The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 921: Lucia Jacobs on Olfaction

Episode Date: August 24, 2026

Steven Rinella and Janis Putelis speak with olfactory specialist Dr. Lucia Jacobs on: types of smell; scent control; human, deer, fish, and dog olfaction; gray squirrels; and more. Presented by Can-Am, the leader in ATVs, SxS, and Utility Vehicles www.can-am.brp.com Find our favorite trail cameras and hunting products at www.moultrie.com Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. The season might still be months away, but if you're anything like us, you're already living in it. You're pulling up maps when you should be working, checking trail cameras first thing in the morning, and playing out a whole bunch of what-ifs related to that buck

you've been watching grow all summer. The off-season is not downtime. It's just a different kind of hunting. An on-X hunt is built exactly for that. Trail cameras tied directly to your map, Wind and weather for your exact location and property boundaries with land ownership data whenever you need them. Download on X hunt and make the most of the dwindling time between now and season. The new Red Bull Dragonberry and Tropicberry Energizers now at McDonald's made with freeze-dried fruit and an electric burst of flavor.

The all-new Red Bull Energizers now at McDonald's. This product may not be right for you. High in caffeine, details of McDonald's.ca.ca. At participating Canadian restaurants, excluding Quebec. Hunting season is right around the corner, and first light season opener sale kicks off August 18. You can save up to 40% site-wide, and this year they're rolling out new 24-hour daily deals throughout the sale.

So it's worth checking back every day because those deals are going to change. There are also a few pieces I really like that are on sale for the first time ever, including the 308 pant and Navigator Hoodie. If you've been waiting to replace some worn-out gear, fill a hole in your system, or just get ready for the season. Now's the time. Head over to firstlight.com and gear up for the season.

This is the Me Eater podcast coming at you, shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We hunt a meat-eater podcast. You can't predict anything. Brought to you by First Light. When I'm hunting, I need gear that won't quit. First Light builds. No compromise gear. that keeps me in the field longer.

No shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at firstlight.com. That's f-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. All right, everybody, you're going to learn everything you ever want to learn about, about, oh, what's, shoot, I can't even say the word, olfaction. Olfaction. Like, how do animals smell? What do they smell?

Do humans really suck at smelling? What does a hound dog smell when it smells? something when you when a deer catches your wind what's happening is there any way to have a deer not catch your wind how good are they how bad are we we're gonna learn everything you ever want to know about about human animal ability to smell yannis putellos is here as well and he's gonna ask a lot of very pragmatic practical questions about how good are hound dogs really and what what conditions make them, you know,

I know. When do they do their job and not do their job? And who's going to teach us all this is Dr. Lucia F. Jacobs. She's an evolutionary biologist, neuroscientist, and Professor Emerita, retired but in good standing? Yeah. Professor Emerita of psychology and neuroscience at UC Berkeley, where she directed the Jacobs Lab of Cognitive Biology.

Her research explores how animals use scent to map environments, navigate complex terrain, and solve spatial problems. A world-renowned expert on animal cognition, Dr. Jacobs has studied squirrel behavior extensively. Her P.A., I'm going to point this out. This isn't in your written bio. You've studied the Eastern gray squirrel,

an animal of great importance to us. Since 1981. Yeah, the wily eastern gray squirrel. She's writing her forthcoming book on squirrel cognition, examining the surprising intelligence behind how rodent store, recall, and protect thousands of hidden food caches. To get us started, well, welcome to the show. to get a start, let me tell you a thing that I've always thought. And then I came across your work.

I got two balls in the air now. I came across your work in a book called Super Navigators. And it's a book about how animals navigate. And there was a bit about olfaction. And I found your name. And that's how I found you. A thing I've always thought. And I tell this to my kids.

I tell them like, humans, we humans, suck at smelling. We can't smell anything. But now a bear, now there's a guy that can smell, right? Like, do we suck at smelling? Are we experiencing a world that we can't even understand what an animal is experiencing when it walks outside and takes a whiff of the air? Or are we not that bad at it?

Yeah, so, I mean, there's two kinds of olfaction. And there's orthonasal where you're sniffing. in and you're using that, you're like, what's out there in the world? Like, that's when I go. Right. Yeah. Right. And then there's retronasal, which is asking what's in my mouth.

And to kind of sniff what's in your mouth, you breathe out. So you're sending air over the stuff in your mouth out through your nose. The nose doesn't really care. The nose... But I have to ask, the what's in the mouth? That is just sent molecules that have accumulated in your mouth. So I'm not a wine connoisseur, but if you are, you know, they put wine in their mouth and then they breathe. They take a little bit and they're breathing out.

So what they're doing. So pretentious, though. Go ahead. But anyway, but that's what, that's what, I mean, they're neuroscientists who, Gordon Sheppers written some great stuff about this. But yeah, and so then it's. But it doesn't have to be a physical thing, right? I'm just wondering. If you don't have any idea you're doing it, right?

Okay. So you have to be like eating something. Well, if you're, if you, if, you know, you eat something, you only got like five taste receptors, you know, sweet, sour, you know, salt. But you've got hundreds of olfactor receptors. So you, if you put food in your mouth, what is it? You're going to breathe out and, and it's going to go past your, you know, your receptors or your nose. And you're going to get all that information. I mean, sure, you can also say.

sniff a plate of food and get a lot of information. That would be ortho nasal. But then once it's in your mouth, you breathe out, and then you're getting retronasal. So humans are really specialized on flavor, which is, you know, both taste and odor. And we've met for hundreds of of thousands of years, we've been specialized on processing food, cooking food, all that. And so we've got, yeah, we're special in that sense. But at this... Oh, sorry, go ahead.

No, but at the same time, we are... We're not clueless about the other, I mean, about where we are in space. And I would say mostly it's because people assume we can't do it, so there aren't any studies of it. And it wasn't until I really started beating the drum that olfaction is being used by... across the animal kingdom to orient in space a lot, like importantly, that I started, actually,

we did a study of humans where we had people in the big room, and we had two, like, literally cue tips of odors that were hidden with all these decoys. So they didn't know what it was. And we had them, you know, they were blindfolded. We had, you know, earplugs. The only thing. What were the odors? The odors, we used actually what people, use for nosework. So that's Anas and Birch. It just, those are just ones that are, those are the classic ones that people use to train pet dogs.

And, and, but we really had a tiny, tiny amount, like you walk in, you wouldn't think this is smelly room. And then people were blindfolded and we, in a large room and we would, we took them to a specific place, but we did very meandering path and turned them around around. So they really had, no idea where they were.

They couldn't use path integration to know where they had come in for the door. And then they were given one minute to smell. That's it. And then we would do the same meandering, turn them around, turn around, bring them back out. We take off the blindfold and the earmuffs and then say,

okay, go back and find that place. And the only odor, and we did all this, you know, scrubbing the room of odors before and after. So we just had those two odors. And people could find that space again, statistically, above chance. And when I did it as, you know. When you see that space, that spot they were standing in? That spot, yeah.

And so no one's ever done that experiment with any other animal. We think that, but we did it with humans because the humans are easy to train. And, you know, I was in, I'm in a psychology department, and as I say, humans are really good for some things. And this was an experiment where humans were really, we started doing dogs first, and it was like a real pain to train them accurately, so we switched to humans. And then it turns out humans could do it.

So, but the point of it is so much of our processing is unconscious that humans are probably orienting to odors all the time and don't know it. I see. Now, I was, when I ran the experiment as a subject, I told the students, I mean, I designed the experiment, and I said, I have no idea where I was. I'm never going to. And I would still go back, and I would be back in their accurate place. So consciously, I thought, I didn't know where it was.

Like, you had a nasal sort of like, like the relative odors hitting you, this is where you'd have to go. to find that same blend of smells. Exactly. Exactly. And that's the thing about odors is you think about the world, there's all these odor plumes coming from a forest, a stream, a lake, all that. And, you know, wind direction can be fairly standard. I mean, it's going to come down a slope, you know, it's going to come along a plane a certain way. And so when you've got two streams of odors, cross. You know, it's going to come down a slope. You know, it's going to come along a plane, a certain way. And so when you've got two streams of odors, cross then that blend can become predictable. I mean, that's what we proposed, and that's what we found in humans, even though without conscious awareness, necessarily. What is it, like,

what is the smell that we smell best? I've heard people explain that we're super good on sulfur. Is there some truth of that? There's like some things that we can detect at parts per parts per million that maybe other things wouldn't know, like, we're good at certain smells? No, I, and I'm, I'm, I know that I think the smell of a corked wine is apparently something that maybe that's the sulfur. I don't have those facts right at my fingertips right this minute, but there definitely, people like Gordon Shepard, have shown that humans are better at, um, there, there are sense that humans can detect better than a dog, definitely. I mean, you know, our olfactory system is really specialized for the species.

Like we all have different components. You know, we've all got these olfactory receptor genes, but people actually, even in different continents, will have different receptor genes. And then plus, over your lifetime, you can change the function of those genes by your experience. That's called these epigenetic processes. And that's been shown in mice.

so that, and actually in humans, there's certain odors that most, there's like, I don't know, a certain percentage of people can't smell, like 20% of people. And you can take those people and train them for two months and then they can smell it. Really? Yes, yes. And there's some evidence that with a lot of training, you know, the olfactory bulb, which is the part of the brain that detects everything, actually changes in volume and size and can actually increase. And in most, in all other vertebrates, humans, it's a little less, a little more controversial.

But the olfactory bulb has, continues to add new neurons, new nerve cells throughout life. And so in mammals, there's really only two places that keep adding neurons throughout life and one is the olfactory bulb and the other is this brain structure that it's massively connected to which is the hippocampus which is guess what a navigation center oh no kidding huh I had a question about the just the way our sense of smell developed I'm getting from it that sort of the whole reason for it is just because we liked to eat different things I mean that No, that's actually true.

I mean, we, no, we, but we had a really good sense of smell before that. And so that's something that I've actually published on is why humans are the only great ape that has external nose. So if you think about gorilla, orangutan, chimp, I mean, there's very few great apes species left. There used to be a lot, but now there's just five of us. But if you also think about all the hominids that came before our genus, Homo, if you think about all the astralopithecus, we've got their skulls. And you can see from the skull that there's a bone right here, the Naxon, that you can feel your own bone and it's kind of like a ski jump. And so if you look at a human skull, like your skull, you've got a bone that sticks out on top and then a bone that sticks up on the bottom. And so there's actually forensic psychologists or pathologists,

you can give them a skull of human, and they can reconstruct the nose of that person, like 100% accuracy, whereas they say, you can never do that with an ear, you know, but the nose, because, and they do that, they take a picture of the person before they were dead, and then they've got their skull, and then they, you know, so they've been really nice, controlled studies to show that no shape is extremely individual and it can get reconstructed from the skulls.

So we can go back and look at astrolopithecus and know they didn't have an external nose. When you say an external nose, you mean just like this stick out thing. Yeah, right, this stick out thing. Yeah, I never thought about that. Like a gorilla, he's flush. That's right. That's right. And if you look at a gorilla skull, it's, you know, it just, it's completely flush.

Yeah. Or any of the great apes. What is that? Why does our nose stick out? So that's my, that was funny, you should ask. So you can stick it into stuff? No, no. So actually, you know, I'm a squirrel biologist.

But in, there was only one hypothesis to propose why. And that was proposed in 1913, which was it, it humidifies the air before it hits your lungs. If you've got cold, dry air, you know, you don't want that in your lungs. I mean, that makes sense. You know, it's so it's an air conditioner. Okay. But I came on the scene and thinking about, you know, animal noses, think, well, doesn't have something to do with olfaction. And the anthropologist had never considered that the human nose had an olfactory function.

