I listened to the podcast today. Overall pretty good.
Here are some of my thoughts.
First off, I don’t agree with the “high grading” theory at all. Claiming that targeting 4+ year old bucks is going to lead to a degradation in quality… I just don’t see it. Those 5 and 6 year old deer were the most active breeding/rutting deer at 2-4 years old. If we kill them at 5, they still spread their genetics for 3+ seasons.
Secondly, I’m still a firm believer that the deer hunting in Ohio is really, really good. I would take hunting today over hunting in the 2000’s any day of the week. I realized I’m in the minority and perhaps I live in a bubble, but I see a lot of ground on a day to day basis and I know what my eyes tell me.
Lastly, leasing and baiting, and the craze over cellular cameras… We did this to ourselves, folks. We the hunters are infatuated with big deer. We obsess over them. We think about them every day during deer season, and even during the off-season for some hunters. TV shows, Social Media, all the marketing and the advertisements… all the gadgets and new equipment… it’s a product of US and our addiction to chasing big deer. Social media shows us everything everyone else has and we want it too! How do we do that? We exclude others because we want it all to ourselves, so we buy and we lease. We want every advantage in the book, so we bait and plant food plots and obsess over habitat manipulation. We need to know all the time, in real time, what deer frequent our properties and how often, so we spend 100’s and 100’s of dollars on cellular cameras and data plans. For what? ….To give OURSELVES the edge over others, over our neighbors, over our fellow hunters. We are selfish deer hunters - bottom line.
I think part of the reason behind our obsession over deer and the advantageous techniques and technology, is the fact that a lot of us rode the struggle bud early on in our hunting careers. We still remember what it’s like to wonder what’s out there, or wonder if we’re going to see any deer this week. We think we’re lucky to have gotten hooked on it the way we did, and we’re scared that our kids won’t be as resilient as we were, so we do everything we can to make it easy on them too.
One thing we can do is make damn sure that our kids and their friends get saturated in all aspects of the outdoors. Take ‘em fishing, take ‘em trapping, take ‘em frog gigging… immerse them in everything possible in the outdoors. Show them that there’s more to hunting and conservation than chasing deer. The lust for antlers and “status” among the hunting peers is what flies the plane into the ground. Our only hope is to change the paradigm.