00:00:01
Speaker 1: 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.
00:00:20
Speaker 2: Hey, everybody, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundation’s podcast, which has brought to you by First Light. I’m your host, Tony Peterson, and today I’m taking a deep dive into ethics and deer hunting and how we are all probably hypocrites on this front, but that’s okay. What is right and what is wrong, Not lawfully, although that comes into play plenty in hunting, but personally, ethics and your own journey to establish them and then adjust them to life as it changes are important. They guide us and honestly probably contribute more to our feelings of success than shooting any individual deer ever does. Maybe that doesn’t make sense, but I’m about to sort it all out. So buckle up, my you’re loving friends, because it’s time to get started. Humans have weird views on animals. Scratch that, we have weird views on any life form that isn’t human. I thought about this recently while first fly fishing for trout on the Madison in Montana, and then again while tossing tiny spinners to brook trout in Wisconsin. We don’t handle trout like we do bass generally, and when we do drop them on the bank or in the drift boat by accident, there’s this oh shit moment where you always feel bad. That makes sense if we want the resource around, which we do, but also kind of doesn’t considering our whole goal is to trick them into eating something with a hook in it, then forcing them to fight for their lives, and then pulling them into an environment where they can’t breathe while we snap a couple of picks, and then hopefully just let them go. Given all of that, it’s weird to feel guilty for dropping them, but we do. What we don’t think about is what is that Brookie really thinking throughout all of that. Generally we think they’re probably not thinking very much, but I don’t know if that’s true, and none of us really do. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, so much so that I’ve been reading about consciousness, including a book called The Soul of an Octopus by Si Montgomery now, I’m not going to go full Kenyan on you here with my own book club, but this book is an exploration of consciousness set against the backdrop of captive octopuses, which is the correct way to pluralize that I recently learned, because the word octopi is wrong because you can’t put that Latin ending of i on a word that originated in Greek. So there’s your fun fact for the day, I guess now. This book explores the relationship that the people who manage and run giant aquariums have with their eight tentacled captives, and is pretty bananas. Not only will an octopus show someone whether it likes them or not, you know, by either being affectionate or by blowing saltwater in his or her face, but they are incredibly good at problem solving. They can take apart objects and put them back together, and they can string together somewhat complex mechanical tasks if the reward is good enough, which usually means a live crab or two in a plexiglass box puzzle. They are also masters of escaping their tanks and have been documented sneaking from their tank to another to eat some fish and then slipping back into their own tank like nothing happen, you know, the only evidence perhaps a wet spot on the floor and a missing fish in a nearby tank. They seem to recognize individuals and remember them, and they get clearly agitated and excited, and are sometimes described very similarly to the way you or I might describe elaborate or retriever or a German short hair. They dream, and so do electric eels apparently, which makes me wonder many things. What does an electric eel dream about?
00:04:03
Speaker 3: Exactly?
00:04:04
Speaker 2: I don’t know, but it would be easy to just say, you know, hunting for fish or whatever they eat, and maybe shocking potential predators or something like that. But I can also think about my own dreams and they are very rarely tethered that tightly to my reality. So why should an eels be or my dogs for that matter, who I assume must be chasing roosters or playing with their dog friends when they whimper and run in their sleep. But again, why would they dream only about what is part of their waking reality when we don’t have the same constraints. An easy way to look at that is to say we are a higher consciousness, but that’s a warm blanket we wrap ourselves in, because in many ways we are absolute monsters to a lot of life we encounter and a lot of life we don’t encounter until it’s packaged nicely in the grocery store or hand delivered to us on a plate at Applebee’s. We don’t really know what consciousness is, and we don’t really know what’s conscious and what isn’t on any level that would allow us to truly understand it. There’s a quote by the naturalist Harry Beston that goes, animals are not brethren, They are not underlings, but beings gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. I wonder about this with deer. I mean, have you ever thought about what goes on in a deer’s mind when he’s laying there, bedded up for the midday, or maybe when he walks out into the field to take a long look around in late October. I believe wholeheartedly that deer have a range of emotions. You can watch them play, especially fawns, and while that behavior is explained away as practice for evading predators later in life, I don’t totally buy that. I think that’s maybe an old world way to look at it, like how we used to look at all of the species of primates that haven’t gotten to the Zoom meetings in Starbucks stage of advance. I’ve watched quite a few bucks get visibly worked up over my calling to their own detriment several times. You can actually watch them get pissed off sometimes, And if they can get pissed off, why not happy? We know they get somewhat curious and if you don’t believe