… And 4 Things You Can Do About It.

by Steve Sorensen

What you can do to take care of scent at the source.
We’ve talked about the three main sources of odor a hunter (or anyone) produces – sweat, skin cells, and mouth. Now we need to figure out how to get control of them.

You may not need special brand-name hunting products to shower with, but you need to use something, and they’re not expensive.

First, shower before you hunt. Don’t worry about a little grease under your fingernails from that last D-I-Y oil change – that’s not the big problem. Your challenge is twofold. (1.) Wash away the bacteria that has been partying on your body. And (2.) create conditions on your body that are inhospitable to the growth of new bacteria. How do you do that? Lather up real good with anti-bacterial soap. Without scent added. Think of your skin after your shower as a desert—nothing’s growing there.

Second, realize that you’ll start shedding skin cells as soon as you towel off. You need to stop that. An anti-bacterial body lotion will help a lot. It will moisturize the skin that has just been dried by soap, and keep those dead skin cells hanging on a little longer instead of channeling down your sleeves and sprinkling out like salt on French fries everywhere you go. Again, use a product with no scent added.

Third, brush your teeth, and your tongue, and the inside of your cheeks. Do it as far back as you can go—test your gag reflex with the toothbrush. Use a non-alcoholic mouthwash. Exhaled air contains an enormous volume of gases, and they’ll drift wherever the air currents take them—so make those gases less threatening. Eat something fresh and natural. Chew a mild, minty, sugar-free gum. (Sugar just feeds more bacteria in your mouth.) Or take some apple slices with you into the woods and keep one in your mouth as much as you can.

This toothpaste might not be the only kind that works to reduce your mouth odor, but brushing your teeth is imperative, even if you do it with
baking soda.

These three steps will go a long way toward putting you in control of the scent your body produces. And that’s important, because unless you do all three, you’re not fully addressing the sources of scent. You WILL get noticed by deer.

Fourth, make sure your hunting clothes are clean. To those guys who say they don’t wash their clothing the entire season, I say “Good.” Why? Because if they’re hunting in the area I hunt, a nice buck might run into me while avoiding them.

Never fail to wash your hunting clothes. Use baking soda, or one of those fancy odor-eliminating detergents. If you can’t easily wash your outerwear, let it air out in the outdoors and switch off between two sets.

Now that you’ve addressed human odor at the point of origin, and covered your body with clean clothing washed in scent-free detergent, other techniques can now be effective. None of this has cost much, and it lays the foundation for investing in the expensive gear that fights human scent if that’s what you want to do.

Baking soda is known to keep body odor down, but it can’t hurt to use a stick deodorant designed to suppress body odor.

Clothing impregnated with activated charcoal can tie up the odor molecules that come off our bodies. Silver, a natural anti-microbial, woven into clothing can do the same. Cover your scent by storing your clothes in a bag or an air-tight tub with dirt from under your treestand if you want. Chew chlorophyll gum. Various sprays using charcoal, baking soda, colloidal silver and secret mystery ingredients are supposed to lock up human scent, and I don’t doubt they do—but all of these products will do a much better job if you start by making it a small job for them.

Most hunters are interested in anything that gives them an advantage over the deer’s most valuable defense – his nose. Certainly nothing works miracles, and even all these steps won’t beat the deer’s nose all the time because a deer’s ability to smell is truly remarkable.

Don’t forget the biggest piece to the scent-control puzzle. You must still overcome the wind. For that, only one thing works all the time. Only one thing always beat the deer’s nose. A deer can’t smell you if you’re downwind. Like I was from my cologne-up hunting buddy those many years ago. You may not nuzzle a buck, but getting within 20 yards won’t be a problem.

If you missed Part 1 of this blog, just click here.

***

About Steve Sorensen

Outdoor writer and speaker Steve Sorensen writes an award-winning newspaper column called The Everyday Hunter^®, and is the editor of the Havalon Sportsman’s Post. He is the author of Growing Up With Guns. Invite Steve to speak at your next sportsman’s event, and follow him at www.EverydayHunter.com.[hs_action id=”8244″]

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…. And What You Can Do About It

by Steve Sorensen

Do you know how badly you… yes, I’ll say it… stink?
Visions of me nuzzling a big whitetail buck flickered in my wife’s head.

