Ep. 774: Foundations - How to Live a Hunting Life with No Regrets

anyone who's been paying attention. There's a lot of reasons for this that I don't really need to get into, but what I do want to talk about is how this is affecting my decision making process around hunting opportunities

and how regret in general containt our experiences. I know that's pretty vague, so you just have to bear with me and hear the rest of this talk just to kind of get it, you know, and hopefully I can put it in a way that will help you make some better decisions that will leave a positive mark on your psyche instead of a bunch of remoor, set of missed opportunity, the quality of the entire human experience for us as individuals hinges on so many things beyond our control,

and so many things that are totally in our control. And of course the decisions we make that we think are in our best interest, and the decisions we make that we know aren't in our best interest, but we want to do them anyway, knowing full well we'll probably regret them later. Life is muddy and it's hard. I don't know if it's harder today generally than it was ten years ago, or it'll be ten years from now.

My suspicion is that it's going to keep getting worse until we all collectively toss our smartphones into a bonfire and to touch a little grass, which I'm going to talk about in a few episodes. But since that's not likely to happen, our course almost feels set. Now, maybe that's a bad way to look at it, but reality rarely jives with our most positive hopes and dreams. That's just how it goes. And if there's one component of that which can really kind of haunt you, it's having

some serious regrets. Now, regret is a negative emotional state that basically involves us blaming ourselves for bad decisions. If it's not handled correctly, and it's often not, regret can turn into rumination and cause chronic stress, the kind of stress that o't you know, not only messes with your mind but has physical implications for your body. You know, this is a no bueno. It's also a consequence of life that you'll make decisions that you regret, maybe for

the rest of your life. That's a heavy toll to pay just because you want, you know, with heads instead of tails. But it doesn't matter. As my old podcast editor like to say, it do be like that sometimes, and he was right. Now, you can't go back in time and ask your crush out or talk to a struggling buddy who is thinking about hitting the eject button on life, or not drink the drinks or say the nasty things or whatever. No one makes it through life

unscathed in this department, my friends. It's also true that some regrets are a little lighter mental lift than others. In the hunting realm. Regrets come in many forms. I want to start with one of the big ones to highlight this whole concept. The I didn't go when I should have. Regret. I'm dealing with this heavy right now, and I haven't even made a decision yet. You see, I want to go to Caller Rotto to elk hunt in September. You probably do too, if you're listening to this.

I know that getting elk tags when you live nowhere near the Rockies is only going to get way more difficult. I also know that I'm not going to get any younger. I know that all it takes is one simple thing to ruin your health or at least keep you from the gym and working on elk hunting shape. I know that the amount of elk hunts I have in front of me isn't very many and might only be a couple at this point. Now that's a first world problem, I know, but it's also something I'm just kind of

mine grinding over. If I go el hunting, I know what it'll take more months of workouts, which doesn't really bother me. But elk hunting is also expensive, even for an over the counter DIY hunt. There's that consideration in this world that seems to be getting more expensive by the hour, even though we're told everything's peachy. Then there is the time to give yourself a fighting chance, and elk hunt needs time. I found that if I don't have between at least ten to twelve days for travel

and hunting, I feel like I don't have enough time. Now, that's a lot of days away from the family right at the onset of hunting season, which is not ideal to confound my personal situation. Further, one of my daughters has a bear tag this year. The opener is in early September, when I would be off in the mountains. Now, what will I regret more missing one of the few elk hunts I'll probably ever do, or missing the opportunity to hunt bears with my daughter, which is another opportunity

that just might not come around too often. Again, first world problems, but they're my problems, so I'm going to talk about them. I know that if I do go el hunting, I'm not going to regret it. History has proven that for me every time I've gone, and I've been on some absolute clunkers of hunts, but I've never regretted a single one where it was me and a buddy or two doing our thing in the wild somewhere,

especially in the mountains. It's always been worth it. Now you should pay attention to that last sentence, because I'll bet you probably feel the same way, knowing that I'm wondering if I'm being stupid for even considering not going. But it's just not so simple. The fear of regret is real, but the reality of life is too. I probably won't make a decision for months yet, but I probably will think about it ten thousand times a day between here and there. This is a weird example of

