ORIGINAL: AF Hunter
Thats all fine and dandy if you live in an area where you can bait. Here in Iowa, you can feed deer if you so desire, but you cannot hunt any trails leading to or from the feeder or the feeder itself. The deer are not afraid of me when I am on the tractor. They will walk in front of me in fact. But if I stop the tractor and get off, they are out of there! If I walk around the property, bedded deer will get up and run. Yes, deer do associate some things as non threatening, but still consider a human on foot as a threat. I would also go as far as to say the deer at your feeder wait until your scent is not real fresh until approaching, thus knowing that the threat has left.
My trail camera shows this not to be true. Seriously, literally after an hour I have had lots of deer in there, so my fresh scent didn't scare them away. In fact, if I were to guess my scent is like a dinner bell.I understand if you can't bait that this argument may notbe usefulto you, but it works for me.
Schultzy, when I am scouting I put just a touch of coon pee on my boots just in case. Oh.. and the real reason for mebringing this up was my Dad's argument.Last year he was smoking in his blind and killed a nice 10 point buck, and he looked and me and said I'm sorry, but this scent stuff is crap.His point washehas never concerned himself with scent andalways taken large deer. However, I reminded him that we alwayscamp when we hunt, sosome of the fire pit smoke may help him a bit.
Hey, if you want to put scent shield and a bit of coon pee to mask your scent I'm all for that. However, guys that spend hundreds of dollars on scent free clothing etc.. might be wasting their money. In short, I feel we give deer too much credit.