This is an IHeart podcast.

Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundation's 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.

Hey, everyone, 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 hunters.

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. This was a huge win.

This issue has been front and center in the hunting community for a few weeks now,

and it has been pretty wild.

Now, the good news here is that a 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 white-tail hunter,

which is fair, 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 10 years,

I've hunted and killed white tails 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,

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