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, everyone, welcome to the Wire 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 aging deer on the hoof and how it's not nearly as easy as we think. This is kind of a fun one for me and that it will undoubtedly piss some people off. But there's something that bothers me in the outdoor space, and it involves people just definitively saying, you know, a deer is a certain age. This came straight from the outdoor TV space and has permeated the white tail hunting culture. But a lot of the talk around aging deer is total bs. Now, maybe you disagree, but I'm going to lay out a case right now for why I'm on that side. But first I have to let you know about our white Tail Week's sale, which is a monster, huge, really big sale we have going on right now here at meat Eater. The sale is different from our past ones, and that you can get a good discount on anything you buy, not just some new stuff. You got to head over to first light dot com and start shopping. Now. If you spend one hundred and fifty bucks, you get free shipping. That's okay. But you bump that order up to two hundred and now you get fifty dollars right off the top. Spend four hundred and you get one hundred back. Keep going and you can get up to two hundred bucks off your order. If you break through that eight hundred dollars mark, which according to my writer math is a twenty five percent discount on everything. You have less than a week to get on this, So if you're looking for a little gear upgrade this season, go check it out. All right, enough of that, let's get onto the show. I like dogs a lot. In fact, aside from hunting and fishing, I think the two things that make my life significantly better besides my kids and I guess my wife are dogs and music. Both are cheat codes for a happier life in my opinion. Now I have two dogs. One is eleven and one is three. They were both born in April. Not that that really matters, but at least might frame us up a little more. I guess now the older dog. She looks older, there's no doubt about that. But she's in good shape too, or I should stay. She still has a healthy body shape. We mostly maintain that through feeding and paying attention to her body conditioning. Although she still does some retrieving and she still swims every chance she can. She isn't all that gray around the muzzle, and so when people meet her they often comment about how she must be pretty young. She just doesn't look as old as she is now. My young dog, Sadie is actually approaching middle age of dogdom. She's three and a half, so you know, young, middle aged, but still now. Sadie is a pipsqueak and she weighs forty eight pounds, and she looks just like a puppy. People consistently guessed her age in months like eight months, and not in years like three and a half years. I knew Sadie had a high likelihood of being very small, because that's part of what I wanted out of her. I had worked with her mom and another pupp that was brought into the World Buyer Mom, who, by some strange connections in my life, is owned by Lee and Tiffany Lakowski, which I guess is a fun fact to toss out there. But anyway, Sadie is a dink and she acts like a puppy and she looks like a puppy, but she's not really a puppy anymore. Now, Luna is old, and she acts pretty old, but she doesn't look super old. She's not really built like a lot of older dogs. Now, take my buddy's golden retriever, Margo. She's eight, but she looks like she's about seventeen. She's had a full gray muzzle for years, and she just has the vibe of an older dog. But she's not ancient. Though. When you have bird dogs, you know that eight can still be pretty amazing, even though you also know that your dog is knocking on the door of, you know, being a little too old to handle the all day hunts and the cattails for the pheasants anymore. The variation in dog size and shape and overall vibe is based on a lot of things, not the least of which is genetics. It's pretty hard to look at them and just guess correctly how old they are, because there are too many variables that could throw you off. But no one is going around saying that, you know that Labrador Retriever is definitively a five year old dog because of the belly and the sway in the back and the j low type bubble butt. When it comes to deer, it's a different story. And maybe the last I don't know, ten or fifteen years, we've just all collectively agreed that we are all deer aging experts and that's that done and freaking done. We base our hunting strategies and goals around the age of deer we would like to shoot, and we obsess over the maturity level of certain But do you know where this came from. It came from the people who make hunting content mostly. But why we decided that maturity was the goal might not be so obvious, and it's really probably not obvious to the younger crowd. But you see, not that long ago, we all just hunted trophy bucks. That was how big deer were described. We were all good with that. After all, we are all kind of trophy hunters at heart, at least to some degree. There isn't a hunter out there who doesn't love a giant buck. And if they say they don't care, that's only because there isn't a giant buck walking down the trail toward their stand. They aren't going to pass a one to fifty to wait on a dough, trust me. It's kind of like the guys who have a problem with good looking women and they find a reason to talk shit about them. They know that at a certain level of physical attractiveness is going to put a woman right out of their league, so it's easy. It's safer to be dismissive or worse about those women because it doesn't matter. They're never going to inner or intersect in any meaningful way. The hunter who has no faith in it ever encountering a big buck. It's kind of in the same world. It's easy to talk shit about it when you know that the odds of one passing by the season or in the next ten seasons are slim