Towards a New Understanding

I caught myself this morning while I was writing a response to a fellow on another forum who was defending his use of Scent Lok clothes.

I would agree up to a point. Reducing the amount of stink your body is throwing off is a good idea. The results can be dramatic too. However, I have also had some experiences where it caused me to doubt the whole premise.

I had two nice bucks in velvet IN my turkey blind this season. They came in on the downwind side too. In fact, I have had several encounters like that over the years in the off-season. I am left to conclude that deer are at least seasonal in their worries about humans.

I have shot deer on Saturday and had the same herd back under the same stand on Sunday. I have also shot deer and had their neighbors go on munching grass. Even more dramatic, I shot The Big One back in 2007 and had to wait a half hour while other bucks came out and sparred under the stand after I shot their Boss. The stand I shot him from was adjacent to the family campground, and we go there frequently throughout the summer.

I am beginning to question exactly how in tune deer are with the whole concept of their own mortality, and exactly what we are doing out there in the woods. Mind you, this comes from a guy who has 200 acres all to himself, and I am on the property most of the year doing things that show no threat to the deer. I am sure that in high-pressure areas things may be different. However, I am more and more convinced that the idea of crawling into a $300 charcoal suit and forgetting the wind is far too simplistic a view.

What the heck am I saying here? Look, I am still not sure that we have a good handle on this thing. Think about what it means with Scent Lok going down in flames last week. It means a LOT of experts, folks we trusted for their opinions on deer behavior were caught wearing what amounts to a $300 rabbit's foot. Yikes! What does this mean?

If I look back on what I was being fed to me in the way of serious deer hunting knowledge back in the late-70's and early 80's, it was largely superstition and anecdotal advice. If I look back farther, and I have a collection of some nice books going back to the early 1900's, there is a lot of the same. Folks did not really understand deer. They were largely extirpated, and it has only been recently that the herd sizes have grown to the point where they could be observed as anything more than a set of tracks and an occasional white flag in the woods.

My feeling is that we're still stumbling for the truth. Do not get me wrong. Wearing a three day pit stink in a treestand is still counter-productive in my eyes. However, I am going back and seriously reassessing what I have seen over the years and trying to filter it through new eyes.

Let's just assume that Scent Lok's claims are bogus. That means that folks have been putting on these suits that don't work and going out in the woods. Some of these hunters have been claiming terrific results. My first response to this is that something else that they did, namely addressing other issues of personal hygiene and laundry reduced their scent signature and affected the outcome.

But is that all there is to it? My personal feeling is no. I think the new understanding needs to go deeper. I don't have answers either, only questions. For instance, I've been around cattle more in the past decade than at any other time in my life. The neighbors farm beef cattle. I have even let them pasture a few on our place at times. What impresses me about these beasts is that they are not dumb. They are pretty intelligent, but unlike horses, they seem to have a world view that makes it hard for humans to cozy up to them. It's an alien mindset, very oriented to the herd. Humans are tolerated, but with a high degree of what seems to be mistrust. I am not saying deer are like cows. However, the more I am around cows, the more I can see where I just don't get them, and they just don't get me. It means I probably don't get it with deer either and vice versa.

What if their ideas about us are different? What if we fundamentally do not understand them? What if they don't have the same understanding of mortality? Of prey/predator? Outdoor writers are taught not to anthropomorphize animals-- put human ideas into their heads. However, what if we have not gone deep enough in this?

I go back to one fundamental understanding I had when I started deer hunting. A bunch of people told me a basic truth: if you see doe come through, get ready. The bucks will prod the doe with their antlers and send them out ahead to see if their is danger. Every time I saw doe, those first few years, I always held off shooting. I always figured there was a buck somewhere in the bushes and if I waited, he would show himself.

Bunk. Of course we all know now that bucks are chasing doe in the fall. They prod them with their antlers to try and get them to breed. When doe are not ready they run off. This is the Chase Phase of the rut. However, look how that one erroneous piece of anecdotal fiddle-faddle fundamentally screwed up my whole view of hunting deer. I went through 5 seasons waiting for that buck to come out of the dang bushes.

Now we have come to a crossroads. If you assume that this Scent Lok thing really is bunk, we really need to reassess what it means. We have taken for granted that scent reduction/elimination was a fundamental pillar of contemporary deer hunting, but here are all these experts telling us "Wait! Them doe's is just scouts. There's a buck back in those bushes somewhere!" Remember that as the herds were growing two decades ago, we were all being fed the idea that scent management was a primary concern and a generation of hunters have all relied on this basic fact, just as I did the buck-in-the-bushes tale.

As a fellow who not only believed there was a buck waiting in the bushes, but saw it with my own eyes, I can tell you that having your underlying understanding skewed really horses up what you think you're seeing. If I had not picked up a copy of D&DH magazine and seriously begun to read up on the rut, I would still be out there seeing doe running through the forest and waiting for the buck to come out. I am going back and trying to re-evaluate my vision of how scent management has factored into my deer hunting, and I think we should all do the same. What have we observed and not really seen? What have we seen and misinterpreted? What have we failed to recognize, because we assumed scent-management was the answer?

As I said, these are questions. I'm just asking them. I don't have the answer.