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- Apr 1, 2014
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- 700
Scent control and laughable dog tests
There have been several tests pertaining to scent control where dogs were used to track down the individual wearing activated carbon lined garments and there’s one where the person is totally clad in an air-tight rubber suit with some form of a space suit helmet on with air pumped into it.
These tests are totally meaningless as every one of the tests had the dogs following the trail of the person from a beginning point to a final destination point. Most any animal with a descent nose could do that and it has absolutely nothing to do with a scent control regimen and here’s why.
If it were possible to have a 200 pound person made of 100% odorless materials (similar to the air tight space suit) and have him walk from point A to point B over land and then hide, a dog that is trained to follow scent or any animal with an acute nose could easily find the 100% odorless person. Some that don't think about things in any depth (which is most people), might ask how that is possible?
Stop and really think about it for a few minutes before reading on and see if you can figure out the answer to this very simple question. How could an odorless weight move over an area of ground and then be tracked down?
Think
Think
Think
OK, now that you’ve had a few moments, the answer is very simple and basic. Every hunter, golfer, fisherman, hiker or anyone that does things early in the morning remembers those mornings when they walked through dew covered areas and at some point looked at their back trail and could easily see every exact footstep they took because to the human eye, the dew was visually disrupted.
While we can easily see the disrupted ground, an animal with a keen sense of smell can easily follow the same trail by the odor of the disrupted ground and vegitation. Whenever ground, grasses and or weeds are disrupted (grasses are broken and crushed by the weight, earth under each step is altered from the weight and weeds are broken from the weight) a trained dog can and most any animal can easily follow that path even if there is no other odors whatsoever.
To a trained dogs nose there is a huge amount of odor to follow that is different from the rest of the surrounding undisturbed ground, and that odor is caused by the weight of the 100% odorless person altering the ground odor with every step.
Let's say the odorless person went down a river through the water for a ways and then got out of the river and went elsewhere like you see escaped convicts do in the movies to lose a tracking dog. Obviously if a dog were searching the river’s edge, he would immediately know when he passed over the odorless person’s path because the altered ground odor the person walked on would have a different odor than the surrounding unaltered ground.
I would bet that right after daylight my 3 year old grandson could find a hunter that had walked to his tree through a grass, weed, of green field covered in dew. To us as humans that is an easy visual to follow. Just as we can visually follow the dew disruption to a hunters stand with ease, a dog could easily follow the ground disruptions with the 100% total absence of human odor.
On several occasions every season I’ll have mature whitetails cut and follow my entry ground disruptions for a short distance as well, but because there’s an absence of human odor, they quickly lose interest and go on about their natural routines and movements. In the heavily pressured areas I hunt, if there were any traces of human odor on my entry routes, those mature deer would have spooked immediately if not sooner.
My son Chris owned two trained German Bavarian Bloodhounds for recovering deer and they could follow any scent alteration to the surrounding ground.
It blows my mind that hunters don't think of these very simple facts, but rather want to spew some BS about a dog finding a person that had just walked through and totally disrupted the ground and vegetation to where he hid. It's actually very amusing to me.
I’ve spoken to several dog trainers and from the onset of our conversation they all said that a trained dog is different in that they are trained to sniff out the perpetrator and that there is no way of fooling them. However when I laid down my guidelines for a specific scent test, they backed off on guaranteeing their dogs could locate the person.
The test I proposed to a couple dog trainers is more in line with what whitetail deer hunters have to deal with which is ambush hunting from a specific site. It has nothing to do with following a set trail.
I proposed the following as a dog test to locate me wearing ScentLok:
-I would wear my normal scent control regimen garments which consists of a PROPERLY cared for exterior ScentLok suit (jacket, pants, gloves and head cover with drop down facemask), and a pair of clean rubber boots that are several years old so they have no rubber odor.
-I would be air lifted by a helicopter and from a height of at least 300 feet off the ground (so the down current of the blades won’t disrupt the ground odor) I would be lowered by a rope into a tree (20 feet up the tree) within an area with other similar trees (odor wise) nearby where I would hook up in my clean harness. I would remain there once the chopper left. By doing this I would not be disrupting anything on the ground in any manner.
-Shortly thereafter the dog trainer and dog would arrive and the dog would be released while tethered and be allowed to walk 20 to 50 yards perpendicular and at some point pass through my downwind current (whatever distance the trainer felt would be best for my detection). In other words the dog would walk in a similar manner to a deer that at some point while moving around the tree would pass directly downwind of me. The dog would also walk in a similar stride as a deer would.
-So the dog would only be exactly directly downwind of me for a few moments as he was passing by on the downwind side, just as a deer would. Or the dog could be allowed to come in from the downwind side just as a deer would on a runway that led past the tree.
-This test would totally remove any possibility of a dog following a ground disrupted trail.
-Every trainer thought that under those conditions their dogs wouldn’t be able to detect me and I’m positive they wouldn’t because if a mature deer can’t under similar conditions, neither could a dog and I have deer downwind of me on almost every hunt. Because I pay zero attention to wind direction, I have deer downwind of me on a consistent basis.
Scent control works and I have on many occasions had mature deer walk down my entry routes smelling vegetation along the way, but not spooking and eventually moving on. Did I think they were following some residual human odor I might have left, absolutely not? In the heavily pressured areas I hunt, had I left any trace of human odor, they never would have curiously followed a path with human odor.
A proper scent control regiment requires a little extra work, especially in the beginning, and hunters not willing to put in the extra effort or don't know how to do it, it's much easier to slam the proven technology with false rhetoric that should be meaningless to anyone that researches things for themselves.
Just consider how many hunters you know that say stands are better than a saddle? I certainly hope you boohoo them because that's not even a contest either!! They are simply too lazy or egotistical to give in.