how much we can fear regretting our decisions. When I think back on the four elkunts I've done, they were all incredible in their own way, the successful ones, of course, but even the unsuccessful ones too. So I just don't know what to do. And you might find yourself in a similar situation this year. Now, maybe instead of elk it involves buying your first preference point in Iowa to give yourself a chance at a once in a lifetime

hunt and the promised land. I can almost guarantee that you won't regret drawing a tag down there, but most folks they're not even gonna try. The price for a non resident tag is high, and the juice just doesn't seem to be worse to squeeze for a lot of people, and that's okay, But also think about your best days on stand or your most enjoyable hunting seasons. I'll bet they involved a lot of action, probably with some good

bucks mixed in there. Now, if there is a better place to go for that than Iowa, I'm all ears. The thing is, we think we'll regret spending the money on the tag, and we're scared we won't fill that tag. That would be a regretful situation in our eyes, so it's easier to not even try. But there might come a point when you can't get a tag there at all if you don't live there, or something might happen in life. We're getting away for an over the road

hunt just won't or can't happen. When opportunity goes away, regret comes calling. We've seen this time and time again in the outdoor space. Will you regret the trips you take more than the trips you don't take? Probably not, but it's easy to believe that might be the case. And regret comes in other forms too. I just had a conversation with a buddy of mine who wants to buy a hunting ground in the worst way. He loves to deer hunt, and he has a daughter who is

likely to love deer hunting too. He knows that owning land is his ticket to a sure thing lifetime of both and you know, a lifetime of just not living under the threat of having no place to hunt. This is probably pretty relatable to most of you, fine listeners. The problem with him, and honestly a lot of us, is that he's waiting for land to get more affordable.

We all know how that's going to go. He's also like a lot of us in that he wants a certain type of land, you know, a certain type of woods, which is great, but it's also the kind of woods that everyone wants, because no one wants shitty land, no one except me anyway. I don't care what the land looks like now, because I know what you can do with it, you know, with some elbow grease in some time at least most land. I also know that deer don't care that you own only a beautiful deciduous forest

is a straight out of a Disney movie. Hell, they like the shitty land quite a bit in my experience. But here's the thing. If that's a goal of yours. It's generally not an easy one to achieve, but it is doable for some folks, even if that feels like a stretch. If you do your homework and you figure out how to make some level of that dream happen, usually a level that is far below but you know kind of what you really want, you're not going to regret it. In fact, you'll probably be real happy you

ignored that internal warning and stuck to the plan. And even if you know, settled for something that you could just barely afford, that has some potential. Another way to look at this is that buddy of mine. Do you think he'll regret it more if ten years go by and he doesn't buy any land, or if he buys something small and in his price range that he can

work on and take his daughter to. Sure it could break either way due to unforeseen circumstances, but if we're playing the odds game, I know where I'm placing my bet. So far, I've just talked about big regrets take the trip, or don't buy the land, or wait. But hunting is full of situations we can regret on so many levels. I'll give you a couple of examples from my life which highlight the dynamic nature of regret. Sometimes you feel dumb for what you do, but sometimes you feel dumb

for what you don't do. For me, some of my most shameful moments in the woods are from things that I did but shouldn't have, Like the time in high school when my buddies and I got hammered, which wasn't unusual, so it wasn't unusual when I woke up to go hunting and felt super hungover and like a total turred sandwich of a human. I went out to still hunt around in the early season with that hangover, which is

something I just kind of did then. It's also one of the many, many reasons why I rarely killed a

deer back then. Well, anyway, as I was sneaking around with a throbbing headache and the vague threat that I might ruin my underwear if I try to suppress a sneeze because that pressure is going to go somewhere, I ended up at a small pond, tucked into a standing cornfield, the spot you know, it's always a good place to run into a deer, So I tucked into the first row of corn to try to catch a deer coming back to bed. After a while, I laid right down

in the dirt of that cornfield and fell asleep. And when I woke up, two does were standing at the far side of that little pond, probably wondering what kind of animal makes the kind of noise a hungover idiot with a crooked nose does when he's snoring away. I clearly wasn't dealing with the deer's top brass then, because they both watched me pick up my bow, take poor aim at that lead dough, and then shoot. And when that arrow hit I knew immediately that I'd never see

