It was 6 years ago this month when somebody on the Deer & Deer Hunting forum started asking for opinions on UV Killer. I gave my opinion, and cross-posted it back here on my weblog. I did not realize this was going to be the prelude to the most turgid, controversial period in this weblog’s history. I certainly didn’t realize that 6 years later, my original post on this subject would be getting over 50 hits a day.  The fact that you all are hitting on those posts still today are testament. It still kind of galls me how something so obvious would slip our attention. We think of ourselves as rational people.

Just to give you a brief history, the original post went up in September 2008. It came to the attention of a representative of ATSKO, the company that makes U.V. Killer. In a comment to the post, ATSKO said:

Dear Shaman,
If you believe your readers would be interested in a two sided discussion of U-V-Killer and the science of deer vision, I will try to engage in a conversation.
In any case it would be only fair to direct them to Atsko.com where the dvd and book and hundreds of references in juried periodicals are all available at no cost.
Sincerely,
Dan Gutting, Atsko Inc.

One of the UV Tests

That got the ball rolling. We traded email. ATSKO sent me some material. I tested according to their directions and got wholly negative results. I reported all this on D&DH and the weblog. ATSKO asked me to do additional tests. The more I progressed in this, the more I found that not only could I barely find any camo material that fluoresced in the UV light they provided, but when I did, the solution would not dull the shine significantly. About half-way through, I got word from D&DH that if I wanted to continue my position as a pro-staffer, I’d have to refrain from posting actual test results on their site, and that in the future, I would have to frame my comments about UV Killer as opinion. Meanwhile, from the basement laundry room, I was realizing the UV emperor was running around starkers.

It was not until quite some time later in all this– the whole affair lasted quite some months–that it hit me:

1) We put UV-fluorescing dye into clothing to make them whiter and brighter for us– for our eyes.
2) We do not see in UV. If we can see it, it ain’t UV.
3) The whole idea of fluorescence is that certain chemicals absorb light at one end of the spectrum and then reflect it back at another. A red shirt absorbs sunlight in all parts of the spectrum and only reflects it or re-radiates it back out in a color we see as red. In the case of a UV dye, it absorbs UV and radiates it back as some color WE can see. Zinc Oxide is an example.  It is the stuff they put in the heavy sunblock lifeguards put on their noses.
4) Deer probably see in the UV part of the spectrum, but it makes no difference to the issue. The clothing in question is radiating in the visible part of the spectrum, not UV.

Do you understand? It took me a while. I was so accustomed to thinking inside the box that ATSKO had set up, I did not see basic goofiness of the whole contention. Eventually ATSKO stopped asking for tests, and I bundled up the stuff they sent me and shipped it back.

The Shamanic Clown Suit

In 2011 I found an article about reindeer and UV, and that was the corker. Researchers had found that reindeer had UV sensitivity, but the point of it was that it gave the deer the ability to see things like white wolf fur as darker on a field of snow. If this was extrapolated to whitetails, it would mean that whitetails would be scared more from the absence of UV, and spraying yourself with UV-suppressing chemicals would make you an ominous dark blob.

Clown Suit– what the deer see

It is funny. It has been six years, and still I get close to 50 reads a day on the original post. I went back a few weeks ago and edited in an update. The affair got me interested in deer vision in general and as of this moment, if you Google “What do deer really see?” the first image you get is a picture of my son, Moose, in his hunter orange poncho.

It changed my hunting too. Somewhere along the way, I made the boast that I would wear a flo-orange clownsuit and put up a neon sign that “Danger: Hunter.” The neon sign never came about, but I did score a nice matching set of bibs and a quad parka that are a complete eyesore. I have been hunting in them since 2011, and really see no difference in my hunting luck.

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