Ok so if that's true now , we clean our clothes in a scent free detergent , which I'm wondering which one really works better. So say we clean our clothes , then smoke them , one we are killing bacteria , but the smell of smoke is there , now if it is killing bacteria I'm sure the deer would smell the smoke smell if I can smell it as well. Would this not be some type of cover scent? I'm also thinking carbon molecules would be trapped in the smoke possibly. I'm going to look that up to see if it might be true. Therefore reducing scent. This could also depends on how much you have to exert yourself to get to your tree and get in it. I would like to be clear I'm not arguing here just trying to look into this deeper.
Sent from my E6810 using Tapatalk
I hope I'm not coming off as argumentative, either.
I think too many of us try to equate a deer's sense of smell to ours...not in how acute it is but how humans perceive strengths of competing odors. I believe it's a mistake to think we can cover our odor with another odor.
Deer are said to have olfactory abilities comparable to, or even better than dogs. Law enforcement and now even the medical field is proving just how amazing a dog's sense of smell is. Dogs sort out all kinds of cover scents that drug smugglers use. Dogs locate pretty much every substance they are trained to find. Dogs are now being used to detect cancer.
Odor busts are so complicated. There are a multitude of factors involved. 1st off, we are dealing with animals with individual personalities and makes decisions. Right there, it's hard to define whether something "works" or not. And for the record, I hate the term
"works" when it comes to odor reduction. It's way too subjective.
Another factor in odor busts is all the environmental conditions we deal with. Prevailing winds, thermals, eddys, humidity, rain, structure, etc all have an influence on how odor travels.
Yet another factor is the hunter himself. Personal hygiene, individual odor, familiarity the herd has that human, or humans in general, effect the outcome of how an individual deer makes individual decision on a specific encounter.
Back to smoke...
I'm no chemists and I really don't know
how smoke works, but thousands of years of human behavior proves that smoke kills bacteria. Man has preserved meat for a long, long time by smoking it. Does it continue to inhibit bacterial growth? Probably. Otherwise, smoking would not preserve meat, it would just give it a smoky flavor.
Smoke, as a cover scent, is completely relative. If it was strictly a cover scent, then the ratio of human odor to smoke odor would remain the same whether the deer is 5 yards away or 500 yards away. The value of smoke is the reduction of the bacteria that allows odors to grow. Can smoke
ever "work" as a
cover? If deer are smelling smoke, then they are smelling us. It's the reduction in our odor that smoke creates.