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. 00:00:20 Speaker 3: I know last week I said I was going to talk about setting up for rut hunts in the middle of the summer, but I'm going to put that on hold for a week to talk about our recent public land fight, those sell off attempts, and why this issue should matter to all deer hunts. Well, if you haven't been living under a rock, you've probably heard about a specific senator from Utah named Mike Lee and his grand plan to sell off public land, which he finally pulled after a ton of pressure from you guys. 00:00:48 Speaker 2: This was a huge win. 00:00:49 Speaker 3: This issue has been front and center in the hunting community for a few weeks now, and it has been pretty wild. 00:00:54 Speaker 2: Now. The good news here is that a. 00:00:55 Speaker 3: Lot of hunters showed up for the fight, and both Cal and Mark here have had a huge impact on the issue in a truly positive way. But it's also something that might feel a little disconnected from the average whitetail hunter, which is fare, but it's not something we can or should ignore. And that's what I'm going to talk about right now. This is going to sound like me bragging a lot, but I don't mean it that way. I just want to list off something about my life to sort of contextualize this whole public land issue and make the case for why all of us deer hunters should be concerned not only with having land for all of us to hunt, but what it means to us at our core as Americans. Maybe that sounds a little grandiose or overly dramatic, I don't really care, so let me start with this. In the last ten years, I've hunted and killed whitetails on public land in my home state of Minnesota, across the river in Wisconsin northeast of me, in North Dakota, and then down in South Dakota, and in Nebraska and in Oklahoma and in Iowa. Some of those states, I hunted public because it was the best option, and sometimes it was because it was just an interesting option that I wanted to explore, and it's really nice to have options. Now that was just deer I've also turkey hunted all those states, or at least almost all of them on public land as well. And you can throw in Kansas into that list now since we're including gobblers. 00:02:17 Speaker 2: But then you have Western critters. 00:02:19 Speaker 3: I've personally a hunted and killed elk, mildeer, and antelope and a couple of Western states in that same timeframe, and I was really happy to have a place to hunt each and every time it was all on public Now, allow me to tap into my infomercial side here and say this, but wait, there's more. When it comes to following my dogs around trying to shoot some birds, I've hunted pheasants, grouse, woodcock, prairie chicken, sharp tails, bob white quail, and a whole host of ducks and geese on public land and the same timeframe, not to mention squirrels, cottontail, rabbits, and snowshoe hairs. In fact, I have plenty of private land places to hunt in a few different states, but I'd give them up in a heartbeat to not lose any public land opportunities. 00:03:05 Speaker 2: And I mean that too. 00:03:07 Speaker 3: Public land has been a ticket to a better life for me, and I'm not alone in that. Now, you don't have to hunt public I don't really care if you do or you don't. I know there are some hunters who think we don't need public land at all, and that the government shouldn't be in the business of owning idle recreational land. Now, it's no coincidence that most of those hunters, and probably all of them, if you really get down to it, have private places to hunt where they don't feel their access will ever be threatened. 00:03:36 Speaker 2: Okay, if you have that, good for you, that's great. 00:03:40 Speaker 3: But can you put yourself in someone else's camo knee highs and understand that not everyone owns land, or was born into some family land, or makes the money necessary to lease some ground. To me, that mentality is kind of like the anti car thing that you hear about largely in Europe but also in population centers in the United States. 00:04:00 Speaker 2: Dates. 00:04:00 Speaker 3: Some people who live in metro areas with walkable amenities think that no one really needs to own a car, let alone an evil, gas guzzling truck. But that takes an astounding level of cognitive dissonance to get behind. They can't imagine why someone would need a truck for their living or just their life. Or what it would be like to live in most of the country where you can't just ride a bike to the grocery store. Life doesn't work like that, and when we get that myopic of a view of something, it just doesn't jive with reality usually. So anyway, even if you don't hunt public land for deer or whatever critters, try to understand how that could be valuable to other hunters, let alone the non blood sport crowd that might enjoy some of the wild places we like to rome as well. Look, this is just me in my opinion, but I like public land because I like freedom. I think the ability and the opportunity to walk into thousands of acres of woods or cat or whatever is fundamental to us as humans, and without it we'd be missing something that makes us who we are. When I think about the animals I've hunted and all the fish I've tried to catch, either on public land or by accessing something through public it's not a running total of a body count. It's a hell of a lot of memories of getting to do what I want in the places I want to be the most. But I don't want to just live in the past, and that's the reason I love public land too. The prospect of planning hunts and fishing trips around public land is sort of the life force that keeps me and a lot of other outdoors minded people going every year. This season alone, I plan to hunt white tails in a couple of states on public and bird hunt a couple more. The planning behind that, the eat, scouting, the process of it all. I just love it so much, and that would go away if the public land did Without the setting. There is no show if you get my drift, And this is what I know about the public land that has been on and off the chopping block over the last few weeks. 