to none. It gives you an out to shoot something else but not feel bad about it. It's all weasel word stuff, which is how we got here in the first place. Now, back in the day, whatever day that was, I guess we coveted trophy deer. We called them trophies and we didn't care. Is that's what they were. Then a few high profile people shot lions and giraffes, and the trophy hunting thing went global and the optics were not our friends. That was macro level stuff, though on the micro level we damaged ourselves in simpler, less obvious ways. Talking about deer as if their sole value is derived from the size of their head gear sells the whole thing. Real short, non hunters don't want to hear about hunters prioritizing trophy status first. It's just an ugly look for us. So we came up with a new way to trophy hunt. Now, over time we settled on mature deer. After all, that sounds way more responsible, right. I hunt mature deer, not immature baby deer that are just cute and still have a little milk stash and are attached at the hip to their mamas. Mature deer have served their purpose in nature and need to be removed from the herd before they do I don't know some damage. I guess. I don't know what a buck is going to do at eight years old. That is different than what he did at five, but that's not really a point. We figured out a way to not be trophy hunters, which was the goal, except that it just so happens that the mature bucks we hunt also happened to be at their peak antler growing stage. I promise you that if we suddenly found out that bucks had a huge gross spurt in antlers at ten and a half years old for some reason, five and a half year old bucks would not be considered mature for much longer. We'd figure out a way to target deer that are ten and a half for now, though, the optics of hunting mature deer and the feel good reasons we throw around to do it, they're better than the alternative. We don't want to be viewed as trophy hunters because that's a fast track to losing support in this current culture where we're glad to take away hunting opportunities from anyone as long as it'll make it easier for us. We don't want to give the non hunters and the antis anymore, AMMO. We make enough problems for ourselves. Mature bucks are a better message. But are we so sure we are hunting mature bucks? Kind of sort of a little bit, because here's the thing, how do you know how old a deer really is now? Unless you have like a double throat patch buck that you can track from his fond days to whatever season it is now, you can't, not as well as you probably think. Anyway. Now, a lot of folks are thinking, I've got that dipshit Peterson guy now because I know when my bucks hit two and a half years old and I can track them from there. Fair enough. Are you basing that age assessment off of antler size at all? Or is it body shape or astrological sign maybe what energy the crystals are giving off today? When we look at the general guidelines for aging deer on the hoof, we see some stuff that absolutely makes sense and generally works. Young deer have slim bodies, They look tall because they don't have that sagging belly. They have small sets of antlers. Year and a half old bucks are easy to judge. They all kind of look the same, kind of like puppies. Then we get to two year olds. Now they're supposed to have that lit body, no real definition to it yet and better than forky racks, but still small antlers. But with age comes the expression of genetics. Now, those of you listening who have kids, think about the difference in an infant versus a kindergartener and how they might look to you, or how they might start to act like your spouse. At some point, it's suddenly a little less certain that, for sure, without a doubt, you have a two year old buck in front of you. But we all say we can tell, and I think we can tell them still pretty easily compared to other ages. But where we get into trouble is the buck we deem two and a half that has, you know, one hundred and thirty five inch rack, or the buck that is two and a half that has the forty inchrack. When we get way on the right side or the left side of the antler growth bell curve, things start to get a little wonky and we start to fill in the blanks. But then you get into three and a half year old bucks, and this is where the wheels really start to fall off. How many of us get to spend a lot of time watching three and a half year olds doing wild three and a half year old type of things. Not many. And at this point a buck is middle aged ish, he's expressing his genes in both antler size and body characteristics. So we look and see one hundred and thirty five incher with a decent sized body, and we go, well, I know how old that buck is done and done in two years he'll be mature and I'll kill him. But how do you know you're not looking at a deer with a just naturally smaller body. You don't, No one does. Just like some bloodlines will have outsized racks, some will have outsized bodies or undersized here's another way to look at it. I just wrapped up a successful bear hunt with my daughter. I've probably one hundred bears ten times in my life. And while most black bears all kind of look the same, some are kind of squatty and stout, and others are kind of long and lean. They don't have antlers to cloud our assessments. They have bodies, and their bodies vary a lot by the bear. They don't follow a strict path for development, and neither do deer because they have different genetics. Not to make things even worse, antler size, like I mentioned, exists on a bell curve. You've all heard this, but it's true. We don't think of it like this when we're looking at deer, though, there are outlier five year old bucks that won't grow a rack bigger than one hundred inches, even in Iowa, while other five year olds can grow one hundred and eighty inch track. Most though, fall in the middle of those two. You might be thinking, so, what, how do we