I mean, it was all been the air conditioning hypothesis. Yeah. And so this was like 20. 15, and just then I was really lucky there were some really great anthropologists who were coming out and saying, you know, the old air conditioning hypothesis does not hold, we've tested it, these assumptions, it's not working anymore. And so it was perfect timing for me to waltz in and say, you know, hey, I'm a squirrel person, but I think we, no, I think we need to consider this, this. And so basically what I proposed

is if you look across the animal kingdom how animals orient in space is by using stereo olfaction. So if you think about stereo vision, that's like, you know, if you can close one eye, you've got mono, two eyes stereo, and predators

have stereo because it's for depth perception, right? I mean, you can estimate distance better. Well, 1964, there was a great Hungarian biologist who suggested, why can't olfaction work that way? And in the 60s, people were already testing it with honeybees. So they've got antenna, right? And so if you immobilize one antenna or you cut one antenna, and then you give them a really simple choice test, it's called a Y maze. So, you know, do you turn left or right to get to the reward? Honeybees were, they couldn't do it if it was fixed and they couldn't do if it was cut.

And so... Like to say, so just to make sure I'm getting this, I mean, the same way, stereo hearing, how do you describe that? No, stereo, exact, stereo audition, yeah, yeah. Like, I can close my eyes and if Gianni talks, I know he's over here. Exactly, exactly. Exactly. But if I didn't have two ears, I would just know it would feel like an omnipresent sound. That's right.

Not directional. Yeah. So you say with these honeybees, you clip one, and he can't tell if the smell's coming from left or right? Right. Right. Right. And so meanwhile, what's if you, they did it with slugs who have tentacles. You know, they don't have antenna, but they've got tentacles.

Exactly the same result. They did it. They've done it with hermit crabs, which have, um, Not hermit crabs. They did, I think it was lobsters because they have antennials. Yeah. And the same thing, antenna form things. And they cut it the same thing.

And then the really cool result was garter snakes, which have, you know, forked tongues. And it turns out the forked tongue, they take. No way. Yes. Yes. And if you cut one tine of that forked tongue, they are less, you know, they're slightly disoriented. They get lost. If you give them a simple task, like, you know, left or right, they're worse at it, you know.

Really? Yeah. And that's because, whoops, what they're doing is, you know, they are out there with a tongue sampling airborne odors. And they pick it up on the two tines of that tongue. They bring it back in. They're actually using a different olfactory system that's called the vomom. nasal system and there's two pits in the palate, the hard palate of the mouth. And they bring the tine in and they literally pick up with chemicals, they bring in it and they stick it into those pits.

No way. Yes. Each little tong, each little prong has his own little pit. Well, yes. Yes. And they deliver it back into his mouth. Right. Exactly. And that's what, and if you see a snake, do it, that's exactly what a snake's doing. It's going check to, you know, sample, sample, sample. And then what is it? Sample, sample. And then what is it? Sample? Sample Sam. I never thought about that forked tongue business. Yeah. Yeah.

And what's really cool is that these evolutionary biologists, if you look at, there's lizards, you know, snakes are basically really just specialized lizards. And they're lizards that have forked tongues versus lizards that don't have a forked tongue. And the lizards with forked tongues are more mobile. They're more predatory. They move at greater speeds, all that kind of stuff. So it's definitely. God, man, I didn't know that. Have you ever, I don't know if you ever notice this.

Let's say you'd like be walking around the woods, okay, or walking down the road, and you'll all of a sudden get hit where you know there's something dead and rotten. Yeah. Yeah. It is so hard to find it. Oh, that's interesting. Do you know, like, you're like, you're like, you know what I'm talking about? Dude, something is dead. But you can't, you can't, it's like, it's like hearing a high-pitched noise.

You can't tell where it's coming from. You become aware something's dead somewhere. Right, right, right. But I feel like if you have a dog with you, that's some of a bitch is on that smell like in seconds. Like to him, it's not confusing. Well, and it could be because we are really sensitive to that smell. And so, like, you know, we're probably, like,

that could be something that we are incredibly sensitive to. And so it's all around us. But a dog, I mean, is specialized to, to hunt. to track location of scent. So they've got a completely different, not only do they have twice as many olfactory receptors as us, but they also, like inside the nose, they have a whole area where when they're sniffing in,

it's, like, they open up the front of their nose and it gets sucked in and it goes straight to the olfactory area. It's really like there's a little corral that the air comes in and boom, it goes right into that corral. And we don't have that. Ours is kind of flat. So, you know, we're never going to be as good at localizing odor as a dog. Got it.

Hey, your neighbor, you know that guy your neighbor? He's been out there all summer. He's hanging cameras. He's watching the photos roll in. He knows where that buck is bedding, where he's feeding. He's pinpointing where he needs to be on opening day. You've seen the pictures, and you know the deer is there. The question isn't whether that buck gets shot this fall.

The question is whether it's your story or his. So tip the odds in your favor with the Onex Hunt app. Trail, camera analysis, hyper-local wind and weather forecasts, and the insights to act on what you're seeing. Don't show up to opening day empty-handed. Bring Anex Hunt. The new Red Bull Dragonberry and Tropic Berry Energizers, now at McDonald's. Made with freeze-dried fruit and an electric burst of flavor.

The all-new Red Bull Energizers. Now at McDonald's. This product may not be right for you. High in caffeine, details on McDonald's.cair. At participating Canadian restaurants excluding Quebec. Meat-eater's season opener sale is live. And if you've been waiting to gear up for your hunt, now's the time. Buy one, get one free on all Meat-Eater teas and hoodies.

50% off select game bags and deals on gear from some of our favorite brand. brands, First Light, Phelps, FHF, Multery, Yeti, and more. And for after the hunt, we have a limited time offer to save on our most popular seasonings like backstrap brew, campfire crust, and backcountry bark. Or get the six-pack to try them all. Our favorite time of year is right around the corner. Head over to the meat eater store.com to check out our season opener sale. You know another one that hits you like you can't tell where it's coming from real bad?

is the smell of a skunk. Oh, that's interesting. And that's, uh, that's just like, it's everywhere, yeah, but nowhere. Yeah, yeah. And I have personal experience where I had a,

I had a, like a cattle, hypodermic needle in my garage. Uh-huh. And I had had some skunk essence in that thing. And for weeks, it was a family mystery. Why did the whole garage smell like skunk?

Right. No, you could walk around that grunk. all you wanted. And no one was able to go like, oh, it's coming from right there. That's, it was just everywhere all at once. Well, I wonder if that's because it's so potent. Like we are so sulfur. We're so sensitive to sulfur or whatever that is that it just needs one molecule. Yeah. And it overwhelms you. And well, you know, and how odor moves. It's mostly through, it's through air temperature

actually so convection and people it's so you so you can put like if you had skunk in a room with vacuum sealed it wouldn't move at all it would stay in that one place but as soon as it's you've got higher then you've got wind I mean tiny amounts of temperature differences

will start small wind movements and so your garage you've got wind, even though it doesn't feel like it. No, I don't even mean, yeah. And so imagine that your nose only needs three molecules of skunk to say there's a skunk. And every single place in the garage has three molecules of skunk. So there's just no way to find it. Whereas the dog is like, I mean, the other thing about odor is that you habituate to it.

And so then it becomes a background. And then you can smell. something, you can smell the foreground. Yeah. And in fact, when mice, the faster they smell, the more the, they can have like a smell they're looking for. And the faster they smell, the more it separates the foreground from the background. So when a dog starts looking for something, you know, they'll be sniffing really fast. They'll be, they're trying to discriminate, right?

And that's what they're doing. They're trying to, you know, background one set of smells and foreground, you know, the other. Yeah, that's funny. Yanni's dog when he's got his hound dog. For that dog, like, if you set a duffel bag in my house, I have like a little mutt dog, it's going to be like not that. It'll give it a passing whiff. Uh-huh.

His dog basically has to sit down and spend 15 minutes on that dog. duffel bag. Wow. I mean, like, every aspect of that duffel bag that, like, explores it. Wow. You know?

It's like, so even within that, even within dogs, they're on a separate. Yeah. They're like, these two dogs are on a whole separate trip. Yeah. Yeah. With what they, like, with what that's right. That's right. They're thinking and doing.

Absolutely. And a lot of that is breed, you know, obviously, that's why people have different breeds for different kinds of hunting. but also personality and experience. That's something you don't think about personality and experience. Yeah, and this is actually a huge area now in animal behavior is personality and showing that animals have different personalities from the, you know, and you can measure it throughout an animal's lifetime,

and they will respond differently to the same circumstance, the same situation. reliably. The same animal will respond differently? No, the same animal will respond like the animals who are actually worked on chickadees who are bold, who explore more.

Sure. And then who, the others, who are cautious and who explore more slowly. And as, it's even genetically based. So you can have a bold father and a cautious mother and they will have chicks,

some of which are bold, some of which are cautious. And depending on what the food situation is that year, it might be that a bold bird does better. And then you'll see the ones with more bold chicks do better, and there's more bold birds in the next generation. And then someone's got a house cat outside and the bold bird. Is that a real disadvantage? Is that a real disadvantage?

Right, right, right, right, right, right, right. Hey, what, what, okay, when we smell like it's all through the air, right? Or like you said, you taste it. Yeah, yeah. But what's going on when a fish smell something? Is he smelling? Like, yes, yes. Is he tasting it or smelling it or what is he doing?

Well, because it's all in the water. Both. I mean, both actually, like, you know, fish have, can have taste receptors all over their body, like catfish. So they can literally taste with their whole body. That's different. They're really special. Like, someone like a catfish. They're real olfactory specialist.

theoretically take a catfish and hold his head out of the water and put yeah and dunk his body in the water and he's conducting some smell type activity yeah he's like delicious yeah with his head out of the I mean I know that it wouldn't work but like theoretically theoretically I think that right because I mean I think that's true of a lot of I think goldfish catfish but um their olfactory system is incredibly good and they um I mean we're basically fish you know we're We have the same brain as a fish. We have the same skeleton as a fish. We just, like, you can take a fish skeleton and stretch it. And, you know, it looks like our skeleton is not that different from a fish skeleton 400 million years ago. So, and the brain. Backbone ribs, whatever.

Everything. And most of the brain, not the big cerebral cortex, but most of the, most of the other things in the brain that I've talked about, that's all the fish. It's all there before we left the water. So, but fish, the big difference is bony fish have four nostrils. So they've got two sets. Oh, they've got anterior and a posterior. And so they've got water comes in through the anterior. It goes through the olfactory epithelium.

That's us up here. That's where ours is. It goes through it on top of the snout, and then it comes out the back. Comes out the back. Yeah, because they've got like four holes. in the top of their snout. So two are input, two are output. Oh, good.

So they come in, it goes out. But what's different about fish is because they can smell anything that can be dissolved in water. So you can have like big molecules, huge things like peptides that fish can suck in to their nostrils. and they've got receptors to tell them what it is. And so you've got aquatic animals like have completely different olfactory receptors because they can smell tiny things, big things, as long as it can be dissolved in water

and they can suck it in, they can smell it. Anything water-soluble. And then you get frogs, which live, you know, both in water and in the air and they've got some water, you know, receptors and some air receptors. And you look at their... Also, he can, a frog can smell out of the, like a bullfrog can smell up in the air or down in the water. Right, right. And they've got, they've got like a valve that they can close so that they can smell, you know, one way or the other. And other animals have done, like sea turtles can do that.

But then when we came onto land, when vertebrates came on to land, and then we never went back, you know, what happens is that we became completely land-based terrestrial animals, right? And then we lost the ability to smell things in water because, you know, you can't snuff up, you're not going to smell anything in water. And we became air specialists. So once, and so if you look at the, you know, the genome of land animals, it went from the fish genome to the frog genome, which is kind of 50-50, and then it became the, you know, the land genome, which is all air genes. And so that's when we became really specialized for orienting only in air. But that means that our nose can only detect little molecules that are volatile that are in the air. We can't detect big molecules because guess what? They don't travel in the air.

So what I realized was all these other animals are using antenna for sterilefaction, and they need it to orient. And it turns out that basically what we've, what this external rubbery mammal knows is a couple of tubes. And if you, and the physicists have shown that if you suck air through a tube fast, what happens is kind of acts like an antenna. So an antenna is where, you know, you can, if you're, if you're, You want to orient space, you want to have a sample here and a sample here, right? So you don't want the samples close together. You want the far apart. And so if you've got tubes on your face and you suck in air fast, the air comes from further

way. It's just a, they did this purely with tubes, physics. My collaborator, John Kamaldi did this. And so what I propose is that humans are basically tube noses. And the other tube-nose group is the seabirds, albatross, and the shear waters. Those are called literally the tube-nosed proselyariforms are called tube-nosed seabirds. And those seabirds like petrels, albatrosses, they are specialized. They spent most of their life in the air looking for food on the ocean,

which is like, as Gabby Nevid says, like a needle in haystack. And the way they orient, and she's done work on this, is they orient to a smell. So there's when krill eat phytoplankton, they emit disulfide, what was it? Anyway, they emit a sulfur compound. And the birds can detect that from far away. And then they come in because. No way, really? Yes.

