I think some of what you have mentioned could certainly be true.... I remember reading an article in one of the hunting mags a while back that talked about the different ways blood hounds\tracking dogs actually track. Point of the article was that often times they are actually following what they called "disturbance scents"... Or basically that sometimes they aren't following a specific scent at all, but are just following the 'trail' of disturbances on the ground. Just raised a question, cause no one can tell for sure... But is it possible that deer can do the same thing? Personally, I think it's certainly possible and something to consider - which is why I try to make as little of 'footprint' as possible, even if I think I'm nearly scent free....
Whether a person is a meat eater or a vegetarian or whatever...if a deer smells you it will avoid you. So I don't think it really matters if they can tell the difference or not.
I don't know if a deer can tell the difference between a meat eater and a non meat eater. IMO, your breath is no different than any other body odor. I don't use mouth sprays, the gum, or anything else to attempt to mask my breath. A deer smell differently than we do. In the past I have used masking sprays (fresh earth and such) in an attempt to help cover up my human scent. I stopped after reading an aritcal talking about how a deer smells. I cannot quote it word for word, but the jest was...a human walks into a kitchen and smells an apple pie, a deer walks in and smells the apples, the sugar, and everything thing else that goes into making the pie. The point being, a deer can smell several different odors at the same time, therefore masking agents are actually very little, if any help. Hunting the wind is the only way to beat a deer nose 100% of time.
I think that is the point of "Scent Killer." It elimantes not only the strongest scent, but the underlying scents as well. Now if you're using a cover scent, I could see how that's important to know...
talk about hardcore, I usually just smoke a cig then go to the stand, and for even a weirder twist I used to smoke while on stand and have had deer come directly from the direction smoke is blowing - working hard to kick the habit but haven't been busted nearly as much as you would think
I watched my dad smoke in the stand for years. I cannot tell you how many times that man had to sit his smoke down to pick up his gun/bow to shoot a deer. However, I am sure he (everyone) has been busted by scent and never knew you had been busted. I chew while on stand and last year I watched a small doe feed in a field with the wind blowing into the field. The stand I was in was not hung to hunt that field, as it was hung to hunt a dry creek bed the deer use to access that field. She was about 150 yards away from, I was dressed in ScentLok (I don't care if you believe in or not, just stating facts), had taken a scent free shower 45 mins prior to seeing her, and had sprayed myself from head to toe with scent eliminator. I watched her as she fed, when she got direcly inline with my scent trail, she picked her head up and went on alert. She never flagged, did not snort, did not run. She simply backed out and left. So was it my chew spit that alerted her to me or was it just her smelling the little bit of human scent I could not eliminate? I don't know the anwser, but I can tell you that was the last time I chewed in the stand. I now wonder how many times in the past deer had done the same thing, but I never seen them because I was hunting in the timber and could not 150 yards? I am not saying that I have never killed a deer than came in from downwind, because I have and many of those were killed while having a chew in. But I don't know how many more picked my scent up with me never knowing there were there.
