The Best Scent Strategy

You stink! No, I don’t mean to other humans, I mean to animals!

 

If the wind is in their favor, deer can smell us, literally, from a half mile away. That’s why the most successful trophy hunters take such great pains to try to eliminate as much of their own odor as possible and then mask what they miss when they are hunting or wingshooting.

 

Scent control starts at home or the hunting lodge where you’re staying. We all know about the importance of showering using unscented soap and shampoo. Best case scenario is that your clothing is charcoal lined and washed in a soap with no perfumes in it and then separated from household odors by storing them in a scent-free plastic bag or tub.

 

An option to keep your own body odor away is by using a dietary supplement called Nullo. It has been around for decades and is sold primarily to help people with excessive problems with body odors.

 

The product’s primary ingredient is called chlorophyllin. It causes a change in metabolism of odor-producing bacteria and neutralizes the odorous gas in bacterial cultures. Thus, the odors of bodily wastes, including exhaled breath and sweat, are dramatically reduced or eliminated. Generally, it takes Nullo anywhere from two to 14 days to neutralize a bodily odors, so be sure to plan ahead.

 

Use both Nullo and charcoal laced clothing and you have a high tech solution to scent management.

 

A few other tips:

Don’t put on your outer layers until you arrive at your hunting destination to avoid contaminating those clothes with odors from your vehicle.

 

Before you put on your outer layers, spray them and all the gear you’ll be carrying into the woods with a liberal dose of a scent eliminator such as NO-ODOR Spray, which uses oxidation to control body odor.

 

Spray your boots with some sort of cover scent. Raccoon and fox urine are two popular cover scents. I like to spray my boots with doe urine that has no sex attractant in it.

 

Even though you’ve taken all these measure to kill and mask your scent, the last and most important thing you can do to keep a deer from smelling you is to play the wind. Always hunt downwind from where you expect to see deer. That might mean you can’t hunt your favorite stand as often as you’d like, but the sacrifice is worth its weight in antlers.