And that means because the krill means, where they're going to find fish and food you're kidding me they can smell krill under the water somewhere by what's coming up by what's it's it's being released um yeah uh it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a hard of it no it's methylide sulfate yeah i'm just trying to show off my my chemistry which is like can i can't just remember that one is methyl disulfine um no it's and and birds actually there's studies now in seagulls and homing pigeons and little songbirds

that if you block their olfactory system, they are disoriented. Really? Yes. Yes. No. And birds, and, you know, and people saying, that does make sense. But then, you know, there's atmospheric winds that are carrying odor from like

continents, which is actually a lot of information. How he can find his way back to land. Right. So anyway, so there's the tube knows birds. And so what I proposed is humans are the tube-nosed apes. We, you know, we were the only ape that have this thing. And then since there's been studies showing that, yeah, if you block one nostril with humans, when, if you blindfold them and put them to track a coconut, I mean, a chocolate trail across some grass that if you block one, if you block one, you, if you block one, nostril or you swap the inputs to the nostrils.

They put a big mask that either blocks one or swaps. So this was Nome Sobel's work at Berkeley. It was great work. That the humans are disoriented. Really? Yeah. And so humans can orient, just like a dog, you know, a trail.

I mean, they can track. And then Ken Cotanian did this work with moles where he put tubes in their star-nosed molds. And he put little tubes in their nose. And all they did. had to do was, you know, move a few centimeters to find an earthworm. And if you block one, tube, or if you cross the tube, so you've got the inputs coming crossed, completely disoriented. The mole is just like walking over the earthworm and can't find it. So that shows you that

it's not just the amount of data that's coming in. It's where, is it coming in on the left or the Right. So it's just like you were saying about your ears. I'm going to be walking through the woods, navigating a whole different sense here in two weeks when September it takes off. You know, I would... But here's the deal, though, about the birds. A lot of the, like, if you're hunting a lot of stuff, you need to be very aware of the wind.

Because you got to come in from downwind, or else it's going to smell you. But when you, no one plays the wind with turkeys but turkey actually well turkey vultures are really good sense of stuff the turkey turkey yeah there's no

maybe it's just a thing people miss there's no sense of needing to hide from a turkey's nose that's right and that's probably true though oh you think that is true well there's more work now birds little songbirds they avoid nest holes that have if you put a predator odor in there there's work

now about mate choice and birds even like zebra finches little desert birds that are choosing nates based on odor. So you think it's possible that a turkey could smell you? Oh, but I think it's, I think vision and olfaction, we all

have, we all have both and what you use depends on who you are and the context. And so Turkey has got such great incredible vision, you know, color vision, incredible acuity and hearing, you know, and they're probably getting 90%

of their but I bet I wonder if there if there isn't some dude that'd be some good study for you to work on is can a turkey get a whiff of a person yes yes and change its course because it winded you

because we are we assume that they have no ability to catch your wind yeah I would say it's it you know it isn't no ability it's kind of like if you look at Like David Meck's work on wolves, they start by its olfactory. And then at some point, they, you know, they know from the concentration that they're right on, they're very close.

And then they're going to switch to vision. And I'm sure you know this from your, you know, your dogs. So it's not like they don't have one or the other. And sight hounds, of course, are going to be more visual because they're big, open plain desert breeds, right? So it's going to vision makes more sense than olfaction. Because when things are dry, that's, you know, that's bad for olfaction.

You'll faction, you want. I was one of his question. Yeah, you want it cold and, and well, actually, warm and humid is perfect. But, but definitely humid. And, yeah, we, no. I'm looking at him to see if this clicks with poundsman lower. Well, yeah.

And I'm just reserved because I don't know if we're going to, are we going to get into the hounds and stuff? Before we get to the hound dog question, I think we've, we had this one when we were discussing having Lucia on, but like does a speaking of animals and their relationship to, you know, wind and smelling each other and the predator prey relationship, does a predator like a mountain lion know that it emits an odor? and thus it has to be downwind when it's approaching a prey animal. Yeah, do they play the wind? Absolutely, absolutely. They, I mean, because they're incredibly, I mean, mountain lions are very different.

I mean, Philids are going to use odor less than canids. So a wolf, a coyote is going to be using odor very differently than a mountain lion, which is ambush predator. So they're going to be up and a perch, right, going to ambush. that they're going to use odor, and they're going to certainly be aware of their own odor. You think so? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

I mean, we live in this, I was just thinking about this. It's like the odor internet. You know, the world is basically an odor landscape that we're stupid about. But all these other animals, they, I mean, the plants have got their own odors, the plants are communicating. The animals are, you know, communicating.

And what's actually interesting is that sometimes predator odor is actually attractive to a prey animal because they recognize that is not a scary, that predator is not a problem. Because I know that predator. And so I'm going to, you know, I'll be attracted. I'm going to get more information by spending more time with that predator. And so you can do the same experiment where

than another individual is like, no, no, I'm a little smaller, and that's a dangerous predator to me. So if I smell that, I'm going to be out of here. But what was that there was a study? This is insane. In gray kangaroos in Australia that were, they gave them, which are like 60, 100-pound animals, you know, they're big, right? If you just, a naive one was not at all put on,

off by the smell of a Tasmanian devil, which is, you know, an aggressive carnivore. It's much smaller, but it's aggressive. But if you gave them Tasmanian devil's scent, they didn't avoid it. This is like an experimental situation. But if you gave them the scent of Tasmanian devil who had eaten gray kangaroo, it was incredibly aversive. So the kangaroo. No way, really?

He's smelling that little combo. That that predator, that 12-kilogram predator, eats me. And therefore, I'm going to avoid that predator. And they didn't before. So, I mean, that's the kind of information that is in scent. Okay, but see, people, there have been hunters that have tried to switch over to a vegetarian diet. Oh, that's interesting. Uh-huh.

Yeah. We think they're crazy, but my dad had a buddy. Yeah. That's actually interesting. They would eat all kind of apples and drink all kind of apple juice before both. But I think that was so that when they would pee, they would make a scent that would be attractive to deer being apples. But he wasn't thinking about seeming like a not meat. Yeah, he was thinking about that he would just seem like animals.

So how long would it take for me to eat a completely, I don't know, vegetarian diet? I think you should go vegan for two months. No, no. And he was like, that song the bitch eats deer. until a deer would be like, oh, no worries. Don't worry about that guy. You know, you also have, you know, in general, if one per human is not eating, eating me, but everybody else is, you know, they might say, you know what, I'm just going to be.

So it's not on an individual basis. No, but, you know, that's an interesting, that's an interesting question. I think if you had, if you were tracking one particular deer, like, you know, just, you had an individual relationship, and then you went vegan for six months. I mean, I don't know how... You know, people do these experiments, you know, like how long is it take for you to be able to smell garlic on your breath or something you're eating?

I mean, it comes out, you know, all that, everything you're eating is coming out through your skin. Apparently, this actually, I read that, that in Vietnam War, the Viet Cong could smell American troops coming in because they smelled like, as what they said, spoiled milk because they were cheese eaters and that wasn't in the Vietnamese cult cuisine. My dad, my dad said that he was in World War II. He said the smell of Germans and make the hair on the back of his neck stand up. But he thought it was this. He thought they had a kind of cigarette.

Uh-huh. Uh-huh. And they had, you know, the crowd, the whole crowd thing. He thought they had a kind of cigarette and he could smell that cigarette. And he said to make the hair on his neck stand up. And he said, he could smell their food and make the hair on the back. And he said if you walked into a building, like when you were pushing them out and you came into the buildings that they were in, he said it was just like the worst because just the association. The association, right. That's right.

That's right. No, that's why, and I bet, you know, 40 years later, I bet if you could bottle that smell and give it to him, he would immediately be back in that situation. I mean, this is why. Oh, yeah, he never, I can tell you that his, his hatred stayed through life. Yeah. So it would have been a bad smell.

Yeah, bad smell. Right, right. No, I mean, olfactory PTSD, you know, people, real, real thing, you know, combat smells and things like that. Yeah. Before we do our hound dog chapter, I got, I got another dear question for you. Well, two dear questions. Would it make sense? And you're in a weird position now where you're giving like hunting advice.

Like, did you picture a world and wit? you like a world in which you acclimated like yani has a property in wisconsin the family place they like card deer on is there a world in which you somehow broadcast throughout the year you had a canister that just broadcasts human odor so that the landscape was just a wash in human odor throughout the year and that you would create a scenario where deer were just that was just what the area smelled like and they would never and then when they smelled a person it just didn't matter because the area was constantly awash like he hung all of his clothes and stuff in a tree and just had to be that that tree just smells that way and then it would be that later when you're

there they wouldn't even know because it always smells that way um the thing is that they it's um you're gonna walk in and um and they're gonna say oh there's the guy who ate a hamburger yesterday yeah it's a fresh scent you know is not just human like you're never gonna like because they're picking it apart too much but i mean at the same time you know if you go to like galapagos islands where they've never had predators you walk up to any animal and and and you know it's cultural i mean whether or not they're afraid of a friend who studied elephants and they the Maasai used a certain kind of you know clade it was kind of a decoration but it would you know had a scent and as

soon as an elephant smelled that they were out there because the Maasai were you know elephant hunters so I mean it's association now what you could do is I mean if you say that you there was something like that that the deer liked, that they, that was their favorite food or something like that. And you put, you could do an association between your scent and their favorite food. You could maybe counter condition it. So that they're going, oh, that's good, you know, that's, that's a good thing. That's a good, particularly, but, you know, the first time one deer sees you with a gun and gives that signal,

it's all over, you know, because all the other deer are going to, because your scent is around and the other deer is around. I mean, no. And you can, there's, there's, animals have to learn, you know, sometimes who predators are. And that's been shown in ferrets that they, you know, they have to, they learn, like the first time they have a bad experience or they see another adult with a bad experience. They go, okay, that's a predator. I didn't know. Now I do, and I'm never going to forget that. And you can do, there's like the study of blackbirds in Europe where the naive bird in the lab, never heard and never seen a predator. And then you have another black bird and you have a stuffed owl. And the one who's experienced sees the owl and gives an alarm call.

And it only takes one trial for the bird who has never seen an owl to see the owl and go, go, oh, that's a predator. And from the rest of us, you know, he carries it with them. And sees an owl, it's going to give an alarm call. And every time it gives an alarm call, a naive bird's going to see, what's looking at? Owl, that's an owl.

And you can, and they did, and then they took away the owl, and they put a milk bottle there. And they trained, and they, like, played the alarm call to a milk bottle. And the bird in the lab says, oh, that's a predator. And really? Yes. You could train them to think that a milk bottle was trouble. They hear, you know, they hear that, that it's like all they need is a call. And so they did that for seven generations, training, you know, blackbirds to be afraid of milk bottles.

So, I mean, it's the same thing. An odor is even more so. Yeah, that's crazy. Because then you got like generations of birds. They've never seen a milk bottle do anything bad. But they just carry it with them that a milk bottle is no good. Because, you know, the thing is, if. That's information. You don't want to have to learn by trial and error.

If you've got someone in your population says that's a predator and dangerous, it's like good enough for me, you know. I mean, it takes a lot. So all the deer in your property, they already have know very much that humans are, you know, you've got a human odor. They also know that you're male. They also know what you're eating. They know your stress level.

They probably know if you've got a cold. I mean, all that is right in your signature. So you can't escape. The season might still be months away, but if you're anything like us, you're already living in it. You're pulling up maps when you should be working, checking trail cameras first thing in the morning, and playing out a whole bunch of what-ifs related to that buck you've been watching grow all summer. The off-season is not downtime. It's just a different kind of hunting.

