Won't name names, but watched a show last night where hubby and wife had 3 guided days to chase pronghorn. Beforehand, there was visit to secure and get coached up on extreme range shooting gear. In both instances neither ventured more than 10 feet from the rig shooting from a bipod with an open door in the edge of the frame. Lots of discussion as well on how hard it was and the fact that they drove almost 40 miles on the last day. Pretty poor example for youngsters out there.

These pros are getting less and less appealing.

In this state, one has to be 50 yds from his rig before lighting off a round at pronghorn.

i quit watching those outdoor shows at least 15 years ago. they were ridiculous. infomercials for realtree and thompson center and canned horschit hunts that 99% of hunters could never do. go to their 300k log cabin sitting on 500 acres of prime property. ride a 20k utv on well groomed trails and sit in a 2k blind dressed in 1k in clothes and watch 150 class bucks parade past all day until a "good buck" comes out and then shoot it with the 1k gun wearing a 2k scope. then act like ya just scored a touchdown while standing over a beautiful animal that just killed and have no intention of eating. those shows made me sick.

I was always appalled at the unsafe gun handling on those shows. and yes, "we hunted HARD for this deer", if they sat for more than 4 hours before it walked out in front of the blind.

There are some quality presentations out there, but I agree that between commercials and product placement, it's mostly about scratching one another's back and securing $$$. Find myself now more into reading accounts from the late 18 and early 1900's.

Pay per view, pure and simple

Can't stand to watch them any more, even Meat Eater has become a 1/2 hour infomercial. Youtube videos satisfy my need for hunting shows lately. Check out Rodney Elmer's "Mountain Deer" on Youtube - hunting under real conditions, family oriented, high level of ethics, and they're not selling anything!

Lots of good hunts/hunters on You Tube that exemplify "fair chase".




mike r

Used to pay my $4 per month. Now I save my money.

First couple seasons of MeaterEater were great, then he got “found out”. Mismatched camo and random stuff like everyone else. Heard some of the podcasts? Talk about knowing nothing about rifles.

Every once in a while, when nothing else remotely interesting is on, I will take a look. Used to be able to take five or six minutes, but lately, two minutes is about all I can stand. Most of the crap that they are shilling has zero relevance to the way that I hunt.

I've never seen the attraction to "hunting" TV shows.

Those shows would be more realistic if the chicks were topless. That's the only way I let them in the blind with me.

Saw the last ten minutes and had the same reaction you did. They were practically chasing that buck down with the truck. Don't like their show much and usually don't watch but it was on when I came back into the house from cleaning my dogs kennel. They had more s*hit than my dogs. He kept saying they were on a short limited time hunt but hunted hard. Hunting hard must mean his ass hurt from sitting in truck all day.

When I was a kid most people didnt have TV. Then for years it was often too grainy to see. For ages there was no real hunting or fishing seen on TV.

Its a blessing to see some good shows with great scenery in places I will never see. Lion and buffalo and leopard in Africa. Jim Shockey moose hunting in backwoods Russia. Grizzly and giant Kodiak, with bow no less. Randy Newberg had great hunting on TV. Western Hunter hunts. Tim Wells hunts.

Sure, there are the pukes in all aspects of life.

But there are now great hunting shows on TV exposing a lot of good guys who love the outdoors and wild places that attract and educate many to the other side of the coin. Shows showing the good sportsmen do and their love for the game they chase....

Well said Rem141r !
Everyone else what I was thinking too, so no need for me to say anything else.

It don't take a team of 15 guys to hunt elk in Az, that's all I'm sayin.

We have many outdoor shows filmed in my county...most of the hunters are “ok” at best, with many so full of themselves its pathetic. Some are just plain clueless. By far the most difficult outdoor personalities are the fishermen...no contest.

The above poster forgot one thing though. And this is a fact. A friend of mine videos for our largest camo manufacturer. The #1 there has his own crew that groom the deer after it’s down. When you see the “walk up” to the dead critter, it has already been to the beauty parlor by a team of folks that disguise any entrance/exit holes, of course wipe blood off noses and mouths and get this....they put shiny black makeup on the nose to make it appear fresh and moist! They also, and I find this unbelievable, put contact lens on the deers eyes so they look freshly killed! Producers don’t want cloudy eyes seen by the viewing public.

I’m gonna see if I can find some of those contact lens for my deer next year.

I gave up on television hunting.
Watcha couple on Youtube.

Fieldsports Britain is my fave.

Charming

Watching a retard on youtube right now, tracking a wounded elk that he shot in the back leg. What a bunch of [bleep].

About the same here. Maybe longer.

I was involved in a big name group filming spring turkey hunting. Once I saw what all went on it soured me from hunting TV for the most part. Ain't missed it one bit.

