Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented 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 Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by first Light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about retraining our brains so we can make better.
Deer hunting decisions.
Absolutely.
I know this might seem like a weird one, but you know, as I get older, I feel like I'm constantly fighting a battle against what is good for me.
Versus what I want.
A default to my mind can convince me to make poor decisions and self destructive decisions, and often just stupid, lazy decisions. It does this during scouting sessions and certainly actual deer hunts too. But it's also something I can work on. We all can work on this, which is what I'm going to talk about right now. Have you
ever heard of the simulation theory? You probably have, and maybe you write it off as total bunk, which is an understandable reaction, But maybe you don't because life is weird and it often feels like we really kind of aren't in control, so you think, who freaking knows, Maybe we are living in the matrix. As we get exposure to companies working on artificial intelligence, simulation theory enters the conversation more and more.
After all, artificial.
Intelligence could become sentient, and if it did, it could harness computational power and the unreal amount of data on humanity that we just put out there in the world in a way that could be used against us, and maybe we will become flesh and blood batteries for the machine. Now, for the record, I'm not sold on the simulation theory yet I think it's interesting for no other reason than
we are all just made up of star stuff. Yet somehow we can ponder whether we really exist as we generally believe we do, or if we are stuck in a living hell waiting on Keanu reeves to come along and unplug us. The mind is wild, and a part of the mind, or a function of the mind that is fascinating to me is neuroplasticity, which is the ability of the brain to change in structure or function in
response to an experience. Neuroplasticity can kind of be sort of a prison, or it can facilitate our voluntary self containment, or it can be used to literally change our reality through our thoughts and actions. In a way, if we can change our reality by simply thinking about it or using our brains to learn new things, isn't that kind of like we control the simulation?
Who knows what I do?
Know? As someone who has struggled with addiction in my life and who has spilled his guts to a few therapists in the hopes that they'll tell me what I want to hear and not what I need to hear, I realize that our minds are often not our friends. This is a concept that came to me when I heard a song by some musicians who go by the name of the National and their song is called your
mind is not your friend. You guys know that I love music and I love words, and I think the challenge to being a good musician or a good writer is to say the same thing but in a new way, sort of like how nearly every fiction book out there is a love story, despite it being presented not necessarily
in a traditional Hallmark movie type of love story. The point of the song, at least how I take it, is that it's hard to understand, but your imagination, your mind, they can work against you in ways that you just don't see coming. You might not understand them at all. And when that happens, you're trusting a flawed system, a flawed system that we are awfully biased toward. I might add, it's sort of like how when you're really really hungry, you want to go right for the most calorie dense
foods you can find. This is an evolutionary trait that hasn't caught up to our modern world of convenience and process foods. Your body and your mind, of which the two are a hell of a lot more closely intertwined than we sometimes like to think, works against you in that moment. It makes itself unhealthy or talks itself into unhealthy decisions because the operating system hasn't been updated in
the last couple one hundred thousand years. Sort of, But what the hell does this have to do with deer hunting? A lot we look at deer hunting in this modern age as largely in academic pursuit. I talk about this all the time, but I believe it. We don't really need to scout a whole lot thanks to trail cameras. We don't really need to know how to hide very well because we can get in a portable cameo box
and it'll hide us very well. We don't have to learn that cold fronts might mean more dear movement because that information is everywhere. We honestly don't have to do a ton of work to kill deer anymore, and I think that's why it's not as enjoyable for us now as it was not that long ago. Oh maybe I'm way off based there, I don't think.
So.
We don't really have to learn anything new with deer hunting, and when it comes to neuroplasticity and how we could train our brains to think about deer hunting on a deeper level, we just don't have to do it. We can kill deer fine without that, or so we think. But what has all of this information done for most hunters? Sure we understand how to hack the herd kind of, and if we have the right amount of land and the right amount of control over that land, we can
pretty much make the deer do what we want. Them to and we can go in and try to kill them when we deem the timing to be right. But a lot of folks don't have that, and some of the folks that do still don't have a stellar track record of killing big bucks every season.
Why is that? Why, with all of.
Our technological advantages and the sheer amount of information we have on deer, isn't it easier than it is? Well, let's start with a basic premise here, one that is sort of predicated on something. I talk about a lot lot doing something different in the deer hunting space. Most folks have a hunting spot and they try to figure that spot out. When they don't succeed, they often double down on.
What they believe should work.
