Ep. 825: Foundations - The Hard Truth About Why Most Hunters Never Kill Big Bucks

to kill Big Bucks. That's probably not a huge surprise to a lot of listeners, because if he didn't struggle with that, you sure wouldn't waste your time listening to yours truly drone on and on on the topic of deer. So I'm gonna lay down some truth here on that topic, you know, in a second. But first I have to do the part of my job I don't really like very much. Meat eater has a monster huge, pretty big white Tail Week sale going on right now. You've heard

about it, you've seen it on social. But here's the thing. Normally, our sales only get you some level of discount on certain new products. But this one's different. It comes with a tiered structure where if you spend a certain amount of dough on anything, you get a kickback on that money spent. So, for example, you go spend two hundred bucks, you're gonna get twenty five percent right off the top.

So you've got to save fifty bucks, spend four hundred bucks, maybe get yourself a new white Tail kid or something you're gonna save a cool one hundred dollars on that. You can go all the way up to the eight hundred dollars mark where you're gonna get two hundred dollars off of your bill if you spend eight hundred bucks, it's pretty good deal. It's twenty five percent off pretty much anything you want to go buy. You got to go to first light dot com and you got to

check out there. If you want to feel like a weak, total loser, don't lift a single weight in your life and then go to the gym and try to start lifting This is when the idea of who you are will meet the reality of who you actually are. It's not really fun, trust me, but it's also an amazing feeling to just ignore the noise and start building muscle.

This is a slow process, but it's worth it. It also teaches you a few things about how full of shit, or at least totally disconnected from reality a lot of people are. And by people here, I mean well men. When I was growing up, I heard a lot of people talk about benching three hundred pounds. I don't know. That just seems to be the magic number for being strong. I guess maybe it's like the six pound mark for bass or the one hundred and fifty inch mark on deer.

Either way, benching three hundred pounds is no joke. In fact, benching two hundred and twenty five pounds, which is the bar in two forty five's on each side, is no joke. That's a lot of weight, and only about one point three million Americans can do it. That's point zero zero four percent of the population, and most of those folks that fit into that category are men with a body

weight of two hundred and twenty pounds plus. Now, the path is different for everyone to build muscle, but it took me about eight years of lifting to get there. And if you watched me try to bench two twenty five right now, you'd say that is a guy who doesn't look like he's going to get a whole lot of reps out of this deal. And trust me, you'd be very right. Putting on muscle is a long, long process, and it only gets longer as we age and our

testosterone production starts to take a nose dive. Now, there's some ways to get around this, like the obvious one, which is TRT, but you could also just get your hands on some anabolic steroids and just jump the line so speak. Anabolic steroids contain a base ingredient that is a type of testosterone referred to as test e, which is funny as hell given what it can do to

your clackers if you take too much of it. Injecting anabolic steroids allows those testosterone molecules the chance to weasel their way through your bloodstream until they reach your muscle cells, where they kickstart hypertrophy, which is what you need to build muscle. There are some downsides to this path, though, you know, liver damage depression, hypertension, thrombosis, and a bunch more bad things can happen with steroid abuse, such as life. Every path you choose has its ups and downs as

positives and negatives. Now, when it comes to being a stone cold big buck killer who should just pre notch his tags before heading out because the deer don't stand a chance, there are many paths to take as well. If you want to flex a lot for your wife and show that you are in the elite percentage of people who can bench press two hundred and twenty five pounds. If you have money or just an unbelievable spot, the path to mature box is much shorter and easier to walk.

If you don't have either, well, it might take you a long time to get there if you ever do, and most folks don't. Just like most folks who walk into the gym on New Year's Day with some fresh resolutions in their heart and some even fresher workout clothes on their body, will never put up the bar with two plates on each side. Why is it this way? Well, on the surface, and I guess as far underneath as you're willing to dive. Killing a big buck isn't easy.

It's much much harder than it appears. So let's start with an easy one here, the population of big bucks in your area. Now, I don't say mature bucks here because I don't know what that means where you live and hunt. I'll frame it up with one of the places I hunt over there in Packerland, in the county I primarily hunt. In northern Wisconsin. They did a comprehensive

study on FONND predation several years back. The cliff notes of the study were that ninety percent of the fawns that they tracked were dead within the first eleven months of their lives. Predator prevalence, hunting pressure, a couple of real nasty deer killing winters every decade. All that stuff

conspires to keep the deer numbers low. Now, while the bucks over there have all the makings of giants if they can get the age on them, most just never do a two year old over there really gets your attention, trust me. So in that case, targeting a big buck, let's say, even just your typical three year old plus type of deer, means you just don't have very many options. But that's the nature of hunting. Big woods deer or deer in places with a ton of pressure, it's hard

to kill what mostly isn't there. Now. Contrast that to some of the hunts I've had in Iowa. The last time I hunted there on public land, I saw about the same amount of one hundred and twenty five inch plus deer in four days of hunting in October. By the way that I've seen in all of my Northern Wisconsin hunts on private and public land combined, of which I have about fourteen years of hunting with at least a couple of weeks during each season, that's quite the difference.

