Real Hunting

[T Mac]

Randy,
I just watched your episode on public land in WY, hunting elk.
Now, this is a great example today's hunting for us regular guys.
Non hunters don't know the things we go through.
-Leased up private lands, crowded public lands, other guys screwing you up.
Putting up camp. Tearing down camp. walking in and packing the meat out on your backs.
Then formulating a "plan B".
Then going with the only thing left...and coming so close.

Public land elk hunting = hard work with no guarantees.
But when you harvest something, the satisfaction is HUGE.
You know YOU did it...not your billfold.

The turkey show, the bear hunt and your Nevada muley hunt were all great, too.
Adventures of actual hunting that we can relate to.
IMHO--If all hunting shows were like yoursI, we wouldn't have so many anti-hunters.
The antis think we just kill stuff because we want to kill. It isn't hard to see where they get their ideas.
Most of the other TV shows show "pro-hunters" or "famous personalities" who go out and shoot penned up deer, or at least "private" deer, tame (unhunted) turkeys, bear on bait piles, and elk on some private hunting lodge in Colorado....with some fly fishing on private ponds thrown in. The talk is all about "trophies".
-These guys are killing hunting for us regular guys!

Example...there's a gal who moved from SoCal. to Winston , MT not long ago. She was against hunting. After being there through a hunting season, she is no longer an anti.
I asked her why, and she said... "I never realized you folks hunted this stuff for the meat and that you depend on it as part of your diet. I never realized how hard you work for it.
I thought you just liked to kill stuff".

Keep up the good work, buddy.

 

[Big Fin]

Thanks T-Mac. Glad you liked it. The amazing part of that episode is that Larry had a stroke three months earlier and also was only a year removed from ten months of experimental chemotherapy. It was by far the greatest hunt of the year, as far as friendship and spending great times with someone I am very close to.

As I have posted on other threads, when you have an industry who has turned all their marketing budgets over to ad agencies, very few of whom hunt, and if they hunt, hunt in "controlled environments," the outcome is what we see in most TV shows. In the quest for lowest cost production models, the "reality" part of hunting is missing in many shows. Glad I trademarked the term "Reality Hunting."

I agree with your assessment about the popular TV message needing improvement to help with our image as hunters. Maybe I am the minority in feeling that way. It is our intention that our show contribute in a positive way, and hope others agree with your impressions that we are hitting the mark.

In spite of the current state of the hunting TV industry, we will continue to be one of the "lonely voices in the lost wilderness" and hope that eventually some of these ad agency people see these kind of response from their customer base. But, given how smug they are about how well they understand the hunting market, I suspect it will continue to be the same uphill struggle it has been.

Good thing I am too stupid to quit and too ignorant to know when the odds are stacked against me - attributable to my square-headed Scandinavian heritage.

 

[Bio Bo]

I happened to catch the 1st part of Keith Warren's new show the other day (Can't remember what he calls it.) where he was hunting near State College, PA. Every buck he showed was a huge deer, bigger than anything I have ever seen in the woods, much less shot. It didn't take long to figure out that he was shooting , not hunting, in one of his high fenced deer farms where line breeding is the norm. And it took even less time to switch the channel.
I can't understand what pleasure people get out of shooting animals like the ones he was shooting. Sure... they are huge, but there is no challenge to the hunt. They put him in a stand where certain animals hang out, and he gets to shoot one when he comes through the area. I guess all those line breds usually find a way to hang together, don't you know...
Oh, and by the way, for all you TX bashers... Warren IS a Texan...