This is what leads us to hunting less than we should because there is often a short term negative feedback loop. When we try new things, they often don't work right away, but because they are new, we tend to assign more weight to that failure. We don't think about going to our favorite stand and not seeing anything, because that's easy to write off. It's just some anomaly where the deer
just weren't moving, you know, full moon or whatever. But when we saddle up for the first time and go in somewhere and hang and bang, and the deer don't show. It's easier to believe that whole process is just not cracked up to what it's supposed to be. We have to try new things and learn from them, and eventually our brains will change to meet the reality of deer hunting. We have not the one we believe we have. Now, let me give you an example of this that kind
of might frame it all up. When my wife and I had our daughters, I knew my hunting time would be greatly shortened. I also knew, since I was a freelance writer back then, primarily mostly in the bow hunting space, that I still needed to go hunt a bunch of states and try to stack up a few.
Bucks every season.
Now, the first trip that I took that first year, you know, when we had a pair of ten months olds at home, was to North Dakota. I had a couple of days to scout and a couple of days to bowhunt. I knew that my odds of filling a public land buck tag on the bow opener with only a couple of days to hunt were not that great.
It felt mostly like a lost cause.
Now for a rut hunt, maybe because there's always a chance every minute you're out there, But for a first of September type of hunt, where morning's reel tough and there was likely to be hunters all over, I just didn't believe it was going to happen. And so it went that way until the last fifteen minutes of the last evening, when a decent eight pointer walked in and I shot him, and the sun went down, and my brain learned something new. A few days is enough time
if you put in the right effort. Now you might be thinking that was more luck than anything, but an experience like that does change how you think. And my reality went from believing I wouldn't have enough time to do what I needed to do to killing quite a few deer on very short trips. There was a time in my deer hunting career where I could go a whole season and not kill a deer, and I promise you that there is a zero percent chance I believed
it would ever be any different from me. I had learned one thing and hadn't learned the next thing to challenge my worldview. So let's take another example. You've heard me talk about snort wheezing a lot, and how I do it far more than most folks do, and how I'm not afraid to snort wheeze well outside of the rut at deer that aren't very likely to be what we would consider dominant buck. Until you try it and see it work, you're likely to believe what your brain
tells you, which is it won't work. We've been told over and over what that call is, and then when it should be used and what deer you should use it on. But most of that stuff's bullshit, and you can learn why. But we have to get past what we think we know, and that is really hard to do. Your mind is often not your friend, and the first step to rewiring your brain is to understand that that is fundamentally true.
Of all of us.
At least, it's often not your friend, and we need to figure out when that is and what we can do about it. Think about it this way. Your body is capable of a fair amount of exercise and would thrive on a very healthy diet. We all know this, But then why do we dread going for a run so much, or a lot of us engaging in any exercise for the pure sake of getting healthier. We know it's objectively a good thing, but man, can we talk ourselves out of it? My elk hunting partner, Tyler, looks
like a male model right now. He's literally one of the most jacked people I know, and it makes me insanely jealous. But I also know what he's doing to get that in shape and how disciplined he is with his diet. It's a huge, huge commitment. He also says often that people will say to him that they just don't have the same amount of time to work out as he does, and they say this without knowing a
thing about his life. Their minds assume that he must have unlimited free time, or he has found a way to extend his days to twenty eight hours when the rest of us are still stuck with the stupid twenty four hour. It doesn't work that way. So how do we rewire our brains to make them our friends? Aside from therapy, which is generally a good call, at least on the deer hunting front, you have to think about the ways in which you think.
About your process.
I'll start with an easy one. If you're being honest, with yourself. Do you think you scout enough? I know I don't. In fact, after stumbling on a little concentration of bucks on some public land in the Big Woods last year, I'm forcing myself to get over there a couple times this winter. I don't know enough about how the deer used that area anymore, and it bothers me.
Now.
I know I can show up, read some sign, and get in the neighborhood of them, But given that short time span for hunts I usually have, it's sometimes just not enough. Why not use February in March to go look at the land and all of last year's rubs and learn something about what they do that I don't
know about. If I let it, my mind would convince me to not make the drive over there and to not go scout that ground, because it knows that I can get close enough without it, And honestly, I'm sick of driving across the Upper Midwest and snowstorms and sleeping in hotels and on and on. The mind can spin a woeful tale to us that we are always primed to believe. But I know something else. I like scouting, especially winter scouting, which is going to be the topic
for next week's podcast. And I know when I just force myself to go do it, I feel better. It's so simple, but so difficult.
Sometimes.