that you’re not spending enough time around them. I’ve killed a few doughs that I bleeded in who came running and who I can only imagine probably lost their fawns at some point. There’s a connection there that is probably something that wouldn’t make us feel super comfortable to fully understand, if we could fully understand it and then allow ourselves to acknowledge it now. In case you’re wondering if at this point I’m setting up to tell you that I’m going to quit hunting and go vegan, well I’m not. I think if a buck walked up to me and started talking to me about his plans for life, and his hopes and his dreams. I’d probably shoot him anyway if the freezer was empty enough. But there is also the question of how we conduct ourselves while we’re hunting, and I think about that now more than ever, since I’m in a stage where I’m not only trying to get my daughters fully hooked on hunting and fishing, but also just taking new people out as much as I can. We look at the guidelines of hunting through the lens of regulation, and we should. The laws that are put in place to govern our activities out there are generally designed to protect the resource and ensure that the fish and game we pursue have the opportunity to get away. Fair chase is a phrase we use a lot, but it means different things to different people, and it’s always evolving as a concept. It stand alone, but put into real world, fair chase isn’t what it once was, and won’t be what it is now in five or ten years. If you don’t believe that, consider any of the big technological leaps we’ve made in deer hunting, going from re curves to the first compound bows set in motion, a change that has undoubtedly made bow hunting whitetails a hell of a lot easier, the advantage of a compound o where a trad bow is undeniable, And you can look at that a couple of different ways. It’s more sporting to hunt with a recurve or a long bow because it’s a hell of a lot more difficult, But it’s also easier to make a bad shot with a recurve, although I say that with the caveat that who is in control of whatever weapon is really in charge of how well it shoots, And with archery, practice doesn’t make perfect, but more of it gets you closer than less of it does, So in one way, it could be viewed as more ethical to hunt with a tread bow, or it could be viewed as less ethical. Another example of this is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, which is tarpin fishing. You guys know, Mark is ate up with the idea of tarpin and him and Giannis just went down there to fly fish for them in Florida. That’s pretty cool and I’m very jealous. But I also think about fly fishing for a fish like a tarpin, and the fact that if you do that, you are admitting you are going to fight that fish for a long long time, which undoubtedly leaves to higher mortality. Is it more sporting to fish with traditional tackle and land them quicker? Maybe not sporting, but maybe more ethical. But then again, it’s a hell of a lot harder to land them with fly tackle. So who’s right? Take another example here baiting deer. I’ve shot deer over bait in a few states and I can safely say it’s just really not for me. I don’t like that it takes the mystery out of the hunt, but I also understand completely why it’s so ingrained in our culture. It does generally provide high odd shots, so in that way it might be considered more ethical than hunting without bait, But on the fair chase front, that argument falls short.
00:09:48
Speaker 3: You see where I’m going with this stuff.
00:09:50
Speaker 2: There are laws and regulations and then there are own personal ethics, and honestly, I meet a lot of hunters who don’t seem to think much about either, which is disheart Maybe this is just a bad batch thing because a sample size or something else, but a lot of hunters I meet will pretty quickly tell me about breaking laws somehow during their hunting and fishing endeavors. The folks who don’t do that still have to answer to themselves for their own choices. And how we figure out what is ethical to us personally is by making dumb choices that are often fueled by greed or ego. I don’t know how many shots I’ve taken at animals that I knew I shouldn’t have, especially when I was young and a dead critter meant a lot to me. I don’t know what percentage of hunters can relate to this, but I’m guessing it’s pretty high. At some point, you’re going to take a shot at a poor angle or farther than you should, or at a moving deer or something, and it’ll all go south, and the instant that it does, you generally don’t feel great about it. That’s like building a foundation for better ethics in the future. Or maybe you go deep into the cell camera game, which a lot of people still feel is too far, and in some situation I’m one of them. Oh, you wouldn’t be able to make a strong case that I’m anti cell cameras, but think about running twenty of them on a property instead of just a couple. There is a saturation point where you could pin down deer movement to a high degree, and the deer that walks by those, as conscious as they might be, can’t possibly understand that the little camo boxes we strap to trees are actually sending us information about their whereabouts twenty four hours a day for months on end. Some folks would have no problem killing a buck every year that they patterned with twenty cameras, but other folks would. The folks that would would learn pretty quickly that that style of hunting isn’t for them. It wouldn’t feel fair to them, And that’s just kind of what ethics are. When we deviate from what we feel is right for ourselves. We generally don’t love the hunt as much. I try to downplay this or weasel word it as much as possible, but one of the things that doesn’t make me feel great about being a deer hunter is when I shoot one that I feel.
00:12:01
Speaker 3: Was just too easy.
