Picture your scent as a cone emanating from your body, so the farther it travels from you, the wider and less concentrated the cone gets. The best way to deal with it depends on how and where you hunt. You might get lucky smoking a cigarette on a sawdust pile, but ignoring scent will more often ruin your hunt. Their noses are supposedly up to 1,000 times more sensitive than a personвЂ™s nose. Human stink is a dead-giveaway to deer, though. He relished rubbing in the fact that he had shot an 8-pointer as he sat on a sawdust pile smoking a cigarette.ДЄnd still, I continued that ritual for more years than IвЂ™d like to admit. His friend laughed a little too heartily when my dad told him what we had done. Somehow I convinced my dad to participate, so we got up tired, went out cold, and came home empty-handed. I remember reading that the thing to do was get up right after you went to bed, bathe in some commercially branded version of baking soda, then walk outside naked and get dressed in the 15 degree clothes you hung outside last night after you washed them in $15 detergent. Scent-blocking products were getting really popular at the time. Mostly what I could get my hands on were glossy ad-driven magazines вЂ“ there were no Facebook groups or Reddit back then. I read everything that I could get my hands on in an effort to formulate my opening day strategy. Dad had a good friend who let us hunt on his property. When I decided I wanted to hunt deer at the tender age of 15, my dad, who didnвЂ™t hunt, agreed to take me. ItвЂ™s also called 'stalk hunting' or simply 'stalking.' Stalking deer & stand placement Human Scent ItвЂ™s staying on the ground and moving quietly to sneak up on your quarry. I assume the name is derived from the act of stalking and then being still. Still-hunting, on the other hand, is somewhat of a misnomer. You either wait in a tree stand or a ground blind.

Stand-hunting is exactly what it sounds like. There are basically two common ways to hunt deer (or any big game for that matter): stand-hunting and still-hunting. The best way to ensure that hunting meets those requirements is to make certain I know what IвЂ™m doing. Law aside, that basically boils down to preventing or limiting suffering, taking only what I need, and doing whatвЂ™s best for the wild population. ItвЂ™s mindful eating.ДЄs someone who hunts for food, I feel responsible for treating the animals I hunt as ethically and humanely as possible. I would rather eat wild, and taking an active role in the process makes me more aware of the sacrifice of the animal, which gives me more gratitude. I do make exception for humanely raised meat, but humanely raised is still raised for the sole purpose of feeding a human. 20 or so years later, I still eat mostly what I hunt or scavenge from roadkill. When I was in my twenties I stopped eating commercially raised meat altogether. I also feel better knowing that the meat IвЂ™m eating was not bred specifically to feed a 'civilized' society with no possibility of freedom, because jumping the feedlot fence is not an option. Knowing that makes me feel much better about what I'm eating. The deer that I hunt, on the other hand, wereВ born wild, roamed naturally, ate mostly what they were meant to eat, and weren't artificially fattened for my fork.

And thereвЂ™s the knowing that your food likely led a horrible life. There are the growth hormones, the antibiotics, the bad juju, and God knows what else that pollutes your body when you eat feedlot beef. ItвЂ™s a crime against human health and a crime against the choiceless animals who are forced to suffer the inhumane atrocities that accompany the assembly-line commodification of life. IвЂ™m no fan of the commercial meat industry. Hunting provides our main source of animal protein. Hunting is one way that I feed my family вЂ“ that includes the four-leggeds who will never be vegan and would never understand if I tried to make them so. Why I huntД«efore I get to the how of hunting, let me stress the why. A few decades into it, IвЂ™m still trying to figure it out, but I have learned enough to stock my freezer with deer meat every year. But it is something I started doing when I was pretty young.Д®verything I know about hunting is self taught or stolen from friends. Shooting: technique, sighting-in, & practice.

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