Episode # 188 reload R. Zavian Hauser – The Deer Truth

October 31, 2016

WR 188 | The Deer TruthWhere the hell did the deer go during deer season? This particular woe is shared by hunters all over North America. Especially when there’s snow on the ground, you see still see deer tracks going past these barriers. Where are they spending their daytime activity? That is the most important secret. R. Zavian Hauser uncovers this secret in his book, “The Deer Truth”. Once a hunter learns where his local deer herd spends their day time, he learns how to access it without spooking those deer. The Deer Truth also covers how to find deer all year round, especially where those deer are while all the pumpkins are around the woods blasting away with shotguns, yelling and hollering. Read this book for an instant advantage over those geezers!

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Zavian Hauser joins us and R. Zavian is a professional horror fiction and nonfiction author from the New England states but he’s also one heck of a deer hunter. Over the years he’s collected a lot information and he’s published it both in eBook and hardbound called The Deer Truth.

Listen to the podcast here:

The Deer Truth With R. Zavian Hauser

We’re heading to New England and R. Zavian Hauser, author of The Deer Truth, joins us. R. Zavian, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. It’s always a pleasure.

It’s been six, eight months since you last were on the show. At that time The Deer Truth was just coming out. Let’s jump into it and tell the folks what The Deer Truth is about, how they can get it, and what you’ve learned so far since it’s been released.

The Deer Truth officially was released in eBook format. It was about twelve days late, publishers and all the other aspects of editing and things that they went through. When we saw the hardcover reach bookstores and internet sales, I believe that they opened it up for early ordering so people can preorder it. I want to say they sold a couple hundred copies of that as soon as it opened up for sale, which was nice for Christmas. People started receiving the books around Christmas.

It’s available through MascotBooks.com by going to the title search for The Deer Truth or you can Google The Deer Truth by R. Zavian Hauser. There’s an astounding number of places carrying it, from Barnes & Noble to Books-A-Million. Amazon.com carries both the eBook and hardcover. The retail price of the hardcover book, which includes full color images throughout the book, detailed maps, descriptions, know where to look for deer, how to setup for deer, all the true and tried proven tactics and tips, no gimmicks, no come-ons anywhere in the book and it retails for $24.95 US. There are also a limited number of autographed versions. There were 100 copies shipped to me to sign. I signed those and shipped them back and that copy retails for $34.95. Quite a few people have attained that. If I see people that have the book, I’ll randomly sign it and it won’t be part of that limited signature edition that’s numbered but it’s still cool to have the signature of the author in your book.

How would they do that? Buy the book and then ship it to you, you ship it back?

If somebody wanted to do that, yes. They can contact me via Facebook under R Zavian Hauser or The Deer Truth or Red Zone Scent Eraser or A Darkness Dwells. I’ve got a whole slew of pages there on Facebook that I monitor and run through the books and the business.

You also are an author about scary movies. Horror fiction, nonfiction author.

WR 188 | The Deer Truth
The Deer Truth: R. Zavian Hauser The Deer Truth

I’m also a nonfiction author. There’s The Deer Truth, which is nonfiction. I also do horror fiction. I’m pretty unlimited on the topics and stories that I can create. Horror fiction’s a huge genre and has a big following. I’m very creative and you take a creative mind and apply it to horror, especially when you use tangible locations and street names in areas that people are going to drive down. That sends out a great reach. Just real quick, the story of A Darkness Dwells hovers around and is centered on the Hoosac Tunnel down in North Adams, Massachusetts that runs through the mountain, right underneath Florida Mountain. It comes out in Monroe on the other side of the Deerfield River. That tunnel’s been surrounded by ghost stories and all kinds of situations since its inception back in the late 1700s, 1800s. I’ve got a lot of historical facts touching in there. I’ve got some realistic locations in there. That book tends to reach into the spine of people from that area and get a real reaction out of them as far as the genuine interest.

I was going to say that’s interesting stuff, how you’d take real places and then spin your story and then people can see themselves going down those streets or knowing that mountain. Let’s spin it up and let’s talk about the book. In your bio it says, “This novel focuses totally on public lands that are subject to massive pressure by hunters season to season.” It also says that there are secrets that the industry has kept under lock and key for decades. Let’s unpack that a little bit.

The industry, like any industry, the gun industry doesn’t send out how they bore their barrels and what temperatures they heat their steel too and all that good stuff. If they did, we’d all be at the machine shop making our own Remington rifles, and some people do. What I wanted to reveal to hunters, my fellow hunters and everybody out there that hunts or takes to amuse, it’s not a competition in my book no matter if I’m out there to compete against someone. Somebody has a line area that I’m hunting then I’ll move out of there and let them have it.

