Ep. 694: Foundations - How To Make Better Shots On Deer

many of our common problems. Addressing shooting form, using the right accessories, tuning your bow, you know, on and on. It's good stuff, not knocking it. After all, if you can't shoot well on the range, you sure as hell won't be able to consistently shoot well on deer. This, as you probably know, is pretty important and it just so happens to be the topic of this episode. If you train retrievers or really any kind of dog, you

start to understand false positives. Some people think a false positive is a dog that looks real birdie only to flush I don't know, a rabbit or a skunk or something. Pointing dogs are prone to false positives too. Inexperienced pointers will lock up in a beautiful tripod point where a rooster was I don't know, ten minutes ago, or with some other critter in the grass that's definitely not a pheasant,

a grouse, or whatever you're after. False positives in the dog world they come in many forms, and they are the enemy of the amateur trainer. They convince us that we have gotten our dogs to a point where they are real good and well. Most of the work's done. You can pat yourself on the back, break up your hound at the local touny bar, and get ready to kill a limit of ring necks or green heads or whatever.

Putting the cart before the old horse is a no bueno situation, though, and it often happens with people who train in the same environment over and over. The dog that will heal perfectly and sit perfectly still until he send him while you're working in the neighborhood soccer field. That's great, but will you get that same behavior while

you're hunting. It's kind of like, I don't know, working out or walking with a pack on your back when you live at eight hundred feet above sea level and assuming that's going to be good enough to get you into the mountains and hunt an elk like a rock star doesn't work very well. Sometimes it's better than nothing. Anyway, back to dogs, how about if you're working on a hunt dead scenario or a fine the bone antler scenario

in the knee high grass. If you've been there and you've trained dozens of times, it's probably pretty consistent that if you point one way or the other, your dog will read your hand signals and switch directions till he finds the price. Now, take these same dogs in an actual hunt, and the wheels will fall off pretty quickly,

at least a lot of times they do. This is why so many folks, mostly men, lose their ever loving minds on the first couple of hunts of the season, especially if you have a few smirking buddies hunting with them. It's embarrassing to break up a dog only to watch

them totally delaminate in the field. It's also extremely common I honestly don't know if there has ever been a single bird dog that advanced to a high level of training in low key environments that also brought that same level of excellence right to the field during a hunt. I think it's possible, honestly, at least not right away. You know, older seasoned dogs can you know, they can get pretty damn close. But the seasoned part is the

one that's important there. And while plenty of retrievers and pointers are likely to get older, not all of them get seasoned real well. Takes time in the field hunting for a dog to learn what you want out of him. While you're out in the field hunting. There's no shortcuts there, and you can train and train and even overtrain, but there's on the job experience, and that's just that. You know what else is like this pickleball? Just kidding, it's golf,

just kidding, it's bow hunting white tails. You can shoot foam until you're an Olympic level shooter, but that's only going to take you so far in the field. You know a lot of the conventional advice here and have probably heard me go on and on about some of it. I think you should practice in some ways that will help you be a better shot, like using three D targets, you know, shooting from your deck or a tree stand

set up just for that purpose. I think you should practice in low light, and that you should shoot at odd yardages with limited arrows. You should make every shot count and treat every shot like you don't get a mulligan, because in the wild you probably won't. And that's a good start, But there's more to be done now. I've told you guys a few stories about some of my most embarrassing misses and the years I struggled with real buck fever, But I don't think you can quite understand

how bad I used to fall apart. It was like having a disease that caused me to black out, lose my mind, and always or nearly always shoot over the back of the deer that I so desperately wanted. It got so bad I felt like quitting many many times. I didn't know a way out, and I didn't really understand the process of getting over my buck fever and learning to be a good shot on animals. In fact, I still don't know for sure how to do it completely.

I kind of think you can't, but you can be better than a quivering mass of total dipshit who couldn't hit a buck in the lungs with twelve quivers full of arrows and unlimited time. Now, I think this is going to sound kind of dumb, but I want you to hear me out. The first step is visualization. I know, I know it sounds like some you know, Kenyon's hippie dippy mustache laiden bs, but the truth is it works, or it can work, and for me it works this way.

