It's not our scent that we need to control!

I tie fresh skinned coyote hide on my boots.
Also made a pair of gloves out of fresh skinned coyote hide.
Traps,snares and tools are sanitized like surgical equpment.
Wear SENTLOCK suits.Like a deer hunter.
After the set is made I sprat it with SENTLOCK .Ever my trail in and out.
Then my screet is Scuba gear. I dont want to breath on anything.

I don’t worry much about scent control. I make sure my traps are clean, I wear gloves to handle bait and I’m careful not to ever let the outside of those gloves touch anything but the inside of my bait bag. Then I set barehanded if it’s warm. Cotton gloves if it’s real cold. A coyotes will be able to tell if you are still there, you were there yesterday, or if you were there last week. I trap for fur, most of my trapping is not for a landowner or trouble critters, so I don’t care to fool with catching all the super wary ones. Gotta leave some seed for next year anyways. I catch dumb, desperate and brave ones and don’t lose sleep over the ones that are still out there.

Now, if I was out to kill a certain coyote, or was being paid to kill every last one, different story. I’d be as anal as any whitetail hunter.

Peed in the pipe and caught a large female yote 2 days later. Some coyote are more paranoid than others over our or foriegn scents. I dont worry about scent as much as I used to.

Very good post. Some areas there are no dumb bold aggressive coyotes. They are all shot by the U.S.D.A. guy out of a plane, or hung in a snare on the fence by a sheep herder, or killed with a cyanide gun by the rancher or county predator control agent.

So when you ask "Scent-free Is it necessary?", I say it depends.


P.S. scent free isnt possible I am very aware. IMO it helps to hold it down as much as you can . Sometimes. Fur trapping getting more sets out is what you want

KISS in and out fast

Had guys cutting wood all day at one spot. 2 inches snow. Dirty sweaty clothing gas oil etc and had lunch made by wives and eaten out of dirty hands. Left a lot of scraps in snow and next morning all was cleaned up by yotes. Some are just used to people and tolerate scent and I believe they even check out what we were up to.

I agree with Boone, my experience is fresh yotes and virgin ground is fairly easy to stack some up in that area quickly ( brave, stupid, starving, young, aka “ the cream “ ) but there are still yotes in most of those areas most times that are more wary of what im doing and where ive been. They take a little more tact to catch in my opinion, but when I move same results catch the cream work for the butter. I still wear gloves to set, wax and dye my traps, and dont use same gloves for bait as I set with. Gloves dont bother me it’s normally cold and im wearing them anyways, fast and efficient sets also have everything there to complete the set fully get up and make next one.

But what if I smell good? My wife says I do.

Very interesting responses, and eye opening. We've come a long ways in all trapping matters from the times when the likes, of Thorpe, Hawbacker, Dailey, Dobbins and other great ones, that I grew up reading their articles and books. In fact I looked at their articles as the
Bible verses of the trapping world.
I more than likely will never change the way I trap canines, cause I'm kind of stubborn and set in my ways, but I also know that I'll never be one to catch 100 canines during the trapping season.
But I always go out and come back home with a smile, after a day on the line.

Reading through this thread has been interesting been at this for 53 yrs.
And still I learn , on location, and natural, make up for alot stuff.
I like knee pads because my knee get sore the older I get. I agree with what been said . Some can be trapped some can be shot some can be snared some can airplaned some can m44 ed they all have a fault just like us or weak spot let's say . All we got do is find it.

To add to this there is a difference for fur trapping coyotes and catching the one doing the killing . Or the last one if there is such a thing.
But in and out reasonably cleanly is a good practice imo.

That'll work.

Truth is that coyotes today grow up around humans and make at least part of their living stealing our livestock or eating our garbage, they are exposed to rusty steel at every fence and if they ran from every human caused scent there would be no coyotes at all in the lower 48. that may not have been true a hundred years ago and surely wasn't true 150 years ago, so maybe the old timers were kinda correct at the time, but their best efforts never left a scent free site.
Truth is no human was ever scent free and the crap sold to kill human scent has it's own scent.
"convince them that it is safe" covers it all, they can watch you build the set and if the bait is interesting enough they will check it out as you walk off.
I used to approach sets from a distance and make a loop trail around them so that I didn't leave tracks at the set when checking it until tracks taught me that the critters were following my new trails as often as the set trail; I was actually leading targets away from my sets.

The only extra things i swear by are cotton gloves & a kneeling pad.

IMO most trappers over think things re coyote and wolf trapping and spend too much time constructing sets leaving a concentration of scent and disturbance. Coyotes and wolves are very familiar with human scent, wire, cable, and chain debris in the bush from logging etc. Just have confidence, get in, set and get out as quickly as possible and you will have little problem.

I dont wear a rubber suit by any means but i do wax and dye my traps and wear rubber palmed gloves and i wear my lacross burlys i work in i just find a fresh pile of cow manure to walk through after chores to use as a cover scent to mask the oil or diesel i may have stepped in through the day