I also know that the more I winter scout, the better I feel about deer hunting in general, and that makes me want to scout more. It's a positive feedback loop. It helps with summertime camera placement, it helps with planning out potential stand sites for the whole season, and walking a couple thousand acres of big woods in February helps me figure things out in Oklahoma or wherever I might end up. That might on paper look nothing like that big woods up north, but it is like that in
some ways. So ask yourself, what does your brain tell you to do that actively works against your deer hunting success or your deer hunting enjoyment. Do you have a spot where you can almost always kill a hundred and twenty inch deer if you sit long enough during the rut, but the one forty plus you really want is still a very rare deer doer, talk yourself into the easy route and killing the kind of deer that will just eventually walk down the trail, even though you secretly want to.
Level up what do you have to do to rewire your brain? There?
Listen to it when it says you don't really need to scout, should stay home instead to watch the NFL playoffs. That's probably not the best way to go, right, Let's look at it another way, one in which I see a lot of folks sabotage themselves. The saddle movement came on way strong in the last ten.
Years, total resurgence.
It's everywhere in diehard set. Sattle hunters are a little like vegans and that they absolutely want you to know who they are as people and why they've made the choices they've made. But saddle hunting is also wildly effective if you know how to do it. You have to be willing to learn how to use them effectively, and a hell of a lot of saddles end up on Facebook marketplace as slightly used items that just didn't do
it for the owner. I'd be willing to bet a lot of those folks bought into the hype but didn't learn how to use them well enough to understand where they shine and how they can help them kill deer. Because they're an amazing tool, but you don't unbox them and suddenly use them perfectly. There's a process to it, and nature is real good at throwing us curveballs. Maybe the tree you thought was super straight isn't because they often
just aren't. And so your backyard saddle sessions prepping to learn how to use it maybe didn't translate very well to the spots where bucks actually live. It takes time, i'm to rewire your brain. But if you look at this example, it would take one stubborn ass hunter to say there is zero benefit to being a competent saddle hunter. It's almost a guarantee that it will be a positive addition,
a complimentary addition to almost every hunter's arsenal. But will only be that good thing if it is allowed to become a good thing through a lot of trial and error and learning and confidence building. And when it comes to confidence, you know, the confidence to try something new.
Our mind is definitely often our enemy. We take comfort and familiarity, and that's one of the reasons we go back to the box blind over and over when we know the deer are generally avoiding it at all costs, because the hunting pressure of the experience on your property
is highly concentrated to that one location. Your mind might say that's a safe move because the entrance and exit routes are so well planned out and you rarely get winded, and blah blah blah, but it mostly doesn't want to face the reality that the deer habit totally figured out. What we can talk ourselves into, hunting wise is bananas.
Think about the decisions you made last season, and the way you hunted the preseason, and how you set things up, your time spent e scouting, your overall enjoyment of every day that you hunted, or the times you could have hunted but you didn't. What was your thinking then, and if you're honest about it, what did that thinking give you? As far as results, we are generally pretty biased toward
ourselves and think we are pretty smart people. But if that were true, we wouldn't consistently have to elevate big bucks to such crazy status because we can't kill them.
We wouldn't have.
To find so many reasons to cling.
To our failure out there. As far as.
Filling tags goes, we wouldn't have to listen to guys like Mark for eight hundred episodes interview the small percentage of folks out there who really seem to have it figured out, but who also still fail all the freaking time.
I will say this to wrap things up. If you do listen to all eight hundred of those Wired to Hunt episodes, or follow the hunting public, or whoever you think is the top dog in the white tail space, you'll probably notice they often try new things, They often deviate from a plan or from conventional wisdom, and just often enough they kill big bucks many times on public land when it would be a safe bet generally that
they were going to fail. This isn't due to them being able to scout way differently from you or some product they bought that just brings the deer in. It's because they've learned to learn about deer and to question their choices so much that they're willingly try to go against their own grain, so to speak, you know, despite their mind's insistence that there is a better, easier way,
but it's just not true very often. So think about that as we dive into the heart of winter scouting season here, which is what I'm going to talk about next week, because as I said, I'm getting all fired up to go figure out some big woods Bucks right now. 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.
A First Light.
I know you're bored as hell right now because it's the middle of winter and it kind of sucks. And other than nice fishing or maybe shed hunting or something, there isn't a lot to do. If you are bored and you want to live vicariously through us or maybe learn something, head over to the medeater dot com. Tons of articles, tons of recipes, every podcast you might want to listen to for any drive you're gonna do. You know Clay's Bear Grease, Brent's This Country Life. The meat
Eater has three drops on there. Lots of good stuff out there. You can also watch a whole bunch of hunting shows there. You can even see one of My Little Girls hunting, you know, Wisconsin, Bear and Deer on a show that just dropped so much good stuff over there at the meadeater dot com.
Go check it out.