There are numerous things that the typical whitetail guy has going against him when he first starts trekking west to chase elk with a bow. Not being able to scout with boots on the ground or not knowing how you react when an 800 lb animal if blowing snot at you and screaming in your face. Not being able to spend a lot of time around elk is a big disadvantage (a few weeks a year max for an easterner). The way you really learn to hunt an animal is by actually spending time chasing them. Another disadvantage for may is that most easterners are shooting everything with their top pin. This list would get extremely long if we kept going I am sure.
But.....I do think that the eastern hunter does have one advantage though. I have seen this evolve in my own hunting career and that is the more stuff you kill with your bow, the easier it is to kill stuff with your bow. Don\'t get me wrong...I am sure many a whitetailer has crapped his pants when he has an encounter with a bull elk. What I am getting at is that many whitetail bowhunters have went through the process of putting their pin on an animal and executing a shot a LOT. It is not uncommon for people from high deer density states to shoot 4-10 deer a year with a bow and there is nothing that teaches you how to draw, how to execute as shot more than actually doing it. I realized this was something I needed to do early in my bowhunting career to get better. I would fall to pieces at the sight of a doe. It took many, many kills to get this somewhat under wraps. I still get extremely excited when a deer walks in but because I have shot many of them, I feel like I am killing whatever I draw back on. That doesn\'t mean I will never miss....it just means that I expect instead of hope to kill everything. I have always believed that to get good at killing deer with a bow you need to kill deer with a bow.
The reason I bring this up is that I was listening to the Meat Eater podcast and Chris Denham mentioned something that got me thinking about this. He said when he guided archery elk hunters that his favorite hunter was the whitetail guy. He said the first day they would be freaking out at all the bulls bugling and not really knowing what to do but he said within a day or so he would see them settle down and then normally at the moment of truth they were good to go because they had shot so many deer with their bows that they stayed sharp. He contrasted that with the western hunter that doesn\'t do OTC now and only puts in for limited draws. They finally draw their tag after 10 years and realize that their hunting skill had greatly diminished and they couldn\'t get it done because of that. I thought it was interesting that he said that and never really translated my original thought (shoot a bunch of deer to get good at shooting deer) into his thought which was killing a bunch of deer will actually help you kill other stuff too.
One never knows if he can keep it together on an elk until you try to keep it together on an elk but I do think that the repetition of keeping it together many times really helps seal the deal.
But.....I do think that the eastern hunter does have one advantage though. I have seen this evolve in my own hunting career and that is the more stuff you kill with your bow, the easier it is to kill stuff with your bow. Don\'t get me wrong...I am sure many a whitetailer has crapped his pants when he has an encounter with a bull elk. What I am getting at is that many whitetail bowhunters have went through the process of putting their pin on an animal and executing a shot a LOT. It is not uncommon for people from high deer density states to shoot 4-10 deer a year with a bow and there is nothing that teaches you how to draw, how to execute as shot more than actually doing it. I realized this was something I needed to do early in my bowhunting career to get better. I would fall to pieces at the sight of a doe. It took many, many kills to get this somewhat under wraps. I still get extremely excited when a deer walks in but because I have shot many of them, I feel like I am killing whatever I draw back on. That doesn\'t mean I will never miss....it just means that I expect instead of hope to kill everything. I have always believed that to get good at killing deer with a bow you need to kill deer with a bow.
The reason I bring this up is that I was listening to the Meat Eater podcast and Chris Denham mentioned something that got me thinking about this. He said when he guided archery elk hunters that his favorite hunter was the whitetail guy. He said the first day they would be freaking out at all the bulls bugling and not really knowing what to do but he said within a day or so he would see them settle down and then normally at the moment of truth they were good to go because they had shot so many deer with their bows that they stayed sharp. He contrasted that with the western hunter that doesn\'t do OTC now and only puts in for limited draws. They finally draw their tag after 10 years and realize that their hunting skill had greatly diminished and they couldn\'t get it done because of that. I thought it was interesting that he said that and never really translated my original thought (shoot a bunch of deer to get good at shooting deer) into his thought which was killing a bunch of deer will actually help you kill other stuff too.
One never knows if he can keep it together on an elk until you try to keep it together on an elk but I do think that the repetition of keeping it together many times really helps seal the deal.