I think about shooting deer a lot. And if you don't believe that, talk to my wife when I'm driving and she's telling me something that I absolutely am not really taking in and definitely won't retain, or you know, when strangers talk to me. A lot of times I get to daydreaming. You know, maybe it's a touch of ADHD or whatever, but I start thinking about shooting deer, and I start thinking about shooting them out of very

specific setups, like when I get into my stand. I also always, always always draw my bow a few times and aim at stuff. Now, not deer. You know this is going to be leaves or whatever, But it's the process of thinking through and visualizing your shot. You don't have to do this just when your wife's talking to you. You should do it in your stands as well. I do it when I'm in a groundb line or a

tree stand or hanging in a saddle. I draw an aim at random, I am at whatever, and I think about how easy it would be to make a shot on a deer if a deer was standing there. If you don't do this, start, I'm totally serious. If you get into a ground blind and you don't draw your bow and aim out the window a few times, you're far more likely to screw up a shot. If you get saddled up and you don't practice drawing and aiming around both sides of the tree or behind you, you're

setting yourself up to make a mistake. You do not want the first time you draw at a weird angle to be the time there's one hundred and thirty five inch ten pointers standing there. Imagine the buck on that trail and watch how your pin floats across that yellow leaf you're aiming at, or that bare patch dirt or whatever. Do this. If you're hunting an evening, do this as soon as you settle in and then maybe once or

twice more before primetime. If you're hunting mornings, wait until first light, do a good perimeter check to make sure you don't have any deer closing in. Then do this. Do it later in the morning too, when you start to get sleepy and you start to think about packing the whole thing up. Do this in hot weather and cold weather, and even if you've made seventeen perfect double lung shots in a row, it's just a good exercise,

but it serves another purpose. It tells you how shooting out of your specific setup is kind of gonna go. This is something a lot of us don't appreciate until it's too late and we're smack dab in the middle of an encounter. Take a groundb line, for example. You set up a pop up on the edge of an alfalfa field. You arrange the far woodline, and it's forty yards. You know there are several trails that lead into the field, and you could draw your bow, aim a little and

you're just gonna be good to go. You start to daydream about a big one coming in and you think he's going to walk right into the middle of the field and pose up at twenty yards, but he doesn't. He stays on the far wood edge, at the boundary between where you can shoot where you can't because of how your chair is positioned and how the shooting port is situated. This is the kind of thing that causes real panic, and real panic is the kind of thing

that causes us to make bad shots. Knowing how far you can swing your bow one way or the other to really shoot and what you'll do if he doesn't follow the script is important. It's something you should think about when you have the luxury of thinking about it on your own time, and not when it's suddenly very important because he's walking through the same goes for tree

stands and saddles. Do you know where you can draw and aim and take a shot from the ladder stand your dad's set up for you seven years ago, when you're hanging and hunting out of a saddle and thinking about where you can shoot and what trail he's likely to come down? Do you know where your real shooting windows are and how easy it'll be for you to aim through them. The more you think about this stuff without a deer there, the easier it is to make a shot work. When a deer is there. I know

this sounds like overkill, but it's not. You want to know how things are going to go before they get going. A little dress rehearsal if you will. The same goes for shot distance. When you get on stand. Do you range several markers so you know how many yards he will be if he stops at the yellow patch of beans in the field. What if he takes the farther

trail around your pinch point? Stan? Are you going to wait until he's there to range him and then suffer the possibility that the extra movement and that extra time will cause you to miss out on a shot opportunity. If you can do something beneficial before he gets there, you should do it. I'd also recommend drawing metaphorical lines in the sand when you get into your setup. As far as shot distances go. If I'm on a bean field, for example, I'll range the rose until I know what's

forty yards out. That for me is the farthest I'm going to shoot at a white tail in perfect conditions. And if it's not perfect conditions because the light is fading or it's raining or whatever, that range is going to get reduced. I figure this out as soon as I can, so I don't have to hamm an awe during the moment of truth. This stuff helps you make

better shots on deer, but so will something else. Watching deer, and I don't mean just seeing deer and taking a video of them walking by so you can post it on Instagram. I mean watching them and paying attention to what they do and when and how you'd shoot them at various times during your encounter. I do this on pretty much every deer that gets into range. I don't

drawn aim at deer. I don't want to shoot, and I don't recommend that because if you have a big old brain fart trip that trigger, which is a possibility, you could have one hell of a oopsie on your hands. But watching deer and how they browse and how their body positioning can change, just from how they look back down the trail, or when they scratch their nose with a back hoof, or when they stretch their necks out

to sniff a certain leaf. That's the stuff that will give you more confidence in choosing the right aiming point. You can damn near predict the future when you want enough. So even when we use three D targets to practice. We often think of real white tails kind of as a two D thing. We think of them from the broadside, and we know where the guts are, and we know where the liver is and the heart and the lungs, but we almost never shoot it here that's perfectly broadside

while we were on the ground with them. We almost always have to deal with a couple of different angles, whether they are quartered to us or a little bit away from us, whether we are ten feet above them or thirty feet above them. A deer walking down a hill by your stand is probably not a shot that you ever ever practice at the range. A deer that's really close, say four yards in the base of your tree, is another shot you probably never practice, maybe shouldn't take.