I hope they do well in there. I’m not going to go back in and chop their tree stand down and steal the cameras and kick their car on the way out. Which I’ve had done to me many times but that comes from some individual. My point and my goal is to reveal the true aspects of hunting. The true nature of locating deer consistently, being able to stop the car in an area you’re interested in, get in the woods, walk the area and identify and locate the deer, not just driving along. This happened; there are a lot of people that have done this. You’re going along and you’ve been seeing this spot on your way to work. This hill, the sun’s out and just right. You think there are a lot that is a good place, got a bunch of pine trees or spruce or hemlock, there’s something on, they pullover, they go in there.

Because that area looks like some area they saw in a hunting show on television nor the internet, they immediately think, “This is it. This is where such and such took that big giant buck, this call and this scent,” and this and that and on and forth. Some of these people will go year after year in these areas that are dead ends. They never had deer in them or if they do occasionally, maybe a running doe or two will pass through there. They’re not seeing the deer the way you should be seeing deer and they’re not seeing them in all locations and yet these people continue to repeat this behavior season after season. I worked in the archery department of a sporting goods shop, some of my teenage middle school and high school years, and the stories people come in and same thing. “I haven’t seen anything. There’s nothing out there.”

Granted they were definitely a depleted deer herd in this area overall, but there are areas that do hold healthy and abundant populations of deer, if you know how to recognize their signs, their travel routes, and all the different things they feed on, then you’re able to capitalize on that. Even if you’re not harvesting more deer, you choose to let them pass by, you’re going to see deer. That’s my point. I go to the woods. I want to at least see deer every day. I don’t want to go sit in the woods and stare at trees, sticks and bushes and listen to birds and squirrels. I want to see deer; I want to study the deer’s behavior. I want to know if I was right about what direction they’re traveling from and I want to learn all the aspects of the white tail deer, the whys, the what, the when and the where’s.

Once you’ve established those things, you can go to the woods. You can be successful. Success is not being measured by drawing blood, the kill and all that. I’m talking about successful as being the deer hunter or deer watcher by going to the woods every day, being able to be where the deer are and be undetected by the deer as well. One of the key things that I point out in the book is a major myth and the misinformation that’s been taught and driven into the minds of hunters for centuries since hunting began especially when it began to become or morph into a business aspect. I’m not a big fan of anyone hunting inside of the fence, I can’t even call it hunting but I will just because we don’t want to offend anyone.

One of the key factors is being scent-free, being able to minimize your human scent. Share on X

Whether you hunt in a fence or outside of the fence, you’re still a hunter. If you put on the goals and you carry the gun and the bolt, then you’re a hunter period. What happens, you’ve got this aspect of the outfitters telling everyone and teaching people starting out in the sport that you want to set up downwind. You don’t want the wind blowing across the deer trail or to the deer from your position. That’s a huge lie. One of the key factors is being scent-free, being able to minimize your human scent. That doesn’t mean human scent being soul or that kind of stuff, human scent being that natural scent that human beings produce on their body from the bacteria that’s replicating itself on your skin and hair and your natural oils of your body over and over.

That’s the scent and your breath that terrify animals in the woods deer, bear, coyotes, all the things that can smell you. You want to mask all of those things best you can. I recommend chewing natural gums to cover the breath and using some products that are proven to destroy human odor. For myself, we use our own product Red Zone Scent Eraser. We spray ourselves and our gear down with that. Our hair, our skin, boots, underclothes, our over clothes and all of our gear to remove as much of the human scent that we may have left as possible. We always set up with the wind blowing from us to where we expect to see the deer. I’m going to hit on that because how many times, and I point this out in the book, how many times have you been out in the woods? You found the deer runs. You put the trail cameras out. You know where you’re traveling yet you go there and set up, you set up downwind. You probably made some noise going in, who knows what happened or maybe something spooked the deer up above or down below. When the deer come through, how is it that they manage to be behind you? Why aren’t they in front of you? You’re downwind to them. How is it that they are able to come in behind you? Why does that happen so often?

One of those major things is the motion that the deer use, like a candy cane, J or hook, whatever you prefer to refer to it as. When a deer is traveling the area, most people for some reason tend to set up bait where the apple tree is, bait where the cornfield is or in some states where you can bait where your whole bait is. In many cases, over scrapes, that’s a bad practice because you’re expecting the deer to come from a certain way. You’re probably moving around a little bit depending all day, if you’re one of those people who can sit all day, which I think is important.