Ever never nope nada noway

There was way back, a program called the American Sportsman. I think Curt Gowdy was the poobah. Anyway, there was this huge housing development/ halfassed resort thing going in, called Lake Shastina ( a reservoir filled with algae and copious quantities of cowschidt) and A.S. was hired I guess to promote it. I was there working on a broke down Cat scraper some distance away. There was a couple of guys with shotguns, a big film crew, a couple dog handlers, about 10 gawkers and two guys with a load of chukars in cages. Found out later, one of the gunners was a movie guy named Phil Harris. So they would shoot short film sequences of the birds rising out of the sagebrush, the dogs pointing and the gunners gunning. Staged from start to finish. Nobody moved more than 50 feet from the film van. Friends later told me they saw the program on TV, and it looked like the bird hunt of a lifetime. The pitch was I guess, that if you bought one of these lava strewn lots in the shadow of Mt Shasta...you too would have grand hunting opportunities at your doorstep. Phony hunting videos ain't a new phenomena.

I have seen guys shoot deer etc with arrows from tree stands that would make you so mad you wished you could knock them right out of that stand real hard like

I remember seeing a show 6-8 years ago with two guys riding their horses with Sharps rifles across their saddle horns talking about bison. They rode and talked for awhile and then rode up to a fence with a pasture beyond it and a barn to the side. There was a lone bison standing in the pasture and the one shot it. You could see a county road in the background. It was disgusting.

About 3 years back what was supposed to an American version of driven grouse. Pen raised Ring Necks tossed off of an up hill rim.

My biggest issue with TV hunting shows is the "different class" treatment of said "stars".

I've seen (and documented here on the Fire) Lee and Tiffany baiting deer in Iowa, which is illegal, only to see a state official hunt with those phoucs. The [bleep] even posted in the local Swisher paper about his 7x7 yard vegetable gardens in the middle of the woods, then talked on TV about his "farming" of crops he cut down for bait.

I've also watched the late Dale Earnhardt hunt here with the great Bill Jordan on a late muzzleloader deer hunt without wearing ANY orange, but plenty of Realtree camo, again, which is illegal here.

Seems if you have a TV show and the graft works, all is golden.

I do like the show Dropped, it's pretty good.

What chaps me is how often the TV hunters "back out and do the right thing" and leave a deer or worse yet an elk overnight and recover it the next day "early" when the sun is already high the sky. "It got good and cold last night" they always say even during bow seasons.
You know damn well that big bull elk is soured, and sometimes the deer is eaten by coyotes. Yet they are so proud, doing high fives and backslapping.
Makes me want to puke.

Agreed ! There are times when backing out until daylight the next morning is the right thing to do but I have noticed that these “pros” have a bad habit of walking away from a killing shot that anyone knows is a deer that’s probably not going to make it 75 yards . They always go back to “camp” which is actually a 7000 square foot log cabin lodge , to “review the footage” and then make the decision to feed the coyotes with their lung-shot deer . Makes me sick !

As stated by others, those shows are so far from reality it turns my stomach. Those shows are little more and commercials for the guide, and the gear. As an example of these "hunts", one of our Big Wigs at work went on one of these canned elk hunts. The biologist for the ranch rode him around as he picked out a "suitable" bull. They looked it up in a photo album, and the biologist told him the specifics on that bull. X years old, X weight as of the last time they darted it, descendant of X line, etc. He shot the monster, had it mounted, and found out it wouldn't fit through the doors to his house, and his ceiling wasn't high enough to take the mount. He had an architect design a new "wing" to his house all set up to take the elk head. By the time he'd paid for the hunt, tips to the biologist and crew, the taxidermist, the architect and construction company, the hunt cost him close to a quarter million dollars. Yeah, I'll never have to worry about that. So phony.

A couple more observations. Tell me how in the hell these guys continue to draw the “impossible “ tags for elk, year after year?? One of my hunting spots borders the Valle Vidal in NM. It’s a once in a lifetime tag that takes a ton of luck and many years to get. God help you if you’re a non-resident. Just about as hard are the unit 16 tags in the Gila. Yet our heroes draw those tags just as easy as pie!

The hardest tag in my little world of elk hunting right now is of course, Kentucky. A bull tag is just about impossible. Yet meat eater gets a bull tag and takes a pretty one. During the show he relates that he “was asked by the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation” to come and hunt a bull. Excuse me? How the hell can RMEF dictate who draws a tag in KY? It’s a known fact that some state agencies can, and do, hold a few tags out of the draw in their primo areas for special guests.....hunting shows who can showcase (advertise) their beautiful state’s hunting resources so maybe that was it.

