Come On! Really?

You know, the more I think about this whole Scent Lok thing the more annoyed I get. You figure an entire generation of hunters has been working under these assumptions about scent management. I am not saying scent management is bogus, but I am saying that Scent Lok and its ilk have certainly muddied the waters. For 20 years we've been hearing experts tell us this is one of the primary keys to successful deer hunting. I would be the first to admit that a lot of my thought has been down those same lines. I never did agree with Scent Lok's claims, but I always figured there must be something to the issue. My whole view of hunting has been clouded by this detritus-- and I never even bought one of their stinking suits.

Look at WoodsWalker. He's big on his ghillie suit. Mine has languished for years in the closet. Why? Part of it was that I found the suit to be overkill for my type of hunting. Part of it was that I was not all that comfortable in it. However, a major component of my dislike for the suit was that always stank of wet jute and no matter what I did, I could not get that stink out of it. Well ( DUH!) maybe Woodsie is right, and maybe a ghillie suit is the way to go, and it doesn't matter that it stinks like jute or hemp or that you can't throw it in a washer and do it in baking soda. It just may work, because the deer don't care.

Or cigarettes. Take ciggies. I know a bunch of guys who smoke-- here in KY it's more the rule than other places nowadays. They're successful deer hunters. How can this be? The deer don't care? If they don't care about that stink and they didn't care about whatever stench was leaking out of the Scent Lok suits and they don't care about rank, stanky ghillie suits. . . DANG! What do they care about.

Human urine? Nope, I know that ain't true. Human poopoo? If Scent Lok don't work and all these guys have been farting in their Scent Lok suits for 20 years. . . well, you do the figgerin', Braniac.

And what about all these experts that were telling us scent management was so important and how you really needed one of these stinking charcoal suits if you were going to be serious about the sport. Now what? Where they taken in by the fraud knowingly or unknowingly. Did they all go running off the cliff together like lemmings, or did they pull this off like a bunch of Chicago politicians. Are these guys rogues or rubes? My feeling is the the answer is, yes. One of those will do nicely.


I'm going to tell you a story to explain my answer. Take out of it what you want. Back when I was first getting into hunting, I acquired a neat little book. It was the 1939 edition of the Outdoor Life 'Cyclopedia. It was a wonderful little compendium of everything you could think of for the outdoors: fishing, camping, hunting, shooting, hiking. I treasured it. In fact, I have scrounged up more copies of it over the years so my sons would each have a copy. It wasn't until I got the farm that I got to try some of the stuff they suggested. A lot of it you can't do on public land or in a public campground anymore. Once I had my own place, I could do what I wanted.

Example: Here's the dream:

Here's the reality:

I tried for two season to build a hearth like the one in the book. There was no freakin' way that was going to work, and there was no freakin' way that hearth could be put together for a short-term camp that made any sense. Pounding that many stakes in was ridiculous, filling up the interior with that much dirt was ridiculous, and after one rain, the whole thing started to settle, lean, fall apart, and otherwise disintegrate.


I should have known better. They also had this picture in the book:

My comments from the summation of this project:

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Yeah right!

Okay, here are some study questions:

1) How many trees were cut down in the making of this home away from home?

2) Who the heck would actually build all that stuff for "but a few days"

3) Are they still selling the stuff he was taking without prescription?

4) Imagine trying to pull this off in a State Park Campground. How long would that last?

5) Imagine if you saw these two men in the woods today. I count only one mattress. Would you be expecting the wives to show up at any minute?

Imagine the caption : ". . . So I said to Bruce, 'Oh you wicked, girl! I was going as Bette Midler's Gift from the Oceans, and you stole my whole costume idea.'"

I see this as a new show on the Outdoor Channel: Queer Eye for the Straight Camper.
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The stuff on hunting was just as bad. Some interesting facts from this tome:

1) Turkeys have to go to water first thing in the morning after they hop down off the roost. Therefore, the best way to hunt turkeys is to situate yourself between the water and the turkeys and ambush them.
2) Deer hunting with buckshot is a highly effective method out to 80 yards. At 80 yards, the average shotgun shooting 00 will put half a dozen pellets into the chest of a running deer. They even had a drawing.

The list goes on and on.

The point is that this compendium of knowledge of the outdoors was really a pile of drivel, put together by a bunch of fey city slickers that really had no idea what was going on in the outdoors. However, if they dressed it up and made it look good, guys would buy the book. That was the 1930's. Honest and truly, I don't think the folks who put out the drivel these days are any more in tune with reality than what they were back then. I'm not going to paint the whole lot of them with the same brush. However, between the urge to make money, the urge to make reputation, the urge to make deadline, and the urge to go with the flow, I don't think many people who create content for the consumption of hunters really have much room left for original thinking, critical thinking, or (for some at least) ethical thinking. D&DH is an exception in this, but D&DH also has to address their own involvement with Scent Lok over the years. I feel no one in the industry is immune from this. Everyone has Scent Lok's taint all over them right now.

What about me? First off, no one ever confused me with an expert on deer hunting. Second, I've been saying Scent Lok was goofy in both intent and execution from the get-go. However, I'm the first to say that scent management as a concept has ruled my deer hunting life since about 2 years prior to Scent Lok first showing up. It has only been in the past 3 or 4 years I have even started to question the extent of my anti-scent compulsion. It has only been since this Scent Lok decision came down that I have realized how totally taken in I am ( even though I was a Scent Lok skeptic) and started asking the hard question: What's really the truth here?