00:06:06 Speaker 2: Once it goes away, it's gone. 00:06:09 Speaker 3: This is no different from a hell of a lot of hunting opportunities, and one of the reasons I think the resident non resident fight in a bunch of states is so dangerous because once an opportunity goes away, it generally just doesn't come back, no matter how much the conditions change. If this public land out there, scattered across a whole bunch of western states in Alaska had been sold off, it would be gone for good. I know that seems evident, but it's hard to understand the impact of something like that in the moment before it really happens, especially if it doesn't affect you personally. We could try to make up ground through walk in programs and tax incentivized programs, which we should every chance we can get, but the appetite usually isn't there in a meaningful way, and that means that while we can try to recoup some of those losses somehow, it's never going to get us back to baseline. It'll be a net loss, guaranteed. So what would have been the impact of losing three hundred thousand or three million or one point two million acres of public land. Well, it would have shifted more pressure to available spots, which would have degraded the quality of. 00:07:13 Speaker 2: The hunts on those spots to some level. 00:07:16 Speaker 3: It would have put more pressure on leasing prices and recreational land prices, which both favor the well healed but not so much the rest of us. So there would have been some residual loss of all hunting ground, even for some hunters who didn't hunt public land at all. That would be bad enough if this would have somehow been a magical, one off event. But the precedent is what scares the shit out of so many of us, just like that resident non resident fight I already mentioned and will again toward the end of this rant. Once some people with some power over others figure out how to use it to their advantage, it becomes almost like a contagion. 00:07:53 Speaker 2: You know. 00:07:53 Speaker 3: It might slow down at certain points, but it never seems to stop. This goes both for the general complaints and the fix, which benefits some hunters but removes opportunities from others. Once we have the template for this kind of thing, it's very repeatable and will be repeated. 00:08:09 Speaker 2: So this isn't a one off deal. 00:08:11 Speaker 3: And honestly, it's a fight that's going to keep coming up until enough people don't care about it to challenge it anymore. Is that a risk we should have taken. I don't think so, and I know a lot of you don't think so as well. There are some things that are just too valuable to some of us to let them go without a fight, and public Land is one of them. Will we lose this fight eventually, I don't know. I kind of believe so, but that's not good enough of a reason to be dismissive of it. 00:08:38 Speaker 2: Now. 00:08:39 Speaker 3: This is probably a good time to point something else up with this issue, too, which is that we are constantly actively being divided all the time. We see this political which is a huge issue in and of itself. With the public land selloff thing, you kind of just have to pick a side in it. And once we pick sides on one issue, it's human nature to paint ourselves all on one team or another, and that sucks bad. You can love public land and you can love guns and not be so tribal as to lose your voice in the fear that you'll be considered one of us or one of them. That division leaks through into hunting in a million different ways. And it's easy to throw your hands up and say that something like this doesn't really matter because it's all going to shit anyway. 00:09:30 Speaker 2: But it's not. And I don't care if your number one. 00:09:32 Speaker 3: Issue is I don't know too many wolves in your state or too much overcrowding on public land according to your standard of who should be out there, and when I don't care right now that the bird watchers and the mountain bikers don't really foot the bill for a lot of this stuff the way we do. Those issues are all real, all valid and all worth discussion and debate, But without the places to go to do the things that might be affected by those issues, it doesn't matter as much. The fight to keep the land ours should take precedence over those issues that only really exist because we have the land in the first place. Now, I know these issues aren't that simple, and I'm glossing over some of the nuance, but you get my drift. We can fight about a lot of stuff later, but for now, it's a good idea to consider what has to be done to keep this land open to all of us in the future. And it's also important to acknowledge what this means to the average white tail hunter right now. 00:10:23 Speaker 2: Not much. 00:10:24 Speaker 3: I mean that most of us wouldn't miss a beat if one point two million acres of BLM land had gotten sold out west this year, we wouldn't A handful of us will lose antelope spots or elk spots, maybe a place to hunt mule deer, but mostly it wouldn't matter to most of us at all. But how about that national forest you might hunt or a lot of the hunters in your state do hunt, but you don't because that could be next maybe not this year. Or in the next decade. But when we start placing more value on land being in private hands than in the public trust, we are going to give bad ideas to politicians all across the country. And if not the national forest, perhaps it's the state wildlife management areas. The Western stuff is sort of the canary and the coal mine here in a lot of those states, there's a lot of land and not a lot of people. When you have an abundance of something, it's easy to try to devalue. 