An on-X hunt is built exactly for that. Trail cameras tied directly to your map, wind and weather for your exact, location and property boundaries with land ownership data whenever you need them. Download on X hunt and make the most of the dwindling time between now and season. The new Red Bull Dragonberry and Tropicberry Energizers now at McDonald's made with freeze dried fruit and an electric burst of flavor. The all new Red Bull Energizers now at McDonald's. This product may not be right for you.

and caffeine details of McDonald's.ca. At participating Canadian restaurants, excluding Quebec. Meat Eater's season opener sale is live. And if you've been waiting to gear up for your hunt, now's the time. Buy one, get one free on all meat eater teas and hoodies. 50% off select game bags and deals on gear from some of our favorite brands. First Light, Phelps, FHF, Moultry, Yeti, and more. And for after the hunt, we have a limited time offer to save on our most popular seasonings

like backstrap brew, campfire crust, and backcountry bark. Or get the six pack to try them all. Our favorite time of year is right around the corner. Head over to the meat eater store.com to check out our season opener sale. So on this, not on the deer chapter. Yeah, since we're here, let's stay on the deer chapter. So let me hit me with a couple like, uh, let me hit with a couple of things that are sort of that float around in, and hunter legend.

Okay. one is that there's this product that was on the landscape for a long time what was this idea that you could wear certain clothing with like what is it carbon what's in there charcoal oh you could wear like this charcoal impregnated whatever no it's activated carbon activated carbon you could put a clothes on yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and deer wouldn't know you were there Do you buy that? I mean, most of your odors are coming out of your hair. And I mean, so to humans, that's the other thing. Humans, we are more scent glands at any other great ape.

We are the smelly ape. So we've got, and they're all concentrated, in our hair, in our armpits, groin. So we are just, you know, we're just walking bags of scent. So if you're going to wear anything carbon blocking, you definitely want to be wearing a whole full head hood, I think. A head net? Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. So there's some that makes some, that makes like a little bit of sense to you. It makes a little bit of sense. Yeah. Okay, there's another one that you do. But can I just say that I bet it depends. It wouldn't take much for a deer to realize, oh, that's a carbon scent and it comes with a gun. And then all they associate this expensive suit with a hunter and then it's all.

So can you explain what's going on there? Is the scent being eliminated? Is a scent being masked? Well, it's, I mean, you're masking the human body odor. Maybe. You're not masking the face. So you're not, like, removing it. Because I think the whole thing about what this carbon technology

was it somehow it was soaking it up. I mean, it would be soaking it up. I mean, but on the inside, yeah. I mean, it would be like a filter. But for one thing, if you've got any exposed skin, you're constantly emitting, you know, volatiles. But also, the suit itself has an odor, right? I mean, the outside of the suit is not odorless.

And so all you need is for one deer to figure out that suit smell means a hunter. And then that deer to give an alarm call to a suit. And then all the other deer know that suit is a predator. I see. So, I mean, you have to do some experiments on this. But, yeah. You could go either way. another one that goes like uh you create you put a natural odor down in such enormous quantity

like let's say you take like uh they call it like a masking scent okay take something like well it's not offensive to deer but it smells strong right so let's say like a a female the urine from a female deer it's in heat oh where like it's attractive yeah but also it's super powerful right right and he won't be the deer won't be able to find my smell. Right, right, right, right. And this is applied into ways. I'll drown it with this odor. Right.

And he won't be able to pick my odor out from this overpowering odor that I'm putting here. Vanilla has been popular lately. Like, it's this overpowering vanilla that supposedly... Well, that's interesting. And vanilla is very interesting. But I just want to say it's kind of like the skunk in the garage. It could be that the male, the buck is so sensitive to female, you know, in, in heat that it just

atlas his brain. And no, but I mean, that he he's got to be tracking females across huge distances, right? So he's going to be incredibly sensitive to that. So if you, so that would be an odor that you might be able to

just overwhelm his system because his, unless his brain habituates. Like he goes crazy for it. Well, he does, but then he slows, there's no female here. And then it turns into background. It's like people who live next to pig farms, they can't smell it after a while. Yeah.

You know, and they go away and there's like people studied this because, you know, there's lawsuits about pig farms. And I think if you go away for a couple of years, you come back, you can smell it again because you've got, you know, like turnover. Oh, it happens to me every time. Our water, the house is pretty sulfury. Yeah. If I'm gone for a week, my first shower back, I'm like, whoa.

Yeah, exactly. Second shower. It's just like normal again. You've habituated. Right, right. Right, right. So, so. But it was never mind the dough and pee thing then.

Let's take vanilla. Vanilla. So vanilla. You would put a smell down and you'd be like, just wall of smell. Yeah. And it would hide the human part. Well, vanilla is interesting because it actually smells like milk, a mammalian milk from, like, human milk. This has been, like, that's probably, maybe one reason we're all.

attracted into vanilla, vanilla. That's just interesting. The vanilla is universally considered a very pleasant odor in human cultures. But, yeah, so I mean, again, you know, it's also the problem is you're hunting for dinner and they are trying to save their life. So you've got completely different motivation here. And they're going to be much more conservative unless there's some reason they're not going to be because there's some reason they're not going to be because there's They're really hungry. Just speak to the mechanics of it.

The mechanics. Like could you put from an animal standpoint, never mind deer, just like an animal, a mammal. Right, right, right, right. Overwhelmed. Could you overwhelm them so much with one odor that they're not finding another or like, let's say this. Let's say I'm baking a pizza in my oven. But then I take an ounce of skunk smell and pour it on the counter. Right.

You're not going to come in and be like, oh, I see all the stuff. skunk, but I get a little pizza too. You're just getting skunk. Exactly. So is it theoretically possible that you would replicate that scenario and have it be that you're putting out so much vanilla or piss or whatever or zucchini bread that a deer is like, all I'm getting is zucchini bread? No, I think it's possible at the same time, that's an area they wouldn't want to hang out in

because it's too dangerous because you're just making them odor. blind. And that's their, and, you know, when I study kangaroo rats, we radio transmit, you know, and tracked them in the desert, it was so interesting. On a windy night, the kangaroots will not come out of their burrows. And I think it's, yeah, and I think it was because, I mean, partly it's the sound is, is, but I think it's, I think it's odor. It's like, you've got turbulent suddenly, they don't know where the coyotes are. And so I think of deer, I bet have a very, very windy day. So what's your experience? This is hotly debated.

Okay, that's interesting. With elk as an elk guide for a decade, yeah, we definitely felt like extreme wind conditions would sort of, would, would settle the movement a little bit. And they got deer, but here's the, here's where this gets tricky. They got deer on collars. Yeah. That are like next to the eye of a, that are like 20 miles from the eye of a hurricane and they don't change tune at all. Well, it depends. Like they go about their business. Yeah, but see, so I was say, again, context. Where, you know, is that wind coming in

reliably laminar from one direction, or is it like, you know, turbulent? So, hurricane is one thing. But, I mean, there's actually, if there's a study of blue crabs orienting to odors in in streams, artificial streams, they're more, they're more accurate orienting in turbulent

streams than than laminar flow because they are adapted to their whole evolution has been life is turbulent and so I meant I mean it depends where it is like if if they're in a windy habitat that they

they know how wind works and they've learned about it versus a forest elk or forest no actually that's not true right they be more open white tail be more closed but you know you imagine a forest

animal where it's not expecting a lot of wind movement would be more freaked out by well i think both those animals elk and deer live in a wide variety of habitats both could be open or closed and probably the one that lives up on near shodoh montana on the uh what they call that the rocky mountain front where the wind blows a lot yeah they like learn to figure out a way to deal with it right yeah yeah use their olfactory senses deal with it but when the wind blows like that in Wisconsin, maybe the deer lay low a little bit. You know what works best for them from a predator perspective, like a human predator perspective?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They are at a huge advantage in a swirling wind. Oh, yeah. Huge advantage. Oh, and. I mean, people will just be like a swirling wind, you're like, never mind. Oh, because they, no matter what you do,

they can smell you. Yeah. You're not could get up on them in a, in a, in a non, like, what you want is a, what a predator wants is a very strong, West wind. Right. Not very, but like a consistent west wind.

You're like, okay, I know exactly what I'm going to do. When you get there and it's like hitting this cheek and then it's on the back of your neck, you're like it's never going to happen. Right. And so that's, and I bet that's why this is so controversial.

Because I bet everyone's reporting different things based on where they are with different wind conditions and you've got, you know, um, animals adapted to local wind conditions. And so sure, in Wisconsin it's this, but in that great,

you know, that place where the, the Rocky Mountains are, it's that. And so the deer are going to have different strategies. They're going to learn different. The fawns are going to have learned from the parents. You know, it's all, I mean, they're long-lived animals, social animals.

So there's a massive amount of social learning going on. I'm sure they're learning from the adults. In our mind, like in our mind, what they like is, without being able to interview them. Speaking of a deer, a white, let's say a white, yeah, what he likes, he likes an obstruction to his back. Yeah. Huh.

Okay. Uh-huh. Something behind him. Yeah. He can see out here. Yeah. And he's in a spot that has swirling wind. Like in our mind, that's like where he's coming.

That's interesting. You know, then he's like, I'm going to chill. So this is what you do. You set up artificial swirling wind on your property and all the deer come in and they love it. And it's swirling wind. And then you go out, just turn it off. This big bucks galore. Okay.

we're going to move into the hound dog chaffing. Sounds like a very, like big box, like very expensive to set that up on 40. circulating systems. On 40 acres. You know? All right. You ready for hound dog questions? Sure.

This is the hound dog chap. The anticipated hound dog chap. I don't know if these are in order, but we'll just start with what we had for one. Yeah. Well, let's start with the cold nose dog and the hot nose dog. And I think the nay explained that to you. Yeah, yeah. So it's basically, um, a dog that, um, hot,

is like a recent trail, and the cold is like, it's been there for a while. Yeah. And so there are dogs out there that are in the same pack. Yeah. That one will find a mountain lion track. Yeah. But it is old enough to where they smell it and they just no reaction whatsoever that we can see. Yeah, yeah.

And they keep going. Right. Another dog in the same pack goes over there that has the cold nose. Yeah. And gets on it and boom. you know, here it starts. And they're off to the races. And it could be, some people think that they run it,

they don't like that because they're running a three-day-old track. And, you know, the lion could be, you don't know, it could be in two counties over, right? Anyways. So, what causes that? So, I mean, definitely, you said nature, nurture, that's definitely both. I mean, you're going to have different personalities.

Dogs obviously have different personalities, and they have different experiences. And so you've got a dog who has successfully been, paying attention to cold. And what's cold is, you know, you've got all this dead skin falling down. You've got all this, I mean, this heavy molecules that are falling off you and the mountain lion. And it's all falling into, onto the trail. And the more the heavier the molecules are and the more the trail has texture to it,

it's not like a, you know, a rock surface, but it's like, you know, grasses, vegetation, that kind of stuff, that's going to hold those big, heavy molecules longer. And so it's going to be... Like it grabs onto them. It grabs onto them. Yeah, literally, you know, has placed for it. The other thing that, I mean...

And so there's going to be a lot of signal there, and that might be a dog who's had a lot of good experiences with that, on that. On cold tracks. Like he's caught him before. Right. He's like, I don't know, I've picked up smell this old and caught it. And exactly. And that's a huge positive reinforcement. You know, it's like that dog is going to remember. The other thing about olfaction memory is that they're, you know, we don't forget odors and dogs don't forget odors.

And they, I mean, that, the odor comes into the brain. It goes right to your emotional centers. And so even in humans, you know, odors are encoded really deeply. and emotionally. So that's why I can give you the smell of your grandmother's kitchen and you can, you know, you recognize it. And so anyway, so you can have a dog that had a really good experience catching, you know, succeeding on a hunt

using those heavy molecules. And so, and also it could be, like I said about the chickadees. This would be exactly the same thing. It would be a really interesting study to do to study a pack that had these different personalities.