But it all depends on so many things. Can you get your arrow into both lungs? How likely is it? How likely is it that you'll get into both lungs on a giant buck like that? If you've never once thought about taking that shot, or visualized it, or watched a four key do this same thing and actually studied his movements and picked out the best aiming points every seconds he made his way through, I really think Watching deer and learning about their movements is an education that

is worth so much to all of us hunters. This allows us to take better shots, partially because it allows us, you know, like I said, to predict the future. Just like in dog training, where there are certain behaviors that are just going to show at certain times, deer are very very likely to do certain things at certain times. I'll give you an easy example. If a buck walks in and he's totally relaxed, but then he stops to focus on something and he stares for like thirty seconds,

you might think you're in trouble. Would you feel relief if you watched him shake his tail a couple times real fast? You should, because that means he's probably gonna drop his head and start walking, just like every other deer who has done the same thing. If you watch deer enough, you start to learn those types of behaviors and understand when your best shot opportunity is about to happen. That's so important to making good shots in the field

when it counts the most. Think about it this way too. Most of the time, when deer come in and they're relaxed, they're moving pretty slow. They sniff here they step there, They almost forecast their movements, and that gives you a really good chance to draw when you need to and

anticipate right where you should be aiming. All this stuff requires patients, and it actually helps you to become more patient, which is the antidote to rushing shots, which is the one thing that causes us to make bad shots more than anything else. Let me give you another example. You guys know I like to hunt rivers, I like to hunt water. Well. One river I like to hunt is in North Dakota and has steep banks. The deer almost always approach it at a walk and then they descend

right down to the water and drink. This usually happens without a whole lot of stopping. Then they cross the river and they have to ascend the other bank. When they do, they almost always always stop to survey their surroundings. They've probably dealt with enough coyotes and lions there to know that the safe side of the river they just left is a memory, and it's time to figure out if there is danger waiting for them on the new side. It's pretty simple prey behavior. But if you're up in

a tree there and they pop up, that bank. It often seems like they are onto something because they seem just a little bit edgy, like maybe they caught just a slight whiff of you and they're considering leaving. But

they mostly didn't and they mostly aren't. But if you believe that you know that they might be on their way out, you're gonna rush a shot when you could have just waited a little bit until they convinced themselves that the new bank, the new side, is all good, and then they walk right by totally unaware that you're about to skewer them. Pay attention to all of the deer, study them. It's important. And lastly, I have one more

thing for you. If you want to be a stone cold killer who consistently makes the kind of shots where you get to witness the light, it's going out, take shots that you know you can make. I know that seems dumb, because of course that's what should do, but a lot of people don't. Just think about it this way. If you put a deer out in front of you at fifteen yards a broadside and it's relaxed, how often are you going to tank that shot? Not very often,

I hope. But now put that same deer quartering away in a little bit tense at let's say thirty three yards. Sure, you can make thirty three yard shots all day, but it's not nearly as much of a foregone conclusion as that first fifteen yard broadside shot. Knowing your limitations and being patient enough to wait for a no brainer shot or good things. It's also really tough to learn either of those things and implement them in the field. But we should all be working to be better at shooting deer.

I deal with this every year, and it gives me so much pride to string together several good shots. You know, it doesn't always happen, and I doubt it ever will for me or you or you know someone like John Dudley, who could probably outshoot most of us if we were in broad daylight and he had to shoot in a pitch black cave. He probably still screws up some shots, you know. So the goal isn't to just become a badass paper puncher here. It's to become a reliable, consistently

good shot on actual animals. That takes a few things that you can't just accomplish on the range. Think about this as your season opens up here. Think about coming back next week, because I'm going to talk about how to navigate the quote unquote October lull in real time, and I'm going to give you an example for that when I open that show that you're probably not going to expect. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which

is brought to you by First Light. As I always, thank you so much for listening and for all your support. Truly appreciate it means the world to me and the rest of us here at meat Eater. If you want some more white tail content, or you want to see some videos with Steve or Clay or whoever, listen to some podcasts, go to the meaedeater dot com and you will find so much content that you will probably get fired from work because you'll spend too much time looking at it. But that's okay.