scent desensitization

[P Carter]

Someone said--I think--that dogs can map and navigate a room by smell alone.

I imagine that elk are similar. It's not just "a scent": I'd guess they know exactly where the scent is; how many people are there; how long ago the person was there; and a whole bunch of other information. I don't see that some familiarity with old clothes would fool them into ignoring your actual presence.

Think on the flipside: if there were a green, orange, and red sign that sends a clear signal to us--I dunno, an off-color "watch for rock" road sign or something--elk would see it as an indistinct gray blob with no meaning.

Sight is our key sense, smell is theirs, we don't really know how elk experience smell but it's certainly different than how we experience it!

 

[Packer9037]

I don't believe in trying to trick an elk's smell...if I get the wrong wind, I assume I'm screwed. Let us know how it goes if you try it out.

 

[hibernation]

If you hang laundry in there, I’d bet they avoid it initially and then start to ignore it as it loses scent. Meaning it won’t have much impact on your hunt compared to your fresh human stank blowing through the air.

If you go in often enough to keep it fresh, I’d bet they stop frequenting the area.

 

[K9kodi]

Late reply.
Can you train elk to receive a smell (odor) and think good things? Absofuckinlootly. 100000% you can. It’s both very simple and hard at the same time.
The theory, the idea, it’s instinctively simple, but being able to properly accomplish this super simple process it’s almost impossible in your given circumstance.

In a controlled environment, maybe even a large tract or unit of private land, all you have to do is associate your odor, or random human odor of your hunting party with something they desire. I.e in the off season place corn or high value food on a trail for a week or two then do it again, but leave cotton gauze with your odor or hunting party odor in the mix. They will be conditioned to finding the food and comfy eating it, then you slowly associate your odor with it. Then I’d change the location of the food, maybe a couple feet away with more fresh scented gauze so they may eventually follow that odor to the food.

People often ask why I hunt using an atv to get to the other side of the farm. Well, I run atvs so often it’s a normal sound. In the off season you could even put a spreader on it and drop corn as the atv goes by. You can condition them to be neutral to a sound, the sound just can’t be present when bad things happen. Like some people put a little bell on automatic feeders, if the be goes off and then the noise of the spreader hits and deer know it’s time for food, you could in theory now have a deer call that’s a bell. Now, this is considering it’s all controlled environments. Probably more so academia settings.

If you could possible get an animal to associate your human odor with something good, the posssbikity of other hunters screwing that up for you is monumental. All the hard work you put in is for not if other hunters make the animals associate that once good odor with someone bad. They won’t ever trust it again.
Moral of the story, is it possible, absolutely, is it likely in your given situation, nope