Because it could be that you've got kind of an ADHD dog that just wants to, you know, trail nose in the air. And the other one's like, no, I'm kind of quiet. I've got two dogs, two muts, and one's, you know, absolutely will jump on anything. And the other one's slow and actually learns faster because he doesn't jump on things. You know, he will learn a problem faster. And so you can have a slow, deliberate personality that say, you know what? I am going to specialize in these heavy molecules. And I'm assuming you're going to tell me that it could be nature or nurture,

like it could be passed down through generations in their genes because they succeeded running cold tracks. And then you could also teach that to a dog. Yeah. I mean, I think what you've got, you know, probably you've got, you know, litter puppies. you might have cold, you know, future cold nose, future hot nose in the litter. But then, depending on their experience, how they're trained, what their, you know, did they have a really good experience using that strategy, then, you know, then what they're going to do. I mean, what any predator would do is that they keep working on that, you know, they get better and better.

And the rich get richer, right? And then another dog, it's like, well, that never worked for me. or I had one frustrating thing. I lost it. I'm going to, whereas I trail and I pick up, you know, I do this fast sniffing in the air and I'm, that works for me. So I'm going to do that. Yeah. But it could be that, I mean, interesting to ask your people like, what else do those dogs vary about?

Like, you know, are there, what else are they doing differently? Oh, yeah, that's interesting. You know? Yeah. What other attributes do they have? Yeah. Do they rush the gate? Does this one, you know.

Yeah, like, let's say you're like, I seriously like you got a cold nose and a hot nose dog where you put them all in a situation where they're like a minute behind it. Are they, do they still have different attitudes? Yeah. Or do they kind of like coalesce around some level of excitement? Yeah, yeah. Or is he always like, no. And if you give them a-slow and easy, slow and easy. Or you give them a problem they've never seen before, you know, there's a lot of work now on, you know, problem solving and dogs.

And how do they, how do they tackle it? You know, do they have different strategies? to tackle it. I bet the cold, hot nose is like, is like just a signature of maybe differences in like overall problem solving strategy. And that's what you, that's what we talk when we talk about

animal behavioral syndrome or personality. It's like a lifelong way of a track, of attacking a problem, basically. I got a buddy who's got a beagle and his dog's like a, his dog's a blood trailer so it can find a wounded deer. Yeah, yeah. And one day,

we put it on a deer and it knew the path like 100% like because we knew the past you because we lost the blood trail yeah yeah yeah but the dog just lost interest and he said he knows he won't find it oh really yeah so it's like funny he knew where it went but he's like he knows he'll never find well the way that was explained to me because I called out a you know a deer tracking dog a few years ago and the same thing happened we kind of just ended up doing circles and it was a lot of just you know dead ends and eventually said, I think that that deer that we're trailing or trying to trail is not wounded enough that it will die because it emits through its hoofs, it emits a scent that says, I'm wounded, I'm in danger, I'm dying, whatever.

That's what that blood, that's what the dog's trailing. It's not trailing the blood. Exactly. It's trailing corticosterone, I mean, the stress hormones. Yeah. And actually. That's interesting. The dog's like, he's not hurt.

There was a study in gerbils where they had one gerbil that I think was stressed or killed by a cat or something. And they took blood from a gerbil who had been attacked and one who hadn't been attacked. And another gerbil could tell the difference between the blood. Really? Yeah. So that, I mean, because you've got, you know, you've got stress hormones coming through your blood is coming out. It smells like it. Yeah.

Right. All right. Differences in scent molecules, like conditions. Dry ground versus wet, warm versus cold, rising versus steady temps, rough ground versus soft ground. You kind of said already, the rougher the ground is the more scent molecules it traps, right? But that's good for, you know, that would be good for tracking, but not for trailing, right? So if tracking is the ground, trailing, I mean, that's how you use it too. I don't know what we're term it.

Okay, I know, but air, air versus ground. The dog that keeps his nose in the air and a dog to keeps his nose on the ground. Right, right. And so. What is the term for that? I mean, we, the search dog is the world. It's like tracking, tracking nose down, trailing. Yeah, like, we had a guy on that trains apprehension dogs.

And he talked about, like, yeah, yeah, yeah. A dog that goes into a building to find a suspect, his nose is in there. Yeah, right. A dog that, like, you're like, a guy, a guy. suspect last night ran off into the woods. And now we're wondering where he went. Right. That's right.

That's right. That's right. And I think it depends on conditions, too. I think that at times, hounds sometimes will have their nose down. Yeah. If the conditions get right and they don't have to have their nose down there, they can sense when their head is up, they can move faster. Right.

They will switch to that as long as they're still getting that. Well, and so we did a study of search dogs in California where it's, cold and wet in the morning, and this is in the East Bay, and then it's hot and dry in the afternoon, and then cold and damp again in the evening. And so we're using search and rescue dogs, really, really well trained and very carefully controlled, where we had like a quarter mile track with a human walking on it and, and waited at the end. And then we just measure the location of the dog GPS. And we also developed this thing to measure whether they head up was head up or down.

And we, every 10 meters, we took a weather station and we measured the wind speed, temperature, blah, blah, everything. And so, and what we found was it, basically, they were more accurate when it was cooler and, and more humid. So that definitely. And the reason. And probably faster, too, then. Well, well, so that was interesting.

What we found is that when they started off, if, so we would, um, These are search and rescue. So we give them a sniff of a t-shirt or something. And they take off at first. Once they have the scent, they know exactly what they're going. They start off fast with trailing, air in the air. But then if they start losing it, then they slow down. They're still trailing and they slow down.

But then if they start, you see them circling. So after, if they slow, they slow down and now they're circling like 10, 20 yards away from the trail and they're, and they're still trailing, but they're circling. Then they really lost it. Then they may move up to like 40 yards away from the trail. They're circling and they're on the ground. So, and what we found is when you had the, like here was a trail and there was a big wind

coming, the actual, there was a lot of probably these heavy molecules blown down. down off the trail because there was this one place where the track went next to a small hill. There was wind coming down. And all the dogs kind of scooped down. So they didn't stay on the trail. They skipped down. Yeah. They were where to smell landed.

Exactly. And they're so accurate. That's really interesting. So there was like three strategies, you know. And basically when you know exactly where you're going, you're high. speed air. And then if you start not sure, you move away from the trail, and now you're using air, but you're moving, you know, you're kind of circling, you're away from the trail. Once they start circling, they've lost it. They're looking to pick it back up. That's right.

That's right. Yeah. And that's exactly what you see in all animals, butterfly, you know, and moss, I mean, all animals that orient to space, humans, we've done this in humans in virtual environments, you know, it's casting. You know, they're trying to find the plume. And so, and then, but they didn't really do the head down to the ground unless they were really lost. And then they're looking for like some big heavy molecules. But so I think it's like, you know, if you want to go fast, find them, you want to, you know, you want to just use air. But then if you lost it, then you have to, okay, you know, you got to do something slower, harder. But then you say, okay, that is, they were here.

Do you think that can be trained? Oh, absolutely. I mean, these search dog people, I worked with Shea Cook and others. I mean, they start training their dogs when they're eight weeks old. I mean, they, you can't just take any dog and, and, I mean, you know, well, search and rescue is a whole training thing. Yeah. But I bet, I mean, I think, so I think you've got breed differences, you know, obviously hounds, beagles. I mean, they are all nose. But, um, so you, you know, so you. You know, you've got breed differences, you know, obviously hounds, bagles. I mean, but, um, so you, so you But you've got layers. So you've got the breed. You've got personality, which is going to vary within a litter. Then you've got experience, which is training. And then its own experience, maybe also, you know, they're going to learn from each other.

So like, is there a really experienced dog that is leading the pack that other, the younger dogs can pick up on? So all that's going to, and, you know, complexity. which is probably why you end up with some amazing dogs, you know, that are doing things. Shea had a dog Zinka who she was hired to go to an orchard in Southern California to find a, you know, an invasive pest, insect pest. And this was like five-acre orchard and the dog found both the insects, you know, I mean, and didn't look at. And because she trained her on that insect.

I mean, that's the other thing. How big is that bug? Oh, tiny, tiny, you know. Not like a big old cockroach or something. No, no, no, a little tiny thing. And you were asking about, you know, can they learn different things? Well, that, you know, you've got the dog who's only will go for blood or go for whatever's coming out of the hooves. I mean, search and rescue, you've got, you know, you've got cadaver versus live, you know, and, and, I mean,

we, you know, we also, and you can have six people run out into a field site, and the dog is only supposed to find one person, and that dog will only go to that one person. Yeah, like that level of detail. Absolutely, yeah. I guess on that question, go ahead. On that question of that there's certain climatic conditions that are good for a dog

or any animal smell. Yeah. I'm assuming to be saying for, like, like, so in general, you say, Can you hit me again real quick? Yeah, no, it's a physics, really. So it's more humid is better. Okay. And it turns out that's because water molecules, there's only so many places that an odor can sit on the surface.

And when there's a lot of water molecules in the air, they fill up all those places. And so odor molecules stay in the air. This is what the physicists have said. It seems like... And it's warm better than cold? And warm is better than cold because warm is more... You've got more air movement.

I mean, or molecules move more when it's warmer. So you want... But you don't... So you want warm and humid and probably a textured surface, not like, you know, not bare rock. But assuming that like, assuming that through time, odors degrade. Yes.

Would there ever be a situation? Could it be that you went somewhere, a dog went somewhere, and it was, and the coldest part of the day? So there's already an odor laid down. Okay. And animals already gone by. Yeah. You take your dog there the coldest part of the day.

Yeah. And it can't do it. Would it ever make sense, you'd be like, I'm going to come back when it warms up and let them take another swing at? Now the odor is older, but would the climatic conditions ever override the age and somehow activate the odor? I bet. I know. I bet they would. I bet they would. And then the other thing is, you know, dogs have a really interesting way that they activate odors in the ground. So when they, I mean, you know, the dog knows they've got two holes in the front, right? They're bringing odor in. and when they sniff in,

in the back, there's like a little valve that opens up and that odor gets sucked in that valve and goes right up to this place where, like, you know, that collects all the odors for detecting. Then that's an inspiration, right? When they're breathing in. When they breathe out, that valve closes and they breathe out through those slits on the,

side and that sends the air to the side and down and backwards and so when they breathe out they're not contaminating what they're trying to breathe in with what they're breathing out yeah yeah this is Gary Settles did this work is amazing amazing work and it's even more amazing is that he showed he studies aerodynamics that when they they jet air out of the slits of the no it becomes turbulent and it actually creates a little turbulent field like this is when the dog's nose is close to the ground and that turbulent field moves forward and sucks air from in front of the nose into the towards the nose so when they breathe out so it's like this incredible feedback where the the dog as he's breathing out he's also making the odors ahead of him come

towards him. God, that's incredible. Hey, there's a version of hunting where you just show up, you sit in a tree stand, you hope something happens, and then you go home. A lot of people hunt that way. And every once in a while, it'll work out. Then there's the version where you've done the reading before the test. You've got the on X hunt app with cameras integrated on your map,

a tailored deer movement forecast to help you make the most of your days in the woods and precise weather predictions. So when a buck starts showing up, know where he's coming from and where he's going. Most of us don't have unlimited days in the field. We've got a week, maybe a little more. And every hunt that doesn't produce because you were in the wrong spot, that's a cost you can't get back.

Build a real plan before opening day with the on-X hunt app because hope is not a strategy. The new Red Bull Dragonberry and Tropicberry Energizers now at McDonald's, made with freeze-dried fruit and an electric burst of flavor. The all-new Red Bull Energizers. Now at McDonald's. This product may not be right for you. High in caffeine, details at McDonald's.ca. At participating Canadian restaurants, excluding Quebec.

Meat-eater's season opener sale is live. And if you've been waiting to gear up for your hunt, now's the time. Buy one, get one free on all meat eater teas and hoodies. 50% off select game bags and deals on gear from some of our favorite brands. First Light, Phelps, FHF, Moultry, Yeti, and Lodys. more. And for after the hunt, we have a limited time offer to save on our most popular seasonings like backstrap brew, campfire crust, and backcountry bark, or get the six-pack to try them all. Our favorite time of year is right around the corner. Head over to themeatheater store.com

to check out our season opener sale. So I think we've kind of covered this, but just so that all the hound folks out there know, but like there's someone that lives in Texas and doesn't want dogs that run bobcats only wants them to run lions. Oh, yeah. He seems to have successfully done so. And you feel like that should be very easy to do,

very trainable. Absolutely. I mean, that's what the search and rescue people do all time. I mean, they all, I mean, they will train one dog to do one thing or they will train. I mean, I think they're dogs that do more than, like do cadavers and live humans. and, you know, and then there's drug dogs that are only looking for one kind of drug.

