Florida wrote:I respect your opinion, so I'm surprised to hear from you that it was so helpful. My dad's got a small piece of property so the topic applies, but I found him less entertaining and informative than most w2h guests.
He lost all credibility with me when he said I would see 5x the deer of I followed his 45 minute scent routine before every hunt. I think I'd see more deer if I could spend another 45 minutes in woods.
I did appreciate his style of hunting. Seeing lots of deer even if it does not include mature bucks is appealing to many, especially those with young children. I'm not very accomplished as a hunter and if love to see more deer.
As far as dissing Dan, I agree that he wasn't making a personal insult, but he was saying that Dan's techniques aren't applicable to most hunters. If a guy can spend 45 minutes on scent control on every hunt, he can scout a lot more if he ditched it.
I'm glad Mark had him on because it's good to hear different opinions, but I just didn't hear anything that I thought I would apply myself.
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Hi Florida. Sorry for the late reply but I just ran across this thread.
When I said in the interview with Mark that a hunter can expect to see five times the deer when using extreme scent control, I meant through the season, not on a given hunt on a given day. Most busts, in my opinion, occur out of sight of the hunter, and most occur at night. Typical small property owners will hunt a stand for 2-3 days and then experience a decline in sightings that is often quite abrupt. Using extreme scent control, over the course of the season, the decline can be expected to be much less, and so over the course of numerous sits the hunter will see perhaps 5X the deer they would have if they had used poor scent control and deer start to skirt around their stands in daylight.
Sorry for the confusion, but I will say unequivocally that I did not mean that on a single given hunt the hunter would see 5X the deer.
To others in this thread, make no mistake about it. I greatly admire the ability of guys like Dan Infalt who repeatedly demonstrate their hunting prowess.
My message is that the average hunter in my state only spends 7 days in the field (gun) and 14 days in the field (bow) so the tactics used by Dan and others, which include hundreds of scouting days, simply do not apply to the average small property owner. But that small property owner can greatly improve his hunting by spending some time with scent control, stand access, habitat improvement, etc. The demographic I am speaking to is the small property hunter who simply wants to see more deer while on stand. Most would like to kill a big buck but would be thrilled to just see small bucks and does more often than they are now.