So at a very simple level, you might not kill too many big bucks because there just aren't too many big bucks there to kill. Now, I will say this, though, I've never hunted anywhere that didn't have some big bucks. Now. Locals have told me they aren't there, and I've seen it proclaimed on social media and hunting forums over and over about certain spots, but they were wrong. In my experience, not many is far different from none. So in this way,

big is all relative. But let's say we're dealing with the top twenty percent of bucks in your area. The other eighty percent, they're not big enough for you to consider them big. And you want to get in on that good stuff that leads to a taxidermy bill, but you can't, and you wonder why. Well, one of the reasons might be that we are so good at trying to supplement real world experience with vicarious lessons or academic lessons.

What I mean by that, and you've heard me say this a lot because I believe it so true, is that you can't replace experience with anything. It's the number one ingredient in woodsmanship, and woodsmanship kills big bucks. This is because people with lots of experience and a high level of woodsmanship don't need to focus on the obvious stuff. They can go deeper, and they are more in tune to the in the moment details that really matter. So let me frame this up in a way that's kind

of easy to understand. Let's say you read every book there is on bass fishing, you consume a thousands of hours of you know, ass fishing content on YouTube, You fill your brain with knowledge from other folks on the topic. Do you think it's possible that you could consume enough content on this topic to make you a better fisherman than the top pros, meaning is there an academic way to beat the people who have tens of thousands of hours on the water. There is not. There, just isn't.

You're not going to be able to read about catching smallies in a post front in June and outfish somebody who's had to figure out on the water how to catch big small mouth in cold fronts in June several years in a row. It doesn't work that way. This doesn't work in deer hunting either. You have to get out there with the deer and you have to give yourself to the process of being a deer hunter who is trying to get better. This means doing the challenging

stuff versus you know, not hunting. It means figuring out how to kill a buck on October eighth, when most folks would rather stay home until the pre rut. The advice on how to kill big bucks probably mostly doesn't apply to you, and it will never beat out your instincts and intuitions if you work to develop them by being in the woods solving the problem of where are the deer, where are the big deer? And how do

I get to them? Undetected? Most people also won't kill big Bucks with any level of consistency because most people aren't very good at trying new things out. We put stands where we like stands. We sit the food plot a lot because it's easy, but we also just lay down a pattern of ourselves that the deer can figure out, and they do figure it out super quickly. But trying out new stuff, tactics, sitting different spots you know where it's probably a real crap shoot, you know, that will

help you kill big Bucks more often. And do you know why? Because you'll encounter deer where and when you think you shouldn't. You'll have encounters with deer when other people say you won't. You'll learn about the deer and about yourself at the same time. And how important this process is. Now, There's one thing I'm getting more and more obsessed with as I age, which is like the

importance of momentum on life. If you sit the same stands over and over and you see fewer deer, your momentum is going to slow down and you're going to give into it. This is bad. Now. If you try new stuff and believe you're giving yourself a fighting chance of meeting up with a big one. You'll mostly fail, but you'll be actively failing at something that will almost always work at some point. And when it does work, even if it's just a long distant sighting for three

seconds through the woods, that's a momentum shift. It's a reinforcement thing. It makes it a hell of a lot easier to keep going, keep trying new stuff out. This is hard to do, but as I've said, killing big deer is hard. In fact, I'm sick of telling people how to do it, because even when we know the best ways to kill big deer, we fight with ourselves because we don't want to give the process what it needs. The easy example of this to understand anyway, is the

rut hunt on a pinch point or funnel. You know, train traps are the ticket during the rut, and if you learn to look for them and identify them, you're ahead of the competition in a lot of ways, but not as much as you will be if you can just be more patient. The all day said thing has been done to death, but time on stand kills big bucks when they are looking for does most quality pinch points in funnels will see some big buck movement during prime time at some point, you know, maybe it's once

every few days, and your cameras show you that. And since your cameras show you that, you can look at it one of two ways. You can look at it and say, if I put in five dark to dark sits in a row, which is a big ask, but if I do that in that spot, the odds are way in my favor to have a good one come through when I'm there. But the way we mostly look at it is that there's only a random good one

going through every couple of days. It's not consistent enough to justify the extra hours in the midday watching squirrels, you know, running around and fighting off those tree stand naps that always seem to hit so hard at lunchtime. So now we reinforce these thoughts, which ties right into the momentum thing, by saying, well, you know, such and such put in fifty six hours this week and he

didn't kill one, So what chance do I have. Well, you can put in a lot of hours and not kill a big buck, but you still have a better chance of killing one with lots of hours on stand versus fewer hours on stand. I don't know how to put that any other way. This is where hunting gets even wonkier. Though in the early season. If you put fifty six hours into a pattern in it it doesn't work. You probably put about forty eight hours too many into it.