When the deer comes in, especially bucks, they’re not going to come straight down the run of the trail. They’re going to come in and let’s say the wind is prevalent from the west, there’s still going to be some tailwind or crosswinds, maybe southwest or northwest from that. Before deer’s going to come into an area and venture going to the food, the scrape or whatever, he’s going to want to smell everything. He may make this Jhook circle that I’m talking about and end up behind you or whatever because he wants to smell everything first and look at the area and assess that he is safe to enter that area and detect any danger that might be there.

A common misconception is to setup with the wind blowing to your face. That’s a huge mistake and wind shifts when I’m out there and it continues. If I was set up with the wind behind me coming from the west and it shifts to the north, then I’m going to change my position if I can without being detected. I want to see all of the deer or the majority of the deer that travel to that area and they’re going to do so with that wind blowing from me to them, just the way it is in our experiences.

Thanks for that insight. It’s real easy to be quiet when you’re hearing that type of insight. I spoke to a guy from Hunt Fish Journal, Jerry Everhart, and he hunts deer 360 degrees of a stand through his system. You can go to Hunt Fish Journal and hear his system. He says he doesn’t worry about the wind, he worries the heck out of his scent, but he doesn’t worry about the wind anymore. Let’s spend a little more time and let’s expand that a little bit because that’s a critical misnomer, lore, or a tradition in our industry.

What it boils down to, and I’ve had this discussion at seminars and trade shows with outfitters, for hunters it’s a misconception because if you go to an outfitter or you watch a hunting show and that’s how they tell you to set up then you take it with you and you teach your friends that stuff. Then you’re passing on a misconception. However, for the outfitter it’s not a misconception. You know the reason why they set you up that way? With the wind in your face?

No.

That is to reduce the number of wounded animals on their property. If they set you up so that you saw all the animals that were traveling around you, you may be enticed into shooting or further shot, shooting more animals whether you get them or not. They do that so that the one animal who might come through the setup the way they have you set up is the only one you’re going to see and the only one you’re going to get a shot at. That’s generally what that’s for, it’s a conservation practice amongst outfitter groups and guides and those types of people. I have a friend that’s a guide, he guides out in Maine and travels out west to go look for elk. He’s a jack of all trades of the outdoors. He hunts exactly the way that I hunt, the way my grandfather taught me to hunt, with the wind blowing from my back to where I expect to see the deer. I might get one deer or two deer that come in behind me, but not a dozen or fifteen deer always in front of me.

What your friend was talking about, on the Hunt Fish Journal, he’s right on the money. I don’t worry about the wind. I spray myself down, but I do know enough about the wind that I know how the deer travel when it comes to wind. They always, when just normal traveling, they crisscross the wind. They walk into an angle; they never walked straight into it. The only time that I have ever witnessed deer traveling with the wind in face is when they’re alerted, spooked and they’re on the run.

Can you repeat that because a lot of people don’t understand that and don’t believe that? Coming from this guy, I started deer hunting in 1966 and that’s a lesson learned the hard way, but please reiterate that.

I’ll say it in layman’s terms. When you are setup for deer, if you can get an aerial view whether it’s a little snow on the ground, get up in a tree and look around the area. Look at how the deer trails traverse the country. Follow them around, pay attention to the wind. When you’re out in the woods and you’ve seen deer, check the weather. See where the wind was coming from. You’re going to see that deer always when normal traveling, walking from bedding to feeding or feeding to bedding or whatever point they’re traveling for a reason, you’ll notice that they always cut the wind, they always cross it. They’re never walking straight into it, straight away from it, or straight across it. They’re always walking through the wind on an angle.

If the wind is coming from the west, the deer is most likely going to be traveling in a southwest or northwest angle as he cut it. Most of our deer runs herein New England, the way our mountains are facing, most of our mountains tend to face north to south, the deer trails tend to run east and west, so from the sun to the moon, back and forth along the ridges. They do cut on an angle. We have a prevalent west wind, our deer trails will run southwest to northeast, cut that wind on an angle. The reason for that is what the deer can’t see or hear, they can smell. The only time that I’ve ever seen a deer travel directly into the wind, I mean straight into it, is when they’ve been spooked, jumped, or being pursued by something so they can smell ahead of any danger.