So it seems like from what you're saying, it seems like it'd be possible not only for it to know a mountain lion from a bobcat, but for it to know that mountain lion from that mountain line. Absolutely. Absolutely. And maybe you could say train it just to go for female, you know, bobcats. I mean, they would be able to do that. They'd know that. Absolutely. I mean, you, you know, you'd have to, I wouldn't want you to do that. And I don't know how you do that. But theoretically, but their level of smell would be that it could tell the difference.

Right. I mean, it's just like, you know, the kangaroo knows that that was a Tasmania devil that has eaten kangaroo. There's, you know, mice, voles actually, two males know that that male has eaten in last 12 hours and this one hasn't. So this one is more of a competitor because it's, you know, so, I mean, it's just like, it's,

there's a massive amount of, there's no privacy in olfaction. Everything that you are comes out through your skin and an animal in their scent marks. And oh, that's the other thing, scent marks. How do you, how, you know, odors, like when animals, you know, urinate, defecate, I mean, there's a lot of oils and heavy molecules and those all prevent

the odors from evaporating. And so if you're like, if you're marking what you want. Purposely marking. You want, you know, everyone to know that that's your territory and I marked it. And you don't want it to disappear because you want them to think, I just marked it. Because that means I was just there. And animals are really sensitive to how long an odor has been, was last there. And in fact, oh, this was a dog result is that if you take it,

a search dog and you bring him in at a right angle to a trail and are they going to turn left or right to follow a human. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, there's two studies of this and where they only need five human footsteps to know which way the human went. That's so, so you've got a human who lays down a trail like, you know, 20 minutes ago, and a dog comes in and three steps isn't enough, five steps isn't enough. That means that the light volatoles have, you know, have blown off the difference between the first step and the fifth step.

I mean. But he can go like weaker, weaker, take five steps, stronger, stronger. Exactly. And so they know that my prey is going, you know, went left, not right. And so that's the kind of discrimination between, you know, a human wearing shoes, five steps that the dog knows that that's the difference. I mean, and that was, and they were stepping on carpet, so it wasn't like crushed vegetation or anything. I mean, it was really just the steps. So, so.

There should be, I mean, if it's doing that with the, with a human in boots, it should be no different with a lion or a bobcat or a bear. Because they're sweating through their pads. I mean, animals have all these sweat glands in their pads to protect them. So, yeah, I mean, they're just, yeah. Okay. I know for a fact, I've watched him do it. I can explain all the conditions if you want. This is a fact.

The short version of, we're out there together, Mingus and I, my blue-tick hound dog, and he's maybe 20 yards down the hill from me, and we both kind of come up on a track at the same time. And I go, oh, I think that's a mountain lion track before I've really looked closely, and he immediately starts going up. He starts going to one direction. and does not change directions.

This track has quite a bit of fresh snow in it from the morning. But it's obviously fresh enough that he's smelling through that fresh snow. Right, right, right. I couldn't tell which way it was going until the track went underneath a tree where there was less snow and that could finally see the toes. Yeah. He ran that track backwards. I'm guessing 700 to 1,000 yards.

The wrong direction. The wrong direction. Eventually, he turned. Yeah. So is he just. No, he is he, and his head up, right? He's trailing. He's going for, it's air.

You know, he's, he sniffs the trail. He knows there's a mountain lion. Yeah. There's, I mean, what was the wind that day? There was probably, it wasn't dead calm. Yeah. Yeah, it was something in the middle. This is generally, this is like a general thing that people sort of know.

Is it a beagle can very quickly figure out what way a rabbit went? Mm-hmm. But a hound. can't quickly figure out what way oh that's interesting but here's the key difference a beagle's always working something to happen two minutes ago oh okay and he's working effectively what happened

nose down nose down right the beagle the beagle is doing nose down so it's working on big molecules that are being left by the body you know whereas the but that's a very slow way to work as opposed to the hound which is like I'm going after a mountain line. That's a big animal moving very fast. I need to use air, right?

Because I've got to go far. And so maybe occasionally that's a mountain line, but now the wind has come in and it's shifted it over, like the we've seen with our search dogs. They shift over. And so it's picking up a molecule, you know, a volatile molecule, and the volatile molecules are this way. And then it gets to a point where it's like,

you know what, that's the wrong way. and then it's got to come back. No, but what he means is he's following it. Like, okay, let's say you, let's say a rabbit gets scared, a dog scares it. You scare a rabbit. Yeah, yeah.

You see a rabbit takes off. And then someone's like, oh, here comes the beagle. So you know what way the rabbit way. Yeah, yeah. Here comes the beagle. That beagle is going to almost instantly know what direction of travel. Yeah.

It's not going to run it backwards. Right, but that's like the dog. It's going to go the way it went. But that's like, but that's a minutes old trail. But like, like, I think what he's saying his dog went, didn't know the way the lion was going. Right. And he went 700,000 yards in the wrong direction. Right.

Complete like 180 wrong? Well, he's literally following the trail. Backwards. Oh, he's following it backwards. He's not putting together that it's getting older and older and older. Oh, that's very cool. Okay, because number one is snow. So it's cold.

It's not great conditions. And so- So any snow is going to be bad. Or harder? I think harder. Definitely harder. So, like, what do beagles do in the snow, I guess? That would be...

They're fine. But again, he's dealing, like, just the nature of hunting rabbits. with a beagle is you're dealing with things that just happened right right right so with a hound like in that situation you're dealing with things that are hours ago right but but do beagles mostly hunt nose down also okay okay so that's a completely different um so now your dog needs to hunt no it's an old trail it's got to hunt nose down it's got to go for the heavy things right and hepper you know um again that that study showed that to do those heavy ones You can do direction, but you need a certain amount of data to get the direction correct.

And so you've got an old trail in the snow, so you've got two strikes against you. And so there's probably enough odor in that trail that it knows that that's a mountain lion, but there's not enough odor. They're not getting the, oh, because the volatiles are gone. It's an old trail. So you need the volatiles to know fond. You know, for an old trail, like the Beagle probably is getting volatiles, too, you know, because it's brand, it's just happened. So you've got an old trail.

So all it's left are the big heavy molecules. The volatiles that. Can you just define and explain the volatiles versus the other? Okay, just little things that evaporate into the air, little molecules. You know, it's like if I'm sure you know all this in perfume, people talk about, I'm, I'm, I'm just joking. But if you wear perfume, they're base notes and there's top notes. And when you put perfume on your skin, the first thing you smell is a top note.

And it's the small molecules that come off first. And then an hour later, then it's a different perfume. It smells on your skin and smells. It's a base note because now you're, the top notes are burnt off and now you're getting the base notes. The bottles are gone. Right. And so you've got, so perfume people, you know, they know top notes, middle notes, It's the same thing.

And so you're basically an old trail. The top notes are gone. They've all evaporated, you know, before. And so what's left is enough, you know, to know that that's a mountain lion. And this is a fairly, I mean, if that was a month old trail in the snow, your dog might not even. I mean, the dog still might know it's a mountain lion, but it's like that trail is so old, I'm not going to bother. Yeah. I'm never going to, some of it's a dog saying, I'm going to, you know, it's not, it's not worth my time.

But your dog going, doing a 180 means that it's missing those little molecules that come off early that tell it. Because that's like literally, think about the difference between the step one and step five. That is like, you know, one second. I mean, difference. And that's how old. And so it's. But that's helpful with a rapidly dissipating thing. Right.

Exactly. Because these same dogs, if they're chasing a raccoon, they know a way the raccoon went, but that's all new stuff. Right. New. That's tonight. They're like, they're at midnight. They're at midnight, they're talking about what happened at 11 p.m. Exactly. His dog at 8 a.m. is maybe talking about what happened at 1 a.m. or what you know what? You know what? Or it could even be 8 p.m. the day before you don't know. Exactly. Or even, even, you know, if it's important. I mean, if you've got a buck, you know, chasing a dough, I bet there could be, you know, even longer. In fact, squirrels, they know not only they smell and they smell a female at her. Like, these are ground squirrels. They males come up and they smell a female.

And they know that she's like three days away from being receptive. And they come back three days later. You kidding. No. So certainly a buck deer would. do that with a female deer too. Totally. It's like, she's not ready yet.

Yeah. Yeah. And they, but I can tell you where I'll be on Tuesday. Yes. Exactly. Exactly. So let's talk about.

So time is, that's the one thing that I, I really think of odor as space and time. Because every time you put an odor down, it starts a time, it starts a stopwatch. Sure. And anyone smelling it knows when they were there.

Yeah. So let's talk about that, like conditions that either preserve or degrade the sense that these dogs or whoever is trying to follow. Well, you know, that's why cats cover their, you know, animals cover their poops and, I mean, cover their scats and things like that, or why you've got, you know, bears, you know, reaching really high up and marking trees because they've got scent glands. I'm sure they must have scent glands in their paws. And so they're leaving individual signature.

They're also telling another bear that I am that tall, you know, because you can't fake it. They don't have little stepstools. You know, why dogs pee as high up as they can into, like, texture surface. So that's going to stay longer. Anything, you know, textured. But animals really care about how long scent lasts. mice, males have something called a mouse urinary protein, and it's this massive protein that

only males produce an enormous quantity, and the only function is to make the volatiles not evaporate so quickly. Because they're competing. I mean, it's just like coyotes or wolves or anything that's scent marking territorial. Mice are very territorial, and so they're marking their territory, and they want, so another male coming in says, oh, that male was just there, he's, you know, he's defending this space, I'll back off.

But cat scratching, if it, if it that should be doing covering its own scat or covering its own urine is, you think it's like he's trying to get it to stick around. Stick around. Not trying to destroy it. Yeah. He's trying to get it from dissipating.

I think so. I mean, I'm not sure. I'm not totally sure about that. That could be, that could also be trying to you know, cats are small, reducing scent so that predators don't know you're around. Also, that's a possibility.

You know, they make marks. Like, like, yeah. They, they make visual marks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's, you know, but you've got like mountain lions

will, you know, bury prey. That's so, like, other animals don't find it. And hyenas, cash bones in water holes so that they're absolutely no one Oh, so they're definitely trying to hide stuff. That's definitely trying to hide it. Yeah, but a lot of, but you know, you can see scent scat piles by coyotes or wolves.

I mean, they just keep marking the same place. I mean, this is like really obvious, visual, you know, I am here. I was just here. I mean, this has been studied a lot. It's in, in, in, in, there's studied hamsters that they also do something called countermarking. So one animal will mark and then. And the other one comes and marks over it. And they did this study where instead of having two animals marked, they painted with a paintbrush a broken line and then a solid line.

So from two different hamsters. And so it looked like the solid line had come after the broken line. But they had actually been done at the same time. But the geometry of the mark would have suggested that one of them was later and therefore dominant. And then when they set those two males up as contestants, they treated that male as dominant, even though the whole thing had been set up by the experimenters. Really? Yeah.

Yeah. So that means, so when, you know, when you see scat piles, they probably coyotes and wild, they're probably no, they know who's done it, when they did it, who did it let, you know, I mean, there's just this all this. Yeah. I mean, there's just, it's like the, it's like the internet. It never goes away. It's all there. They smell it. I mean, I think, I think dogs probably learn to ignore something that's not going to pay off.

I mean, that's, you know, it's not. So the question is, do they remember? they smell it or is it, or is it they don't think it's worth it? And to do that, you need to bring them into the, you know, into like an experiment where you, you collect these scent samples and you say, can you tell me which one, you know, is this a mountain lion or which one's older? You should, you know, you ask them which one's older. They should be able to, you know, tell you that and, you know, press a lever for the older one.