It clearly wasn't the right choice. And volume hunting a spot to the point of insanity doesn't increase your odds of success, it decreases them. During the rut, that's a different story. We often do the exact opposite of what we should by sitting the same field edge stands over and over early and then deciding that we have to be super mobile rut hunters who set up in five

different trees per day when November hits. If you want to kill big Bucks, you have to play the odds game a lot, and you have to try to do the stuff that's necessary to get you close. Now, another thing that keeps most of us from consistently killing big Bucks is we give our sits too much weight, like

each individual sit is too important. We put too much faith that this will be the morning, you know, because the weather is perfect and the deer hunting app says they'll all be moving, and you know, the moon phase is right, and whatever else. Almost every time you believe that stuff, you're going to be proven wrong by the deer themselves. You have to hunt for one encounter, and you have to understand that most of the time your best plans will definitely not put you in bow range

of a big buck. Maybe you can get really good and have one out of every twenty or thirty days in the field result in a close encounter or a big one, But the key is to understand that you can do everything right and you're almost guaranteed to still fail.

But the more times you do everything right and don't see or kill a big buck brings you closer to the time when he will actually walk by a twenty yards Deer hunting is a numbers game in so many different ways, and this one is important because understanding that the failure part is just fine when you did your best isn't just some kindergarten level bullshit. It's true. And those great deer hunters you look up to who seem to always kill, they mostly always fail at killing big

deer when they hunt. They're just more consistent than most people, so their failure rate is lower, and that's pretty tightly correlated to hunting. The way they think they need to as much as they can, and they also scout a ton, So it's probably the number one reason most hunters don't kill big bucks. Scouting time in season scouting time, i should say, is as valuable, if not more valuable, than actually hunting. We have this idea that scouting in the season is a good way to bump our bucks onto

the neighbors. But if you're not seeing or encountering big bucks, how could that possibly matter? Now, sure, you know your trail cameras tell you that big deer are around, and so you can use that as an excuse to not go looking for fresh sign. That's a bad idea. Deer concentrations they shift and they move throughout the season, you know, depending on pressure and food and available cover. Big bucks move throughout the season two and they leave a lot of sign when they get to new areas or start

spending lots of time in very specific spots. Now, the off season stuff is important, believe me. Winter scouting, you know, it's a great way to develop good rout spots. Summer scouting, you know, it's a great way to get into the season and kill one early. But if you want to kill a big one, in October or the pre rod scouting right now for where the big bucks are is

the ticket. Now. Too many of us wait for the deer to show up where we want to hunt them, instead of going to find where they are and hunting them in their spots. And when you do that, you give yourself a whole season of being in the game versus, you know, trying to utilize a couple of windows of time that you and everyone else is waiting for where we kind of all deem that the deer should be the most vulnerable. The easy way to combat this stuff is to try to force yourself to use some time

to go look at some spots. Let's say you have a day to hunt and you're going to do a morning sit in an afternoon sit. Find one spot to sneak into during the midday that won't affect your other hunts. Go look at a spot or maybe a couple sneak in like you plan to hunt, because you might need

to call an audible and hunt what you find. Understand though, that mostly you won't find anything good, But when you do, you'll be in a better position to kill a big buck right now then you will at any other point of the season and even sometimes during the rut. That's the power of in season scouting, and it's so much more important to us than sitting out and waiting for the bucks to get dumb, which is the last thing I want to talk about here. The rut is great,

it's fun. It's a leveling agent that gives each of us a better chance. But it doesn't make pressure deer super dumb. It just doesn't. If you believe that you're probably not going to kill big bucks very often. They aren't just super good at surviving for only eleven months of the year, even if they are prone to some riskier behavior during November, which they are. Got to give them the respect and the effort they deserve, and you'll be surprised at what happens if you keep at it

for a whole season. Do that, and come back tomorrow where I'm going to keep this podcast train rolling right along the tracks with another episode of Foundations. That's it for this episode. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. And if you like first Light and you want to add to your kid or you want

to try it out for the first time. You need to go to FirstLight dot com right now because the white Tail Weeks sale is going on and there's a ton of good deals out there. There's a tiered system where no matter what you buy, if you spend a certain amount, you get twenty five percent off, and that keeps going up until it gets to a really good deal. So check that out and as always, thank you so much for your support. I can't tell you how much it means to us at meet eatter, so truly thank you.