even figure this out? Well, the easiest way is to start sending in the teeth from the bucks you kill to get them cementum annuli aged. There's no more accurate way to find out the age of the bucks you kill. And even then it's not an exact science because those rings on the bucks teeth that they count they can vary a lot, depending on it being from the south or the north, and the corresponding severity of winters that your buck had to deal with. It's a good way to learn that you can't age deer worth of shit. Though. I say that because for a few years a couple buddies and I sent in the teeth on our bucks. I can safely say we were mostly wrong, and often wrong, in that we were chronically underaging our deer. The one hundred and twenty inches we love to shoot. We're all over the map, and a lot we're way older than we cementum annuallye aging can turn two and a half year old bucks into five year old bucks pretty quickly. Now, one of the reasons you don't hear about a lot of people doing this, especially the people who claim to know the exact age of deer, is because it's a little bit of a pain in the ass and they don't actually care what the age of the buck is. They don't really want to know. It really doesn't matter. But if you want to give yourself a reality check, this is a good way to do it. It makes the idea of aging deer on the hoof seem like far more of an inexact science than we believe, because honestly it is. Now, there's nothing wrong with laser focusing on what you think is a mature buck, really nothing at all. You do you seriously, There is no question that age is a secret sauce in growing big bucks. It just is, and it's what makes some places so easy to hunt and most places so hard to hunt. But what I want to say as I wrap this up, is that if you're confident of your aging abilities, check your don't do it by looking at a deer's jaw, because that's a coin flip as far as being worth anything. Cement to manualie aging, which is available through quite a few different labs, that's the closest you're going to get, and it's pretty exciting to send in teeth and wait for the results, which in my experience are always pretty interesting and rarely lined up with what I believe to be true. Now does that matter in the grand scheme of things. Not really, But there is a message here that I kind of want to leave everyone with. The idea of aging deer on the hoof comes from a place where we had to change our messaging so we didn't appear to be trophy owners. It has morphed into something else, especially with so many people interested in quality deer management and raising deer in a specific property. Now, I'm not saying focusing on age is a bad thing, because I don't believe it is. I just think it's best to be honest about what we are actually doing and understand that while our current messaging might sound a hell of a lot more responsible and palatable to non hunters, it's also a little bit damaging to a lot of other hunters. Newbies to the sport. Hear the talk of mature bucks, and they want in. But that's a terrible way to start. It's almost a guarantee to create and destroy a new hunter in a matter of not too many seasons. You don't pick up a football at target shopping out your lunch break and then go play in the super Bowl the next week. For a lot of folks hunting in heavily pressured areas, this aging deer thing is a bad idea too. If ninety nine percent of the bucks in your county are destined for the big betting area in the sky before they reach four and a half years old, it doesn't do anyone much good to try and hunt mature bucks. In the conventional sense. You might as well pick up a unicorn tag when you're at it, because you're just as likely to fill that one. Now. I do believe there are bigger bucks in a lot more places than we like to think. But there's also the reality of a lot of hunting pressure in a lot of places, And there's also bad winners, heavy predator loads in certain places, and just the truth about genetics and what they will give you. Wise being in a place where you can age bucks or pass up bucks and wait on them to get mature. That's great, but a hell of a lot of hunters aren't anywhere near that. If you're in that crowd, the path is going to look a lot different, and it can still be super fun and crazy rewarding. But the idea of holding out for a truly mature deer might just be a bad one for you. There might be no way around that. Plus, it's way way harder to age deer than we generally present. In fact, on the hoof, it's impossible to be super accurate. Now you can lump bucks into age brackets by looking at them, at least some of them, but overall, this is a much harder task than we believe it to be. That gets way harder by how we are biased around rack size too, which while we talk a big game about looking at body shape and size, rack size just definitely factors into our age estimates. So take that in the reality that we generally don't know shit about the specific genetics any one buck is carrying around, and you'll know that age is just a moving target, one where we're shooting at while blindfolded and hanging upside down by our ankles. While a bunch of angry hornets buzz around our heads. It's just tougher to do than we think. Think about it and think about coming back tomorrow when I'm going to drop another episode about why most people don't kill Big Bucks and the hard truths some of us just need to accept. That's it. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by first Light and first Light has eight ton of stuff on sale right now. In fact, pretty much anything met eat or sells can be yours at some level of discount if you go over there to first light dot com and start spending some money. As always, thank you so much for listening and for all your support. We truly appreciate it. Here. Keep checking back because we're going to have a lot more content dropping this week. And again, thank you, thank you, thank you,