Lee and Tiffany have no need to bait. In their section of Iowa their are thousands upon thousands of acres of corn planted of course. Everyone in that area combines their corn.....it’s their livelihood. Lee & Tiffany who generally leave it standing or mow it down here and there. They do have major frustrations with neighbors who also like to hunt, but combine their corn, as the Lakoskys are drawing deer right and left off the neighbors and on to their property. They are not too awfully popular at all with adjoining landowners...not at all. Now, I’ll be the first to admit, I don’t know Iowa’s laws concerning corn left unharvested, and whether that is considered baiting. I would suspect not though....the show is too out in the open with their management schemes in that regard. Baiting laws can be strange. NM calls food plots baiting in some areas I hunt....wow.

Ditto....

I've quit watching that crap. Once in a blue moon I'll watch Shockey. I've never been a Jackie Bushman or Michael Waddell fan, but some of the idiots on today make them look good. I've said that you could take a hot girl, teach her how to shoot, and I'll guarantee you that somebody, somewhere, would pay big bucks to sponsor her.

I'm not sexist, and I don't mind seeing women hunters, because I have 2 granddaughters that deer hunt. But, let's be brutally honest about it............have you ever seen a big old fat ugly chick hunting on one of these shows lately. Of course not, they're all young and pretty. Poor old Brenda Valentine, back in the day, wouldn't even make to top 50 list today.......lol.

Good post. I'll add this about Kentucky..........I've put in for an elk tag every year there's been a drawing, and never got one. My son did draw an archery tag for a bull. I get a letter each year offering me a chance to "buy" a Kentucky elk tag to help support the RMEF. It's all about money, everything usually is.

Don't know about Lee and Tiffany, but I imagine that they're not too concerned with making money off their crops. We're helping them out every time we buy something from one of their sponsors.

Hunting is just like every other part of our society. There's an "us" and there's a "them" and we ain't "them". Money and power talks.

We just added the outdoor channel option to our direct tv, my son loves hunting shows. I was pretty ticked off when the first thing on was wicked tuna stuff, I can watch that elsewhere.

Watched a guy letting deer expire overnight, I don't understand that, maybe that is me being from Ga where we have warm winters, but other states do to, and if you are in shortsleeves hunting on camera, make a good shot with a bow which clearly the camera suggests also with all the slomo...and "you decide to wait overnight before trailing"...and the then next morning, he only went 30 yards into the brush. That meat is ruined... it was all about the horns for them.

Yep. Thats it in a nut shell.

I think this kid falls into the "US" category, just a young illusive Youtuber that seems to have a knack for getting his kills on camera. Pretty good for outdoor youth to relate to.

We don't even have those channels anymore. I don't miss them.

I wonder about outfits like RMEF. I remember them buying elk habitat and then the only ones allowed in were the directors. Another self serving bumch claiming to represent us?

Good ol' Brenda. Her autographed photo graces our wall. We met her at a local sportsmens jamboree a few years ago. My wife and I were working the DU booth. As down-to-earth and real as real can get. Nothing phony about her. Can't say the same about the 'painted ladies' on the current crop of hunting shows.

For several years I was a member of the National Wild Turkey Federation (NWTF). Their "banquets" were fundraisers that raised thousands of dollars. I asked if the money that was raised locally was spent locally, and always got the run around. Finally, the answer I got was that it was spent where it was needed.........and that in the local area, we were in "good shape."

I quit paying dues, and quit attending their functions. I decided I was better off to spend my money on my own land to improve habitat.

I always liked her shows. I'm sure a lot of it was staged for the camera, but at least she seemed real, not fake.

I did enjoy the old American Sportsman shows of the 60s and 70s. Also was a show in Texas called Lone Star Sportsman. sponsored by the beer. Jim something was the host

Everytime I try to watch the OC it seems stupid Wicked Tuna is on.

TV hunting shows.....

Hmmm whodathunkit

I must admit,I watch them.But only because of the alternatives offered when I sit down in front of the tube.You just have to take it for what it is,visual entertainment while letting the mind relax...

I presume you all are aware that most if not all of the shows on Outdoor Channel (and similar) pay Outdoor Channel to run their shows. They have to sell product (otherwise known as crap) to be able to pay to get their shows on TV. It wasn't always that way, but it's nothing new. That said, there are a few semi-decent shows.

Regarding American Sportsman, Phil Harris (a Hollywood actor but more famous for the Jack Benny radio show before TV) actually was an enthusiastic bird hunter, but mainly in the Southern style of quail hunting. He often hunted with Bing Crosby and another celebrity whose identity I forget.

Regarding the shooting of pheasants thrown off a hill, that is a variation of a European "tower shoot" more than a driven hunt. It's a European tradition that is used in the US, principally as a social event or corporate outing. It is a shoot, not a hunt and a few levels easier than a good sporting clays course.

I had another item but it eludes me at the moment. Carry on, gentlemen.

You are correct. The shows themselves have to PAY The Outdoor Channel (and Sportsman’s Channel) to broadcast their shows. Going rate is about 50k per show.