I went hard down the wormhole of scent this year (maybe we can make a thread about this not on trail cam section). I was getting busted despite having a crazy scent routine, it was driving me insane. Listened to a couple podcasts with a guy who trains trailing dogs particularly for law enforcement. The gist of it, you can’t fool a deers noise. That soap, smoke, cover scent, all being smelled by that deer, dog, bear, etc BUT he also smelling you. I think he said 88% of human scent is just a genetic footprint we all have, in fact certain European countries carry a “scent bank” of criminals in case they ever need to track them later on. This is our odor from hair, skin, breath, farts and so on. Then a certain amount is from diet and last a small percentage from soaps and deodorants and the like. So animals like deer have the ability to break down each individual scent and react without processing it. This particular olfactory organ they have (we don’t) is hardwired directly to their brain. So they don’t think about scent, they react. You can fool their eyes and ears because they have to go through multiple processes before the brain interprets it. Essentially our eyes are more like their noses. We see something and we don’t have to break it down. We see and react.
So if you covered your self in coon piss to mask your scent you aren’t. The deer will smell the coon piss and you. He can smell both plain as day. If by some means you were to overpower a deers noise with some means, he will likely get spooked by that and leave anyway. He can’t use his number one like of defense. This is above my scientific pay grade, but scent molecules attach at the atomic level not the molecular level. So without some ability to change scent particles atomically we are just introducing other scents by using some form over cover scent as opposed to actually changing what is being distributed through air currents. The example was, we walk into a kitchen and someone has just baked a cake, we smell a cake. A deer or dog walks in and he smells the egg and the flour and the icing, etc.
Sorry long winded but scent control fascinates me. I would go through all these painstaking steps as a bow hunter to try to make myself indistinguishable to deer and was still getting popped. The morale of the story, understand wind and thermals and play them to the best of your ability. Everything else is most likely comfort food.
