think we should be so quick to increase the volume of those disappearing opportunities simply because it'll either make our hunting easier or it really doesn't affect our personal situations, so we don't care if it goes. I think we have an obligation to at the very least consider what we are leaving in our wake. I
think we need to consider that right now. A hunter's fund wildlife mostly, and that has allowed us to do what we do and has created this weird, NonStop in fight we have going on. If someone else starts paying the bills even a little bit, or hell, if you live in a state like Colorado, you could potentially look at a ban on bow hunting, or hunting out during the run, or some other seemingly insane proposition, because it
might not be hunters deciding the whole thing. If you live in a state where you think that will never happen, ask some of the folks who live in states that they thought that would never happen. It can happen, and it will. But we as hunters don't need to dump a bunch of gasoline on that fire just because it might not directly affect us. Right now. Now, I know there are a lot of valid arguments against just about
everything I've ranted about on this podcast. I understand that I understand why you disagree with me, But I think at the very least, we should ask ourselves why we love hunting, and yet why we might be quick to take away opportunities from our fellow hunters. Maybe it's a resource concern, then great. If the folks who know, say the herd numbers are diving through the effectiveness of a certain weapon or technology or season structure or whatever, then
it's time to listen up and accept those changes. But even then, I think we have to take small steps. Take the ban on trail cameras on public land in Kansas as an example. Again, why start with a wholesale year round ban is the first choice. Why not a ban on in season use only at first, or why not a three year band to see if hunter conflicts actually decrease as a result. How did they even measure that in the first place. Maybe you agree with me,
maybe you disagree. Maybe we are on an inevitable path to the end of hunting and it doesn't matter, or maybe I have this whole thing wrong and people will be bow hunting white tails for a few more centuries. Who knows, I don't. I do know that right now we are in a place where we could think beyond ourselves a little to decide on our own individual effects
of the future. I think about this during this one hundredth episode because most of these and honestly most of the hunting content out there, is built to sell one of two things, education or entertainment, although nearly all of it falls into some hybrid category of both. We want to know how to scout. We want to know how to kill big bucks. We want to know when to call, when to sit on the ground versus climbing up into a tree. We want to know what moon phase is best,
and on down the line. And I love that shit, I really do. I think the most beautiful thing about white tail hunting is not only that it's still available to so many people, but it's still so mysterious. Sure we talk a big game about this betting area and that travel route in certain food sources, but for the most part, most of us, on any given year don't kill a big buck. Most of us don't kill a big one on any given five or ten year period.
That's testament to how hard this is, but also that it must speak to us on a level that is worth fighting for. It must at least shine a bit of spotlight on the reality that these opportunities to hunt are pretty damn special, and we shouldn't want them just for ourselves. We should want others to be able to partake.
I mean, can you think of another thing in your life that you'd willingly pay a lot of money to do and where you put in a ton of time into it, and where you identify at least partially with the pursuit itself the way we do with deer hunting. That speaks to something powerful, especially when you consider all of that and the fact that you're destined to lose almost every single time you hunt, at least if the score is kill or no kill. But that's not why
we hunt, and we all know it. We don't act like it very often, but we hunt to hunt, and killing deers a real sweet bonus to the whole thing when it does happen. So all I'm saying is, let's be careful with this stuff. Let's think about the direction we are heading and take a long look at lost opportunities in the hunting space because they mostly pour tend law opportunities somewhere down the road, some of which might
affect you personally, and probably not in a positive way. Lastly, now that I've gotten that out of my system, I just want to say things. I know you have so many hunting podcasts to listen to. You have a lot going on in life, you know, stuff that's begging for your attention and your support. So it means a lot to me and the Mark and the rest of the crew here at meat Eater that you stick with us even when we and by we I mean me say
offensive stuff or stuff you disagree with or whatever. I can't tell you how much it means to me that you guys and gals keep coming back and you keep listening. I honestly truly appreciate it. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast. As I always, thank you so much for listening.
If you want some more whitetail advice, you can head on over to the meat eater dot com slash wired and see articles by myself, Mark fellas like Alex Gilstrom and Beau Martonic and Antie May and whoever white Tail Killers go check him out.
M HM.