A lot of people don’t grasp that deer smell in parts per million. People don’t get it. A good way to explain that to someone, which we would do at seminar, is take a dog biscuit, put it in a Ziploc bag and put it in your pocket. Even if I spray that bag, I’m talking about a plastic bag. If I spray that bag with a scent elimination product of any kind, a dog can locate that biscuit inside the pocket of my jacket because they smell in parts per million so strong, depending on the dog breed. The one in particular I’m talking about is a German Shepherd. They could smell that dog biscuit through just about anything other than being wrapped in tin foil and coffee grounds like the drug traffickers do to avoid the police. It’s the same thing with hunting, if you can’t eliminate your scent completely, then it’s best to use the wind to your advantage if you’re that type of hunter or if you’re high enough in the tree.

I say I prefer to do it simple. I’d rather work smarter than harder and I like to spray myself down with Red Zone and eliminate any scent that’s in my body. If something happens and I do happen to have some human scent, I broke out a sweat or whatever; I carry an extra bottle, put it in my bag, a small one that I can do some touch up spray. You’re not going to eliminate a human’s odor 100%, but if you knock it down enough so there’s not enough particles of it floating through the air, then you’re not going to alert deer or other game animals to your presence. The thing about the breath, the breath is huge. In the last few years I always use real doe and ewe urine that I collect and make it myself and that’s in the book as well on how to do it, how to locate it, how to identify it and we heat it up.

We use body heaters and we put them around the container and heat that stuff up and then open the container. You’ve got this hot, fresh smell going through the woods and when a deer hits that path, he comes right down. A good way to look at that is anybody ever blowing bubbles, a bubble machine or whatever, this kid with a stick in the wand and blow bubbles, blow the bubbles and watch the bubbles travel through the wind. Imagine that’s a giant scent molecule and how it travels. Imagine that scent molecule will be in full strength out to about 100 yards. They’re going to a deer that you’re not even going to see. You’ll never even know they were there. They may not blow; they may have stuck their feet. They may come in, hit that scent, stop and go back the way they came and avoid that area completely. You’ll think, “There’s no deer here,” when there are deer there, they just smelled you and your presence and they made themselves nonexistent while you were there.

One visual aid that I use is 10:00 to 4:00, 2:00 to 8:00 or any variation thereof. That’s an angle. When you’re in the woods, take your compass and look at your 40,60, whatever you’re hunting, you know that. Take a compass and see the deviation from north and south. When you do that, you’re going to be amazed you go, “I never thought about it.” That’s the thing that Whitetail Rendezvous is doing. We’re bringing content but we’re talking to real people that have concepts and they’re proven. Thank you so much for that because that’s a wonderful thing. As soon as you understand that, you will become a better hunter.

Let me add one thing to that too. A lot of people don’t carry computers or other devices. There’s a simple tool that you can use which I have. If you look at any of my videos on Facebook, especially the one where I have the eight pointer that I let walk by this season on video the past season, you’ll see a piece of thread on my ball in the wind and you’ll see that the wind is blowing directly at that deer who is clueless there were humans sitting there at the base of the tree ten yards away. I use that small trick, real thin fiber attached to the stabilizer, the limb or your sight. That can give you a constant acknowledgement of the wind and how the deer are traveling and you notice that string is at a 45-degree angle across my body and that buck is walking straight in front of me. That’s because I was set up perfectly for those conditions. With that prevalent wind traveling the way it was, he was crossing that wind perfectly and he surveyed that entire area before he went to the pond and got a drink. It was hot and warm weather. We had a horribly warm weather last year and water became more important than food sources and the food was everywhere.

That’s another big thing with people hunting, everybody wants to know where the bedding area is and the feeding area. The bedding area, there is no such thing in my opinion as a defined bedding area. Deer can bed down anywhere that daylight finds them and they feel safe. If that’s a scenario that they feel safe and over and over, then maybe that becomes what you would think of as a bedding area. The minute they start getting some pressure, they’re out of it, gone. That’s no longer a bedding area, that’s now an area to avoid and they’re in a new area.

The book covers every aspect of where the hell did the deer go during deer season. It covers how to find them all year round but especially covers where are those deer while all the pumpkins are around the woods blasting away with shotguns, yelling and hollering and doing all the other things they do. You know when there’s snow on the ground, you see their tracks still and they still go through those barriers. Where are they spending their daytime activity? That is the most important secret. Once a hunter learns where his local deer herd spends their day time and then he learns how to access it without spooking those deer.