00:12:03
Speaker 2: Now, look, this is highly subjective, so don’t think I’m shitting on someone else’s choices here. But if I feel like I have a property really figured out, or some situation where the kill is going to happen, for sure, I tend to lose interest real fast. The hunt is just sort of gone for me then, and I really like the hunt. It’s one of the reasons I’m always scouting new ground. I feel like that is how I challenge myself to give the deer a real chance. And if I do get it right and kill one on new ground or ground that I’ve been trying to figure out for a few seasons, I generally just feel really good about myself as a hunter. It’s what I need to get out of it to feel like I’ve done it right by my own standards. I guess now I’m lucky to have a job in a life situation that allowed me to figure that out for myself because it matters to me a lot. It shapes my decisions, It keeps me scouting and allows me to be excited about waking up super early to get into the woods and see what I can make happen. When I deviate from that path, which I do quite a bit, I don’t genuinely feel as good about myself as a hunter.
00:13:06
Speaker 3: But what does that mean to you? Well, maybe you’re chasing them.
00:13:10
Speaker 2: Exactly like you should to feel really good about yourself, but maybe you’re not.
00:13:15
Speaker 3: And if you’re not.
00:13:16
Speaker 2: You can figure out why, but it really comes with tough decisions that need to be made. For example, let’s say you get your hands on some land and you put in that food plot and it grows real nice, and you have your pictures of your hit list buck and then you go in and you kill him, and you feel great because you should. But what if you do that for five seasons in a row or ten seasons in a row, and you realize you just don’t care to put in any extra effort because you know you don’t need to know, and you don’t feel as excited for the season as you once did because you know it’s just a matter of waiting until the buck you want starts daylighting and then you can go in and kill him. Have your ethics changed. Maybe what’s happened is that you’re not super thrilled partially because you figured out how to kill them without having to really hunt for them anymore. Maybe that’s the wrong way to put it, but there’s something missing. This is one of the reasons people often get a renewed interest in hunting When they travel to a state or a location that is new to them. They realize what hunting can require of them, and it actually feels good to put in the work and try to unravel a new mystery. Maybe it’s a matter of picking up a crossbow and realizing that’s not your jam, because they’re a hell of a lot easier to shoot accurately than a compound and worlds apart from a tread boat. A lot of times the things that make it easier for us to fill tags end up also being the things that suck a little joy from the experience and diminish the feeling of accomplishment to some extent. Now, I don’t care where you stand on any of these issues, but instead care more about people trying to figure out.
00:14:47
Speaker 3: Where they stand on them.
00:14:49
Speaker 2: The hunter who is trying to hunt in a way that feels good ethically to him is generally pretty much welcome in my camp. But this is also something we owe the deer. I believe some people frame that up, you know, like, as a respect thing to the deer, But that’s the wrong way to look at it, since the goal is to kill them, which I feel is pretty disrespectful. It’s more about acknowledging that this is an animal with a life it really wants to live, that at least deserves some effort on our parts to try to kill them in a way where they not only have a real chance of getting away, but also a real chance of not taking an arrow or a bullet into the guts or the leg or whatever. We don’t have to do this, and we can still stay on the right side of the law, but we should do this because for some reason it’s just the right thing to do. It’s kind of like the thing about not putting your shopping cart back when you walk out a target load up your groceries into your truck. You don’t have to put it back. No one’s going to arrest you if you don’t. But if you just leave it there and you drive off, I hope you trip and fall while carrying your groceries into your house. And when you’re laying on the ground, I hope a spider bites you in your eyeball. Maybe that’s too harsh, Maybe I’ve lost the plot. So I’ll just wrap this up by saying we all have our own standards by which we live and hunt by, And on that latter front, it’s a good thing to at least think about what kind of hunting makes you feel good about yourself, not just makes it easier for you to kill. What have you done out there that made you feel, you know, not so good about yourself? And how can you avoid making those decisions and those feelings in the future. All of the answers to those questions will be different ten years from now, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth exploring today. It’s not going to hurt anything, and in many ways might help you make better decisions in the field and help you have a more fulfilling season, which should be a higher priority goal than simply focusing on inches of antler or some other metric. So think about that and think about coming back next week as I talk more about deer and hunting and well deer hunting. That’s it for this week. I’m Tony Peterson. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundation’s podcast. I am here to tell you we have a lot of great podcasts on our network. But if you have not listened to Blood Trails, which is a Jordan Siller’s project, go listen to some episode. There’s two seasons out now. Jordan is an incredible writer and he does an amazing job with that podcast. It’s so interesting and of course if you want more content, head on over to the medeater dot com. We drop new articles, you know how to articles, conservation pieces, all kinds of good stuff. You’ll see new podcasts dropping there, and you’ll see new films and videos dropping all kinds of great hunting.
00:17:30
Speaker 3: And fishing information there.
00:17:31
Speaker 2: Go check it out at the mediater dot com and once again, thank you so much for your supporter
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