There have been several tests pertaining to scent control where dogs were used to track down the individual wearing activated carbon lined garments and there’s one where the person is totally clad in an air-tight rubber suit with some form of a space suit helmet on with air pumped into it.
These tests are totally meaningless as every one of the tests had the dogs following the trail of the person from a beginning point to a final destination point. Most any animal with a descent nose could do that and it has absolutely nothing to do with a scent control regimen and here’s why.
If it were possible to have a 200 pound person made of 100% odorless materials (similar to the air tight space suit) and have him walk from point A to point B over land and then hide, a dog that is trained to follow scent or any animal with an acute nose could easily find the 100% odorless person. Some that don't think about things in any depth (which is most people), might ask how that is possible?
Stop and really think about it for a few minutes before reading on and see if you can figure out the answer to this very simple question. How could an odorless weight move over an area of ground and then be tracked down?
Think
Think
Think
OK, now that you’ve had a few moments, the answer is very simple and basic. Every hunter, golfer, fisherman, hiker or anyone that does things early in the morning remembers those mornings when they walked through dew covered areas and at some point looked at their back trail and could easily see every exact footstep they took because to the human eye, the dew was visually disrupted.
While we can easily see the disrupted ground, an animal with a keen sense of smell can easily follow the same trail by the odor of the disrupted ground and vegitation. Whenever ground, grasses and or weeds are disrupted (grasses are broken and crushed by the weight, earth under each step is altered from the weight and weeds are broken from the weight) a trained dog can and most any animal can easily follow that path even if there is no other odors whatsoever.
To a trained dogs nose there is a huge amount of odor to follow that is different from the rest of the surrounding undisturbed ground, and that odor is caused by the weight of the 100% odorless person altering the ground odor with every step.
Let's say the odorless person went down a river through the water for a ways and then got out of the river and went elsewhere like you see escaped convicts do in the movies to lose a tracking dog. Obviously if a dog were searching the river’s edge, he would immediately know when he passed over the odorless person’s path because the altered ground odor the person walked on would have a different odor than the surrounding unaltered ground.
I would bet that right after daylight my 3 year old grandson could find a hunter that had walked to his tree through a grass, weed, of green field covered in dew. To us as humans that is an easy visual to follow. Just as we can visually follow the dew disruption to a hunters stand with ease, a dog could easily follow the ground disruptions with the 100% total absence of human odor.
On several occasions every season I’ll have mature whitetails cut and follow my entry ground disruptions for a short distance as well, but because there’s an absence of human odor, they quickly lose interest and go on about their natural routines and movements. In the heavily pressured areas I hunt, if there were any traces of human odor on my entry routes, those mature deer would have spooked immediately if not sooner.
My son Chris owned two trained German Bavarian Bloodhounds for recovering deer and they could follow any scent alteration to the surrounding ground.
It blows my mind that hunters don't think of these very simple facts, but rather want to spew some BS about a dog finding a person that had just walked through and totally disrupted the ground and vegetation to where he hid. It's actually very amusing to me.
I’ve spoken to several dog trainers and from the onset of our conversation they all said that a trained dog is different in that they are trained to sniff out the perpetrator and that there is no way of fooling them. However when I laid down my guidelines for a specific scent test, they backed off on guaranteeing their dogs could locate the person.
The test I proposed to a couple dog trainers is more in line with what whitetail deer hunters have to deal with which is ambush hunting from a specific site. It has nothing to do with following a set trail.
I proposed the following as a dog test to locate me wearing ScentLok:
-I would wear my normal scent control regimen garments which consists of a PROPERLY cared for exterior ScentLok suit (jacket, pants, gloves and head cover with drop down facemask), and a pair of clean rubber boots that are several years old so they have no rubber odor.
-I would be air lifted by a helicopter and from a height of at least 300 feet off the ground (so the down current of the blades won’t disrupt the ground odor) I would be lowered by a rope into a tree (20 feet up the tree) within an area with other similar trees (odor wise) nearby where I would hook up in my clean harness. I would remain there once the chopper left. By doing this I would not be disrupting anything on the ground in any manner.
-Shortly thereafter the dog trainer and dog would arrive and the dog would be released while tethered and be allowed to walk 20 to 50 yards perpendicular and at some point pass through my downwind current (whatever distance the trainer felt would be best for my detection). In other words the dog would walk in a similar manner to a deer that at some point while moving around the tree would pass directly downwind of me. The dog would also walk in a similar stride as a deer would.
-So the dog would only be exactly directly downwind of me for a few moments as he was passing by on the downwind side, just as a deer would. Or the dog could be allowed to come in from the downwind side just as a deer would on a runway that led past the tree.
-This test would totally remove any possibility of a dog following a ground disrupted trail.
-Every trainer thought that under those conditions their dogs wouldn’t be able to detect me and I’m positive they wouldn’t because if a mature deer can’t under similar conditions, neither could a dog and I have deer downwind of me on almost every hunt. Because I pay zero attention to wind direction, I have deer downwind of me on a consistent basis.
Scent control works and I have on many occasions had mature deer walk down my entry routes smelling vegetation along the way, but not spooking and eventually moving on. Did I think they were following some residual human odor I might have left, absolutely not? In the heavily pressured areas I hunt, had I left any trace of human odor, they never would have curiously followed a path with human odor.
A proper scent control regiment requires a little extra work, especially in the beginning, and hunters not willing to put in the extra effort or don't know how to do it, it's much easier to slam the proven technology with false rhetoric that should be meaningless to anyone that researches things for themselves.
Just consider how many hunters you know that say stands are better than a saddle? I certainly hope you boohoo them because that's not even a contest either!! They are simply too lazy or egotistical to give in.