And so, I mean, those are kinds of experiments you could do with dogs to find out. Because I bet they know a lot more than we know. In the case of like holding scent and these conditions that might prolong scent being there, get rid of it, like, is there, you said obviously textures are good because it's just like little nooks and crannies, I'm guessing for these heavier molecules to sit in and get held. Is there something that where snow in some form, because it's

you're almost pressing it into a medium that it would hold scent molecules or because again there are times where I can clearly see that it's Mountline track but my dog is not interested and it's like it's visually there

but somehow the scent has literally disappeared from it I mean it's also cold it's wet but it's cold and cold and cold it makes it harder to the molecules literally it's brownie in motion.

The molecules are not moving. And so they're just like, they're not getting it. So they need molecules moving to be able to. Because they've got to, yeah, they've got to get it in their nose. And if it's all, I mean, so normally, you know, if they're smelling close to the ground,

the molecules are, you know, they're kind of dancing above the ground and they're able to smell them. And they're sniff them and they're sucking up the air. And they're sniffing them in. So it's literally the air next to, said surface, not the surface itself. Yeah, I mean, right, because the surface,

they're trying to get, they can't smell the surface. They have to smell things in the air. And so they're, you know, they're going sniff, sniff, sniff. And then, of course, when they're expiring, they're setting up these little, they're agitating it. So they're bringing up anything that's on the ground. They're bringing it up into air, and then they can suck it in and find out what it is.

but they I mean so the same thing when there there might be a you know a hard surface or clothing or something and to smell it they still need those molecules to be in the air

they can't they can't stuff a piece of cloth in their nose and say that's what it is it has to be something that's got to come off the surface into air to get into their nose so if it's cold, I think

molecules are just not going to be moving as much. Their nose isn't probably going to be working as well. I mean, I imagine if you took like a hand warmer and put it on the footprint and heated it up,

that would be interesting. I wonder if that would help it. It might excite some activity there for some. Yeah. Yeah. Let me ask you a series of quick questions. Like, So let me just say what one's better? Like if as a surface for an animal to detect odor on, okay? So like gym floor, gravel driveway.

I'd say, well, for detection, the same temperature, the same wind and everything is the same. I think actually the gym floor, because things are not going to stick to it. So they're going to be more, they're going to, you know, the same wind is going to pick things off the gym floor. But if you want to know 24 hours later where there might be a cold trail, then I would say the gravel. Because it would have gone down into the crevices

and there would still be stuff there. I guess actually, so that would be, I would say the, what are you going for? Are you going for the heavy molecules or the light molecules? I didn't think of through that far. I didn't. I mean, I'm just doing this on the fly. But I think, yeah, because a smooth surface

you know, it's a smooth surface. Molecules, volesosos are just going to, you know, blow, stay aloft. But it won't have the holding power. It won't have the holding power. Exactly. I'm going to do one more. Okay. A rock-hard frozen lake. Just pure, flat, clear ice.

Yeah. Or a lake with an inch of snow. Frozen lake, inch of snow. I think an inch of snow would, I mean, one thing, a frozen lake is going to have, it's going to be, it's cold, it's probably going to be windy, everything's going to get blown off. And whereas the snow has some texture to it, so it can hold onto stuff. And snow is actually going to keep things warmer because, you know, it's slightly warmer under snow, maybe.

Got it. Cut you one more? Yeah. Smooth granite surface. Inch of snow. Like smooth granite dry surface. Right, right, right. right right smooth a granite surface with an inch of snow yeah i um again i think it would be um um if you've got an

animal that's moved fast over the smooth granite and you're right on top of that animal then there that granite is going to lift there's going to be a lot of volatiles in the air and so that that a dog with a nose up in the air is going to do wood it's going to have a lot of information um But if it's a little older, then the snow is maybe is going to hold some of those large molecules. And I'm not a hunter, and I'm be completely wrong about all this, but that's my... No, this isn't hunting questions.

This is smelling questions. Yeah. That's true. I think what Steve is getting at a little bit, and I think it must have been in here somewhere, is that the dry ground versus a wet ground, or what would be called, like, a snow-type hunt. There's a debate here that you'll think is interesting.

In Arizona, and the southwest, the hounds are constantly having to work in dry conditions. Right. No snow. Right, right, right. The northern tier of the Rockies, we're always running tracks in the snow. I think it's a common belief that the dry ground hounds have it harder. Yeah. Yeah.

Because it's, I mean, when all else fails, humidity, you know, I mean, so you've got it hot and dry. That's what our dogs, they were the worst hot and dry, and they're better when it's cold and humid. Now, we weren't working in snow, but maybe that's the same thing. Well, you're talking about the snow's ability, because this is cold, this is old stuff, old information, the snow's ability to hang on to some old information. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And snow does. I mean, that's why animals burrow in snow. I mean, it's warmer.

You're warmer in the snow than you are exposed. So, yeah. No, this has been really interesting because I think you're, you are, you know, you're clearing it up. But I think for reasons that maybe a lot of hound hunters hadn't thought about, right, that it's really about what's going on above the surface, not so much on the surface. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

That's right. That's right. That's right. that's right that's interesting yeah. When it's smelling like just like definitionally it has to be something that is in the air. Right, right, right. Unless using the vulva nasal system. Unless they're tasting this.

They're tasting it, which is when licking it, right, exactly. Yeah. Do you feel like when they're panting? So when they're working real hard, what's that, how is that affecting their ability? That blocks their smell. They can't sniff and pant at the same time. Really? Yes, that definitely.

there's um what yes no because you know you you can't bring you bring air into that's just going straight into your lungs um you've got to bring it you know past the olfactory epithelium you're not you're not panting through your nose you're panting through your um your yeah your mouth yeah oh i got to hit you with one about this whole dry ground humidity deal so my buddy kevin murphy he's a he's he likes to run rabbits with his beagles He lives in Kentucky. He runs rabbits all over hell all the time. We took his beagles out to New Mexico, like in the flat-out desert, and put them on

jack rabbits. Yeah. And also also cottontails. So same rabbit also contours. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They couldn't do it. Yeah, I believe it. Oh, that's.

And in his mind, he's like, they're not used to hot and dry. Well, no, I mean, hot and dry is harder, period. And plus, um, though these, I mean, I mean, if, if we're thinking beagles are nose down, heavy molecule, trackers. But still, it's just not going to, yeah, they're going to, they're using brand new. And so they're going to lost all their volatiles. They're used to. I mean, they're, you know, they're spoiled.

They're in Kentucky. It's incredibly hot and humid. They've got, it's like a perfect olfactory, you know, situation. And then it's just like, I mean, probably if you, if you kept those beagles in Arizona for a year, and they would learn. I see. But you just bring them out there. There's no information here.

I can't do this, yeah. Hey, there's a version of hunting where you just show up, you sit in a tree stand, you hope something happens, and then you go home. A lot of people hunt that way. And every once in a while, it'll work out. Then there's the version where you've done the reading before the test. You've got the on-X hunt app with cameras integrated on your map,

a tailored deer movement forecast to help you make the most of your days in the woods and precise weather predictions. So when a buck starts showing up, you already know where he's coming from and where he's going. Most of us don't have unlimited days in the field. We've got a week, maybe a little more. And every hunt that doesn't produce because you were in the wrong spot, that's a cost you can't get back. Build a real plan before opening day with the on-X hunt app

because hope is not a strategy. The new Red Bull Dragonberry and Tropicberry Energizers now at McDonald's. Made with freeze-dried fruit and an electric burst of flavor. The all-new Red Bull Energizers, now at McDonald's. This product may not be right for you. High in caffeine, details of McDonald's.ca. At participating Canadian restaurants excluding Quebec. Meat eater's season opener sale is live.

And if you've been waiting to gear up for your hunt, now's the time. Buy one, get one free on all Meat Eater team. and hoodies. 50% off select game bags and deals on gear from some of our favorite brands. First Light, Phelps, FHF, Maltry, Yeti, and more. And for after the hunt, we have a limited time offer to save on our most popular seasonings like backstrap brew, campfire crust, and backcountry bark. Or get the six-pack to try them all.

Our favorite time of year is right around the corner. Head over to the meat eater store.com to check out our season open. open or sail. There's people trying to figure out deer, you know, and they make synthetic sense. Oh, huh. That are meant to, you know, be like, not only is it a scent coming off the face of a deer,

but this is specifically mimics the forehead gland or specifically mimics the orbital or the glands that are, you know, where they, the pee on them on their hawks. Yeah, yeah, right, right, right. So again, just in your experience and message, around with sense, like, is it possible for us to just to make a synthetic scent that could fool a deer's nose and brain? Oh, yeah.

So, no, because hamsters have like the same thing. They've got like four different scent glands. And they, and so the lab work, and this is, I'm sure, Drew for Deere, that they recognize individuals by all these different, you know, but they know that that's the anal gland and that's the chest gland and that, but they also know it's that individual. So it's a really complicated signal. And, you know, you've got a deer with five different scent glands. Everyone smells different. You know, they're all different. They're different for that. They identify that individual. And now you're bringing something, some generic thing, you know, that is generic hawk odor that

or maybe, you know, it was synthesized for a deer in Wisconsin, but you're actually hunting in a completely different population. Probably they smell differently. They're going like, who the hell is that? I don't know who that is. I mean, I've never, or that's not even my neighborhood. That's not even my state, you know. I mean, sure, if they came to Wisconsin and they synthesize,

you know, your five glands for each one of your deer. Even so, I think it'd be very confusing for the deer to know, like, who is that? I mean, that's a weird robot deer. You know, I mean, that doesn't make any sense. It's like if you showed up wearing a Halloween mask, you know, it's equivalent of you wearing, of doing something very weird. They recognize that it's deer, and they recognize that it's a scent, but they don't understand what it means. Like a stranger walking into your house, and your kids are like, oh, it's just a person?

Yeah, exactly. It doesn't matter. Sure. Sure, have dinner with us. Yeah, it's like, no, no, no. That's exactly right. Yeah. So I think that they're underestiming the deer's intelligence.

And also, the other thing is that it might be that, you know, I mean, in some population, How are deer's using these glands? You know, is that something that they're marking out territories, or is it aggressive or, you know, it's just, it's kind of like, it's a deer language, and you're coming in with a big sign that says, you know, one thing. And the deer's going, what are you saying? I don't, you know, they're just, it's confusing.

Well, some of these manufacturers will claim that, hey, you don't use this one. during these dates, this one is specifically meant from October 15th to November 1, when the bucks are going to be specifically going to the scrapes, marking them in a very territorial fashion. Right, right. And you want to basically introduce a stranger so that that buck's like, man, I don't know who's been hitting my scrape, but I need to come back here and keep putting my scent back on top of it. That makes complete sense. Because they're marking and then they're countermarking. That's right. So that's exactly what the hamsters stuff.

But you feel like we could fool that buck enough to make him think that someone else is countermarking, so I need to come back and countermark it. I mean, the thing is if you give them an animal something that's really, really important, like, and to a buck, whether I'm going to reproduce, that is everything. Like, it doesn't matter if I live or die, if I don't reproduce, who cares? So that's life or death for a buck. So that would be, this is weird. but I'm going to do it.

It's kind of like when I was trapping squirrels and, you know, for behavior. And, you know, in the middle of the summer, you can trap any squirrel as much as you want. But as soon as the, you know, the oaks start ripening again, the squirrels are going, I'm not going in that trap. I know it's a trap. It's a trade-off.

I'm like, I know it's a trap. I know it's, you know, it could be bad, but I'm really hungry and I'm going to go for it. And two weeks later, like the same score. And then, oh, because they know at that point

they have enough. The risk. Exactly. You know, what's crazy about that? So we got a buddy and we got a buddy in, uh, Arkansas.

And they'll put out bait piles for bears. And in the summer, you might have 17, 18 bears on a bait pile. The minute the acorns hit. Yes. They're gone. Exactly.

Oh, it's like, well, it can't be easier than a bait pile. No, but in their head, it's like, no,

it's like, no, it's not easier to bait piles. It's less risky than a bay pile. It's, well, I'm, well, it's also, you know, it's also not, it's not as good. I mean, acorns are really highly nutritious. And I think that's actually, because the same thing with squirrels, you know, they, I mean, they evolved to eat acorns. And acorns are full of kinds of micronutrients that bait, that there's no way, I can't, I can't, you know, walnuts and peanuts and stuff like that.

