LISTEN TO THE PODCAST HERE:

Dawn Freeland Mentoring & Empowering Women in the Great Outdoors because Women Hunt Fish & Camp Too!

Welcome to another episode of Whitetail Rendezvous. This is your host, Bruce Hutcheon, and we’re heading to the Midwest today,out east, and a lady named Dawn Freeland. She believes in Mentoring & Empowering Women in the Great Outdoors. Now Dawn is a woman who hunts, fishes and camps too. Those are the titles of her stores Hunt Fish & Camp Too And if you’re on social network, you know who Dawn is. So Dawn, welcome to the show.

Dawn: Well thank you. Thank you for having me.

Bruce: And ladies and gentlemen, this is a six-month odyssey of getting out schedules together. Would you agree?

Dawn: Woo hoo! Finally getting it done!

Bruce: We’re finally getting it done! We’ve had a great warm-up.

Dawn: Persevered!

Bruce: And in the beginning of the show, — and I’m just going to start right out with this — we were chatting about, “What’s a trophy?” Because I was sharing about a younger deer. It was a gorgeous one, 35, 10-point, heavy brow tines, and it was still a young deer. It came out of Iowa and it was the perfect deer to be the logo of Whitetail Rendezvous, my new show. Brand new. Full potential. And we’re growing.

Dawn and I started talking about that and Dawn said, “Well, here’s what I feel about it.” So Dawn, let’s here how you feel about it.

Dawn: Well to me, the trophy hunter, or “trophy” is anything that had captivated you. That is something that you’ve worked for, that you’ve earned, that is a legal and an ethical kill. I’ve always said, “A trophy is in the eyes of the beholder, or the hunter.” A trophy to one person might not mean the same thing to the next person.

A small doe, perhaps, which is something that you’ve worked for, you’ve stalked. You’ve put the time in. You’ve put the effort in. You made a clean kill shot, and obviously it was a legal shot. And that you’re just as grateful for that deer putting meat on the table as if it was the largest buck that you had ever seen in your life. It’s still a trophy. It’s something that you feel in your heart. It’s something that you feel in your soul. And it’s something that you just are excited about, and you are just happy about, and very proud of.

Bruce: Now, why do you think we’re fixated — and I’m talking about both guys and gals — about mega bucks? Huge bucks, you know. We’re talking Booner Bucks, or, “It’s got to be a Pope and Young 125, 130 buck or I’m not going to shoot it.” A Pope and Young, Boone and Crockett, 150 or above. But don’t you think we’re missing something there?

Dawn: I have a different take on the whole thing. A lot of people disagree with me, and that’s okay. That’s just fine. I disagree with them also. But as long as we’re respectful of each other’s opinions and what not. Some people, they only want to take the biggest and the best, and they pass on anything that’s smaller. I’m seeing in some of the areas of the country that have that mentality — that you have to have certain points to take a buck — we’re finding that some of those areas that that’s been instilled in for a while, some of the genetics are getting a little messed up.

Some of the smaller bucks, that aren’t being taken and that have the genetics big issue, are prevailing, so now they’re in the gene pool. They’re really spreading that out there and we’re coming up with a lot of smaller bucks. Now I look at equality and I kind of have a little bit different take on that.

You need to take small and big. That’s just my personal opinion. This is how I feel about it. Some people, like you said, are fixated on only taking the biggest and the best. You know what? That’s awesome for them. They choose to do that. Good for them. That’s just fine.

We live on a farm that we cash crop, and we have a lot of animals that feed off of our corn, and our hay, and our soybeans, so they’re always ravaging the land. They’re always taking. They’re always taking and we’re feeding them. However, it is nice to put some of the meat back in the freezer, that we have fed those animals all year long. So now, it doesn’t matter to me if it is something that is a large animal with a large rack, as long as it is, like a said, a legal and ethical kill. As a good meat-eater, we’re going to go ahead and take that. We’re going to harvest that animal too.

Bruce: What effect… And I hope I don’t step on too many toes now. But the video, you’ve got YouTube; you’ve got Vimeo. You’ve got the Outdoor Channel and the Sportsman Channel. And it seems that everybody gets excited about big, mature bucks on film. And in reality, not that many bucks that are taken are that big. Are we skewing the perception of hunters out there?

Dawn is a woman who hunts, fishes and camps too

Dawn: Oh, boy, I have a whole other idea on the TV shows that are out there right now. I am not against anybody who takes a large animal. My time I ever have a problem with is when they don’t tell you they’re taking this animal on a ranch. When they’re not telling people that this is not an animal from the wild. They just leave that part out of the show. It does a disservice for new hunters, young hunters, women hunters, who watch these shows and they think that all animals look like that out in the wild. And that that’s what their goal is and that that’s the only ones that they can take.