00:11:18 Speaker 2: It, especially if you don't use it. But there's a slow creep to. 00:11:21 Speaker 3: Things like that, and it'll eventually make its way to the east, and when it does, a lot of Western politicians will have already navigated the waters enough to provide other politicians with an effective route to take on this topic. Just think about how much of a pain in the ass old Mike Lee has been with just his three recent attempts to sell off public. Imagine even a handful of politicians east of the Mississippi trying the same thing. It'll be death by a thousand paper cuts, and it'll kill off a hell of a lot of hunting opportunities. Now, even if the odds seem low right now, they aren't zero and the prospect of losing land this way should scare all of us, and you a warning and beat an absolute dead horse just a little bit more. This is one of those moments in our hunting culture where you hear the rallying cry that straight out of Pink Floyd's song Hey you, We're right at the end as they fade into the outro, Roger Waters sings united, we stand, divided, we fall, We are united in a way right now that I haven't seen in a long time over this public land issue, and it gives me a hell of a lot of hope, it really does. I honestly can't tell you how much I appreciate guys like Cal and Mark getting after this issue with their audiences and really pushing the message and how important this is while giving a simple call to action that absolutely makes a big positive difference. 00:12:45 Speaker 2: It's huge, truly. 00:12:47 Speaker 3: But remember how I said I wasn't done addressing the resident non resident issue earlier. Here's the thing. This is a Western issue first. Mostly it just is and it will be until it's not. But for now, there are a hell of a lot of us who live where the elevation is about eight hundred feet and that's it. And we called Mike Lee and left him messages telling him how important public land was to us, and at least in my case, how I was going to create a podcast to talk about how misguided he is when it comes to the issues, so that our listeners can learn about his motivations. This is because we are united right now, riding the high that comes with a big win, that feels like real, actual justice. 00:13:29 Speaker 2: But I wonder how long. 00:13:30 Speaker 3: It'll take before we get back to our old selves. As I said, this fight is going to keep coming up. Right now, we are largely in this together, But the more a lot of us are told we are no longer welcome in this state or that state to hunt this or that critter, it's going to start to wear on our unity. You want me to fight for your public land and your state, I will, A lot of us will. But when we also actively remove hunting opportunities from our fellow outdoorsman, we are actively removing some pieces of that collective voice. At some point, enough hunters who don't live where you do and who will never get to hunt the animals that you hunt, even on federally owned land, in your state, They're going to become apathetic to the cause, and when that happens, the dominoes will start to fall more often and more quickly. We can't preach unity now and then engage in so much division later without suffering some of the consequences. It just won't work long term. And while we have just won this fight, we got to pay attention to this stuff because it's not going to go away. I want to feel like I need to fight for this until I'm dead, and I want my kids to feel that this is a torch that's worthy of picking up and carrying. But I also know how easy it is to decide a fight is not your fight, especially when you've been removed from something you love because other people who love the same thing have a way to take it from you. 00:14:53 Speaker 2: We just have to be careful with this shit. 00:14:56 Speaker 3: We should use this moment to pause and at least think about our future as hunters together and what that might mean for us as far as land usage, land ownership, and general hunting opportunities. A win now is huge, but how we set ourselves up for the next fight matters too. 00:15:13 Speaker 2: Now. 00:15:13 Speaker 3: I know this sounds like wishy washy, horseshit, But I think we are better off unified in about every possible way. 00:15:20 Speaker 2: I know. 00:15:20 Speaker 3: We disagree on crossbows versus vertical bows versus traditional bows, and baiting versus not baiting, and trophy hunting versus meat hunting, and about a million other issues that at the end of the day might mean a hell of a lot to our time in the field, or might just be something we like to argue about. Because we have strong opinions on this deer hunting thing that we are so passionate about, we can argue and disagree when we have to, but we should be keenly aware of our collective voice. It's quite literally the thing that just kept that land in our hands for now, and that benefits a hell of a lot of us directly and the hell of a lot more of us indirectly. Let's try not to forget what we are capable of as a largely unified group. We as hunters are treated like clueless bubbas and heartless murderers in the media all the time. We are written off as a dying demographic, kindred to cave men and women who haven't quite evolved enough to do the ethical thing which I guess is have someone else kill animals for us in an industrial building far away from the eyes of general society, so we can eat them with a guilt free conscience. We just proved we are so much more than that, and that's amazing to me. Let's keep this momentum moving in the right direction by at least remembering what it took to get us to coalesce into the kind of group that wouldn't give up the fight and who all threw our middle fingers in the air and pointed them in the direction of a specific politician who thought he could take something from us that didn't belong to him. So wrap this up, I want to offer us sincere thanks to everyone who may aid the call to the Capitol switchboard or who did something somehow to get the word out. My kids, thank you and so do I. 00:17:10 Speaker 2: That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. 00:17:12 Speaker 3: This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. As always, thank you so much for listening and for all of your support. If you want some more deer hunting advice, you know, maybe read some articles, some other podcasts, Maybe you just want to hear some good old storytelling over on the Bear Grease Speed We've got Klay's Bear Grease podcast obviously, which is amazing. But then you got Brent Reeves over there, who's a national treasure telling stories every week on This Country Life. Or the new podcast by my buddy Lake Pickle called Backwoods University, that's just fascinating. He's doing a great job with it. Go check those out. Check out the new films we're dropping whatever. We have tons of new content going down every single week at the mediator dot com. 00:18:00 Speaker 2: Zig in for your support. 00:18:05 Speaker 3: M