Sometimes it does require you to do it at 3:00 in the morning. We’ve all done it. That’s a sacrifice we make. I go to bed at 6:00 at night and I get up at midnight, get my gear together and I’m out the door 2:30 so I can make a nice, easy half an hour walk into that area, which sometimes was really five minutes off the road. You’re vetting where they can see the parking lot, the cars driving by. Humans start pulling all and getting out. They can pack up and head out safely. Those are your survivors and those are your light hunt. I particularly hunt the survivors because I like to see deer. I don’t shoot every year I see obviously, but I do see deer almost every day. That was my goal in my career hunting and the aspiration I had as a kid hunting Woodford Mountain and the Green Mountains of Vermont. My grandfather wears maybe fifteen deer net on 100,000 acres. I wanted to see those fifteen-year every day. Eventually I evolved into that type of caliber hunter that was able to make that happen and harvest a deer trophy year after year consistently.

If you’ve ever hunted grouse or ducks, there are downs. What I learned, I took the piece of string to my bow and or my rifle and I take the smallest feather I can get and still tie it on. I keep spares in a little vial because any breath of wind at all, I can see it. Sometimes when the light gets low, I can’t see that string but I can feel that piece of down.

A common misconception is to setup with the wind blowing to your face. Share on X

That’s correct. With the fiber value, the poly fiber that runs anywhere from 8 to 12 inches long and it’s brightly colored or white, I can detect thermals with that fiber. As the temperature is coming up, I can see that thing floating up in the air and dropping back down. You can learn a lot of things. The big thing is if you’re where the deer are, you can learn why the deer are doing these things which I reveal in the book, everything about deer hunting. If you never hunted in your life and you’re going to start this year, you would want to get The Deer Truth. I’m telling you not just to sell this product; it’s not a marketing ploy. The reviews I’ve gotten from my friends that are veteran hunters and people I don’t even know that are veteran hunters who read my book, they all said, “If I had this book before I started hunting, I can go back and probably have a lot more deer in my freezer. I would’ve seen a lot more deer.”

Thank you so much for being part of our show, being part of the Whitetail Rendezvous community. Please give a shout out to whomever you wish.

I’d love to give a shout out to Mike Grandstaff, Whitetail Stalker. He would go off and read a chapter in the book on stalking whitetail deer and his passion behind it. Nicholas Glorioso from Glorioso Wildlife Mounts Taxidermy, Granville, New York. He also contributed a chapter near the end of the book on the proper care and preparation of your trophy once you’ve harvested it so you don’t lose it and you get it to the taxidermist. My great friends in New Jersey, we’re hunting every year and Peter in Sussex and Bill and Mark McPherson down in Cape May. They’re all part of my inner circle and we share hunts together season after season.

One thing I wanted to say too before we ended this thing, some things about the outdoor industry that we could all do better. Everybody could do better getting women and kids more involved, whether it’s volunteering or being out there to take photos or spending time in nature. Start them out young in education. Educating people at a young age, your friends’ kids, even for anti-hunters, educate them about guns, gun ownership and gun handling, firearms and stuff. Many people out there that are anti everything. They’re just uneducated, they really are.

They think that steaks and hamburgers, anything in the store were born in that package. They don’t realize the horrible things that those things go through to get to that package. The fact that we hunt and we hunt ethically and we respect the game, we put the time in and the effort and we are one with nature when we’re out there and that’s something we love to do, we’re passionate about it and we’re directly responsible for the fact that there are still game animals and birds out there to hunt because hunters are the number one conservationists who have set up and fund all of these conservation programs that are all around the world.

There isn’t a single, anti-hunting group that funds or donates any money to any type of conservation program, be it fish docking, animal relocation or any of that. It’s important that we all, rather than bashing the anti-hunters, swearing at them and trying to run them off the road, the things that I read about, we’re better off just try to sit down and talk to these people rationally and educate them. I have turned quite a few people around, they’re not going to hunt, but they accept it and they actually gave me access to some properties that way long ago to access some hunting areas. By educating those people is to what I was doing.

Thank you so much for being a guest and don’t forget, ladies and gentlemen, The Deer Truth. You can find it. Google it and you’ll find it. You can look on Facebook, there are a lot of sources. Take a look at that and learn some of the tips and techniques that we just shared. Thank you so much for being on the show.

The book is available at MascotBooks.com, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million and just about anywhere that you can Google The Deer Truth.

On the next show you’re going to hear from the Founder, Owner, and President of Wicked Tree Gear, Todd Pringnitz. Todd hails from Iowa and he’s been hunting big deer for a long time. You’re going to love his run and gun techniques that you can implement.

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