Exactly. I mean, hungry and slumming it. I think that's right. Yeah, yeah. I got one for you about canines. And this is, so in like in the outdoorsman world, okay, there's this, there's this long running debate. If you went back, if you went back to 1980, all right, in 1980, there was an idea that you could, that a fox trapper or a coyote trapper could wear rubber boots and slosh, wear rubber boots, slosh around in the mud puddle,

wear rubber gloves and wash them, okay, that you could go and like set a trap and have it be that the fox or the coyote would not know that a human was there. You could make it that he was never there. Since 1980, the understanding has evolved to now where there's guys that don't even wear rubber gloves because in their mind they're like,

there's nothing you can do. I think that's right. They always know you're there. You can play games. Yeah. It knows you're there. Yeah. I mean, you're, you're, you're tricking yourself to think that it doesn't.

It's like, it knows you're there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because, you know, our, we are dropping dead skin cells like thousands all day long, you know, and our, you know, you've got these skin cells that are covered with bacteria and the bacteria are decomposing. And that makes your own, your own particular odor. I mean, you're just leaving a stream of. of heavy, you know, pieces of tissue around you.

So you're walking through the woods. You're just dropping trails. So it's not just your feet. It's like you're just dropping, you know, that information. And again, if you're a, it's, you know, dinner or my life. And so an animal thinks you're, you know, you're a predator. They just need one little width of that. So you think the idea that you would hide like, and this is like not old.

This is like yesterday. No, no. I'm saying when I mean that, I mean that you think the idea that that 24 hours later that you could hang out in a place for a minute, hovering around a place for a minute, that 24 hours later in your mind, it doesn't matter what you got on your hands. I think, I think it's like there was a dude here. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think, you know, unless you did all this masking and all this kind of, but just yourself with with gloves, without gloves, I think they would still know. Yeah. But this masking that you speak of, that's what we're interested in. I know, I know, I know. But I don't know.

I mean, again, you know, animals, it's like actually, I've got, you know, mice in my car. And so what really works are these, these rodent, you know, smelly packets? You know, you get these herbal packets. Yeah. And they, you know, you put them. And I thought that I was just realizing, I was putting him in yesterday because I just... Oh, you have mice vandalizing your car. Yes.

Yes. I just, and yesterday, like before I flew out here, I turned on the, you know, the air vents and all this mouse bedding's blowing out. It's like, I got mice back around. You live on a farm. Yeah. Yeah. And we got the mice, you know, deer mice all over the place. And I realized, no, no, no, it isn't that they don't like the smell of this fragrant thing.

It's not, it's that it masks their own odor, that they can't, that it confuses them. If they're moving around this dark car, using a lot of odor, and I've got all these big, stinky packets that people buy for their cars and their crux and everything, it's just, it's disorienting. It's like having wind. So I think. And again, it's like a blind spot, like you said before. It's like that odor blind spot, and they don't like that.

But that's what you're saying is an interesting point about this issue is like, in our minds, when I say artists, I mean collectively like people that are trying to trick animals. In your mind, you're creating an atmosphere that he'll be comfortable being in

but just won't be able to tell what's going on. And you're saying you might be creating an atmosphere where they don't want to be in it. Right, right, right. Because it's like you're creating a confusing space.

Information is safety, right? I mean, you wouldn't want to be in a space that you didn't know where anything was. I mean, that's very dangerous. I mean, animals, number one, where am I? That they, they use vision, olfaction. I mean, they use everything they can. And then there's home court advantage.

You know, animals are safer in spaces where they know. They have escape routes, you know, they know where the predators are. They know who the predators are. All that stuff is very important. So you come in and you do make it chaos. I don't, you know, it's... I want to tell you story, though. It's kind of what you're talking about in a way, but with humans.

So my buddy, my buddy, I have a buddy in Hawaii, Danny Bolton, and they have a coffee plantation like a family property. And he's got all these bananas, banana trees. I think at once upon time they were like cultivated intentionally, but now it's just like scattered banana trees. And I was out there with my kids and they're trying to find a like a bundle of like ripe bananas. Which you can't find because everybody's always in there getting the bananas. He says, though, if you really want to find right bananas, you got to go. they have this pile where they make their own fish-based fertilizer. So they have a place where they're really like the rotting down fish carcasses.

He says, I guarantee you'll find ripe bananas there because no one wants to go there. So you go down to the rotten fish pile and it's right bananas all over the place. Because it's like he just finds over the years that people are like, They hit that wall of stench and they go look for bananas somewhere else. I tell you, that's... And it worked. There's like ripe bananas.

You know, that's animal behavior. That's perfect animal behavior. That's exactly how you should think about deer in the woods. I think we'll be remiss if we have a gray squirrel expert here and we don't hit on, like, you got to tell us, like, what's cool about gray squirrels and their noses? and I don't know if we want to talk about cashing. Yeah, tell us the best thing we don't know about gray squirrels. Okay, well, I mean, so my PhD thesis, they remember where they bury their nuts.

And recent work we did in California was that squirrels, when they bury nuts, we gave them a random series of nuts of different species. They organized them by species so that they would move, so that the walnuts are here, almonds are there, hazelnuts are there. Like you'd give them a pile and there'd be three of each. No, no, we'd give them one at a time so that they didn't know what was coming next.

So they all of a sudden, we give them a walnut and they carry the walnut that far. We've actually also showed an earlier study that they measure the weight of the nut by shaking it. So you watch a squirrel, give a squirrel a nut, put it in the nut in the mouth, they go like that. And that's just like if you had something really light and you wonder how heavy is it, you do that. And so it's force equals mass times acceleration. It's Isaac Newton. I get to, you know, I get to say that, it's true.

But they measure it and then, depending how heavy the nut is, they carry it farther away from the source tree where all the other squirrels are. You want to get it far away and cache it so that other squirrels don't find it. your cash. So the bigger than nut, the farther they cash it. Because it's more valuable.

It's more valuable. And they, not only that, but then if it's really valuable nut, they cash them further apart. So that if one squirrel finds it, then they start looking like this, they don't find the next one. So if you give them...

It's like a diversified portfolio. It's completely, that's exactly the same thing. And so you've got the density of a hazelnut is like this, an almond is like this, and a walnut is like that, you know. And so if you give these squirrel a random series of nuts, you give them a nut, they weigh it, then they go out and cash it, and they're cashing it in the walnut area, and then they come back and it's an almond. Now they've got to go cash in the almond area, and then they come back and they cash, you know,

and every time they go out, they have to remember where the other one was. So they have to have to keep the density right. Yeah. And they do that because we're out there marking it. Like can you can he keep how many walnuts can he keep track of? We don't we don't we don't know. They cash the house, probably 3,000 a year of a gray squirrel. And and we know that in the lab they can remember, you know, they can accurately remember like seven of ten. But I, I, you know, no one's figured out yet how to measure how much they remember in the field. The thing is squirrels are actually, they cash in, you know, August, September, and then they're cashing in their area, in their home area.

And so they are out, they're active all winter. And if you look at a squirrel, November, December, I mean, all winter, they're out there sniffing the ground, and you'll see them sniff the ground, even through snow and sniff. and then they'll, but if there's like just leaves, and they're like checking caches, and then they, and then they'll put the leaves back on it

and they'll go with the next one. And then sometimes they'll dig them up and move them. So they're constantly managing them, you know, all winter. So I don't think they actually have to remember them for nine months. I mean, they eat them.

They cash them in August. They finish them, you know, April, something like that. And so, but they're not, I mean, there are birds that cash them, Clark's Nut Crackers, you know, Cash's Pinyon Seeds in August, September, and then they may not

retrieve them until March. And so those really, under deep snow. So those animals, they really are remembering exactly where they are. But a squirrel's constantly fiddling with them, and passing over them and re-smelling them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But they can remember, but they

don't have to, I mean, so mammals are I mean, squirrels are interesting because they've got really good memory, but they can also smell. Whereas most birds, there's actually, I just saw magpies yesterday. I love magpies. Magpies actually have a good sense of smell,

and they can, if you coat a raisin in cod liver oil and bury it, a magpie can find it. That was a study showing that, because they're carrying eaters. They're probably, you know, like ravens and magpies, they're probably attracted to smells. But squirrels can do both. They can smell or they can, yeah.

You get starting to squirrels, you know, it'll be another three hours. So I remember, but we had a squirrel expert on one time years ago. Yeah. Yeah. John was John Caprowski. Yeah. So 259.

I pulled it up. Yeah, he was doing this stuff. See, I remember. He's an expert on this. I remember reading in headlines. I remember at one point in time reading in a headline that someone's like, squirrels can't, that they don't get their own cash nuts any more reliably than somebody else. That's not, I mean, that's not true.

Not true. I mean, that's, no, I mean, I've been literally studying this since 19801. So they're more likely to go find their own than they are to find somebody else's. Yes. And what I saw in, I had this like 10 yard by five yard arena where I had hand raised squirrels that were, you know, and what would I put in decoys, their own caches and then decoys. And if a squirrel came up and there were like two nuts right next to each other, one was his and one was a decoils. If he hit the decoy first, he'd keep going. So I think his memory was like, there's one there, but if I find one, so he's not using smell because he was.

Then he would go to the one that was like two inches away, but he wasn't. He would just go on to the next one. So like a little nap going boom, boom, boom, boom. And I studied the same thing in kangaroo rats and Miriam's kangaroo rats, which are, they hoard like squirrels. And I found sex differences there. That was interesting. The males were more likely to use odors. They were more likely to find caches that still had seeds in them.

And females, we had a bunch of landmarks around. And females, as long as the landmarks were there, females were super good at that. And males didn't use the landmarks as much, and they were more likely to use their nose. But that's a whole other area of research I've studied for a lot, is sex differences in landmark use, in kangaroo rats and humans, and male refrigerator blindness. I'm sure you've heard of that.

This is where, you know, a man goes to refrigerator and says, where's the butter? Oh, yeah. And opens it up and says, I don't see it. I don't see it. And then, you know, it's actually right there. So, I mean, it's just. I call that all three of my kids refrigerator blind. Oh.

Yeah. Yeah. Terrible at repatching shit off. So you see similar things in kangaroo rats. That's all I'm saying, you know. So you're, when were your, when were your book on squirrels be ready? So probably, I'm hoping it'll be come out like fall of 27. Okay.

And what will be called? It's called the wealth of squirrels. Okay. And it's, it's really about, you know, the economics of hoarding in squirrels. Oh. And everything I've just been talking about. It'll be like, is it intended as a popular book? It's going to be a popular book.

For like Joe Blow, not like a recent, not like an academic title. Okay, and can I, I mean, you know, I've never done this before, so I'm a little cautious saying this, but that's what, I've got a contract for this book from Harvard University Press. And they've agreed to let me write it as a story, actually. Okay. So it's really going to be a kind of a fictional story that is, so it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, you know, it's, It really should be a fun, a fun read, but it's going to be very, you know, dense science. It'll all be based on science. There's no, no humans, just squirrels.

So, an experiment, we'll see. Yeah. So it's going to, John, I mean, people like, it's going to get peer reviewed, too. So it's going to, the biology is going to be, they won't accept it if the biology isn't absolutely right. The wealth of squirrels? The wealth of squirrels. Okay. So, listeners, stay tuned for Dr. Lucia F. Jacobs, the wealth of squirrels.

And thank you for coming on today and explaining everything about how animals experience their world through smell. Thank you. This has been, I have learned huge amount and I've really enjoyed this. It's been great. Thank you very much. It was. Thank you. Hunting season is right around the corner, and first light season opener sale kicks off August 18. You can save up to 40% site wide, and this year they're rolling out.

new 24-hour daily deals throughout the sale. So it's worth checking back every day because those deals are going to change. There are also a few pieces I really like that are on sale for the first time ever, including the 308 pant and navigator hoodie. If you've been waiting to replace some worn-out gear, fill a hole in your system, or just get ready for the season. Now's the time. Head over to firstlight.com and gear up for the season.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human.