Well they don’t always know that those animals are in a very secluded area, or they’re on a ranch, and this isn’t the norm. That’s not normally what’s out there. So when these new hunters, and like I said, these young hunters, are going out there in the field and they’re not seeing those, they’re thinking that there’s something wrong with what they’re doing. And it does a little disservice for these new guys that are coming out. I would say they need to be a little bit more forthcoming, a little bit more honest with that. That’s just me.

Bruce: Now my thought is, in the credits at the end of the show, you just say, “This deer was harvested, blank, blank, blank, and here’s how you contact them.” And it’s in a “farm,” or some private land that is tightly controlled. Or however you want to say it. Because filming is filming, and I understand that, but I can agree with you that there should be some sort of disclaimer because it is skewing… It’s skewing my thoughts. I’m going, “Wait a minute. I’ve never seen a buck with that type of frame, ever!”

Dawn: Absolutely. Absolutely. It should be more than just in the fine print and the small credits that are flying by at the end of the show. It should be something stated, perhaps verbally, or at the beginning of the show, so people understand the situation, and where they’re at, and what’s happening. I just believe in full disclosure; that’s all.

Bruce: Listeners — and Dawn and I didn’t talk about this in the warm-up; this is just how we’re rolling with the show — but if you think about that, there’s an organization called, “POMA,” Professional Outdoor Media Association. And whatever way you feel, Shelly Moore is the admin there.

You can find her on Facebook or whatever and say, “Shelly, I was listening to Bruce and Dawn the other day on Whitetail Rendezvous and this is what I think about that. Bruce is full of _____,” Or, “Dawn was spot on.” Or whatever. But I would really like listeners — we’ve got almost 4000 listeners who listen to the show, so there’s 4000 opinions — throw something out there. Let us hear!

Dawn: Yeah. I’ve been approached by a few different TV shows producers, asking my opinion of, “What would you like to see?” Or, “What are we lacking out there right now, especially with women in the outdoors?” I say the same thing. I think we need to show more real life hunts. We need to show more real life, all the work and preparation it takes before they even get there.

Half the time you’re showing them as they’re getting up in the morning and they’re running out, eating something and they’re running out the door. They’re sitting five minutes and they’re taking a shot at something, and they show them hanging at the end. There is so much more to the hunt that people aren’t understanding or are missing out on, that goes into that day, that morning. So I wish they would take more time on it.

Bruce: I’ll just inject this. I have a friend that is fortunate to be up in British Columbia with a film crew. He’s invited. He’s not a professional hunter. It’s just he was invited. He said he worked harder after the shot than anything before the shot.

Dawn: Absolutely!

Bruce: Because all the work… All the work. Okay, he got his critter. He said, “That only took a couple of days. Then we spent the next three days” — they were on horses, yada, yada, yada — “setting the whole thing up, taking all the back film.” I don’t know what they call it. Excuse me, folks, but I don’t know. But they had to take everything to put the show together after he took the animal.

Dawn: Right.

Bruce: And he said it was work!

Dawn: They always do it afterwards, yeah, because if they don’t harvest an animal during that show, they might not even air it all together, so they’re just wasting a lot of time ahead of time. So they put that in, plug those in. Most of those interviews that you see of people in the shows are the next day or the day after. They’re not before the show, or during even while it’s happening. So yeah. I just wish there would be a little more of real life stuff!

Mentoring & Empowering Women in the Great Outdoors

Bruce: Let’s switch it over to whitetail. How did you become a whitetail hunter?

Dawn: I live in Michigan, so that’s almost a given. If you’re going to be a hunter you almost have to. It’s a prerequisite almost. Like I said, on the farm here, we have a lot of animals that take our crops, and mostly it is whitetail. I started hunting years ago, bow hunting. I started shooting targets and just kind of gradually worked myself into the rifle, the compound, the crossbow, kind of going through the seasons just because I wanted to extend my seasons out.

Now I even do spring turkey just because there isn’t any whitetail hunting in the springtime, so kind of curbing a little bit of that hunger early on and then go through the season. We can hunt here legally, what is considered large game by DNR’s rules, with the turkey, September 14th or 15th — I’m not sure exactly which one it is — until January 1st, every day, and pretty follow the seasons as they go through.

I love it all!

Bruce: Who helped you get started? Who was your mentor?

Dawn: People have asked me that several times, and it really took me a lot to come to terms with it exactly because it’s not a one person; it’s not one thing. My dad was big hunter. Watching him go out. My birthday is October 3rd, so it’s the third day of bow season here in Michigan. He was always going out in the woods, and if I wanted to have my birthday with him, we were out in the woods with him. But he died when I just turned 11, so he didn’t really get to mentor me, or see anything later on in life, or help me with any of that because he was gone before that, before I was a teenager.

Please Subscribe, rate & review the show at http://getpodcast.reviews/id/1032967565