her again because I had backstrapped her. The number of regrets in that sixteen seventeen hour period of my life were many, and I regret it to this day, even though it's been like thirty years since then. Another time I climbed into a tree stand in December to try to fill an antler list tag when I was in my early twenties, you know, hunting after the gun season

then on the farm I was on. You know, it was almost always a lost cause, but I went anyway, and as the sun started to set, I heard deer walking in the leaves and saw some does headed in my direction. I stood up, picked up my bow and got ready. When one of the doughs offered me a shot, I took it and I hit her way too low. It was entirely my fault, and I just screwed up the shot. Now that happens. But what happened next is

what I really regret. I knew I probably wasn't going to find that dough, but I also knew that I had hit her, so I was going to have to try real hard, and since I had multiple tags, I knocked another arrow and shot at one of the other doughs that stuck around. It was a shot I didn't need to take, but I was frustrated after totally botching the first shot. Well, when you get greedy and the outdoors, it rarely works out well, and this time was no exception.

I made almost the exact shot on that second dough, and I can tell you that I felt pretty small when the sun fully set and I climbed down. The regret of taking that shot stuck with me bad, and I felt it the whole next day when I followed one blood trail and then another to absolutely zero dead deer grid searching put up a big old goose egg too.

I honestly don't know if I've ever regretted not taking a shot, but I sure regret taking quite a few of them in my career, especially when I was starting out. There's a good lesson in there. In fact, I think it's why I try to only shoot now where I feel like I have one hundred percent confidence that it's going to be all over. I don't like the feeling of crossing my fingers when I draw my bow because I know where that goes and it almost always sucks.

Now there are other regrets too. I think cell cameras contribute to a fair amount of them. I mean, how often have you decided you'd stay home and clean the garage, or maybe just watch TV because you don't want to sit in a stand during a rainstorm, when suddenly a notification pops up on your phone and mister big and antleery decided he was going to walk by your stand with two hours of daylight left. It happens when you pick one stand and have a camera by a different

one too. Those don't really bother me much, because you know, what are you going to do? You know, the deer out there and they're going to walk somewhere. You also know that they might not have showed up had you been there, So the regret on that situation can be pretty minimal. I guess the one thing that would change it is if it was a real giant, But then again, who cares. You weren't there and he was. So how do you live a regret free hunting life? Well you can't.

You're gonna make bad decisions for a variety of reasons and you're gonna have to live with them. But you can also take a deep dive into the not so great decisions you've made around hunting and ask yourself which once do you regret the most. This is a not so fun exercise that can put you in a spot where you're going to make better decisions. Like I mentioned, I try to be super picky now in my shot selection at this point in my life, because I always

regret taking a shot that I'm not super confident. That's way worse than letting one walk and then not filling a tag or killing something smaller later. Maybe you need to think about what you want out of hunting. What's something you wish you could do just once, instead of living with that dark cloud hanging over your head. Can you do something to change your future and make it happen, then,

I'd suggest that. Or do you find yourself with low grade regret for not hunting in September or October when you could, just so you can battle it out during the rut with every other hunter. There's a pretty simple lesson in that one, my friends, and you know how I feel about that. Even when I blank, Hell, even when I blank for a week or two or three in a row, I never regret just going hunting, But

I often regret not going. Sometimes I regret not churming a branch, or not getting a good range reading on a deer, or not looking up for my stupid phone in time to see something walking in, or not doing the extra work to set up where the wind is damn good instead of you damn questionable. The way to do this is to think about the things that bother you about yourself as a hunter and work on them.

I know. The way we often look at this stuff is to find someone else to blame for our failures, and if we can't find them, we sometimes even make them up. But the truth is we are responsible for a hell of a lot of what happens to us in the white Tail. Would are responsible for making the decisions that can make us heroes or zeros. Think about

this in the off season. It might change how you approach your shooting sessions, or your scouting missions, or the times you head to the woods to hang a camera, set a stand. The more you get ahead of this stuff, the less likely you are to call an audible during the hunt and find out you're about to get your

head torn off by a blitzing linebacker. Do this come back next week because I'm going to talk about how thinking like a deer can help you sort of kind of become like a deer, or at least maybe you'll become a better deer hunter for it. Anyway, that's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. It's been the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which has brought to you by First Light. As always, thank you so much for your support.

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