I had just opened a package one of those brown trucks had just dropped off. In it was a tube of toothpaste formulated to control a hunters mouth odor. “How close do you think you’re going to get to a deer?” she asked.

This famous hunter was the 26th President of the United States. He and his predecessors in the hunting world didn’t smell like roses.

“Um,” I paused, my mind racing through a whole bunch of stuff she could have been thinking. “Maybe 20 yards.” I added, “But deer can smell you a lot farther away than that.”

“I don’t believe that,” she said.

I can’t blame her, but the truth is lots of hunters act as though they don’t believe it either. I remember hiking up a hill behind a hunting buddy years ago, and he smelled like the cologne counter at Macy’s. Once his stench filled my nostrils, I had to stay upwind of him. I probably don’t need to tell you this, but we never saw a deer that day.

My wife’s opinion is that scent control products are a round-up of gimmicks made for gullible nimrods. (Definition, nimrod: 1. In the Old Testament, great-grandson of Noah, a hunter. 2. A person regarded as silly, foolish, or stupid.)

She’s right about some of them. Some gimmicks are a complete waste. (She’s right that some nimrods are, too, but that’s another subject.)

Hunters have always been aware that deer can smell us. And contrary to what my wife thinks, deer have proven that they can smell us as much as a quarter mile away.

This isn’t an embarrassing underarm stain. It’s deer repellent.

Old-time nimrods Theodore Roosevelt, Philip Tome, Daniel Boone and other pioneer hunters did pretty well without access to a Cabela’s catalog of must-have scent-control concoctions. And when I think of those old-timers, I think they must have stunk, even worse than yours truly on my worst day.

So why, exactly, do we stink? At least three reasons.

Sweat—You might have heard that our sweat is odorless. That’s true, but it’s not true for long. All organisms need suitable habitat, and sweat provides a habitat where microscopic bacteria can grow. It’s no secret that these tiny organisms thrive in dark, damp places. Humans cover our skin with clothing (well, most of us still do anyway), and even breathable clothing holds moisture against our skin.

Do you doubt you’re shedding skin cells? Scratch your skin—those white marks are thousands of dead skin cells that you’ll soon shed.

So there you have it—the first condition the bacteria needs. As perspiration oozes out our pores one molecule at a time, a few bacteria collect there. Soon, it’s partytime. It can get wild and rank. There’s plenty to drink, and guess who’s serving the hors d’oeuvres? You are!

Skin—You already know that we constantly shed skin cells, but did you know that’s what the bacteria dine on. As they nibble on our dead skin cells and the organic wastes in our perspiration, they produce their own wastes—and that’s what creates most body odor. And with all the eating and drinking that’s going on, there’s something unmentionable that’s going on, too. Yep—the surface of your skin is a rut zone for bacteria.

Duct tape has lots of uses, but scent control isn’t one of them.

Mouth—And then there’s your mouth odor. Although the old-timers didn’t have specialized toothpaste, mouthwash and mints, somehow they killed enough deer to keep body and soul together. Maybe standing in the smoke from their campfires tended to kill the microscopic critters that cause people to stink—but they certainly didn’t inhale the smoke. Maybe cigars, but not smoke from the campfire. One wonders how they ever got close enough to be sociable.

Clothing—Some guys say they don’t wash their clothing the entire season. That’s a mistake. Why? Because you’re adding your own odor to your clothes from the inside each time you wear them. And airborne odors are coming into contact with your clothes from the outside, and getting trapped there. Do you doubt that? Let me put it into mathematical form:

Clean body + Clean clothing = Minimal odor in the airspace around you.

Clean body + Dirty clothing = Dirty body and dirty airspace around you.

There are more sources of human scent, but these are the big ones. So, what can modern hunters do to eliminate the smells that come from these three sources? Nothing. You can’t eliminate them. But you can reduce them significantly. That’s what we’ll talk about next.

***

About Steve Sorensen

Outdoor writer and speaker Steve Sorensen writes an award-winning newspaper column called The Everyday Hunter^®, and is the editor of the Havalon Sportsman’s Post. He is the author of Growing Up With Guns. Invite Steve to speak at your next sportsman’s event, and follow him at www.EverydayHunter.com.[hs_action id=”7771″]

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