Question: Can white-tailed deer tell the difference between deer urine and human urine? I have been on a deer ranch, and the owner said they can’t and that you could freshen a scrape with human urine. — Charlie M.
Answer: I, too, have heard this claim and believe that it, like bland vegetables, should be taken with a liberal dose of salt. The basic components of mammalian urine are essentially the same regardless of species. They include predominantly water and organic solutes like urea, creatinine, uric acid and trace amounts of enzymes, carbohydrates, hormones, fatty acids, pigments and inorganic ions.
And it is those trace elements that can make all the difference, particularly things like hormones. It is believed that from a single whiff of urine, a deer can determine much about the animal that left it, including sex, breeding status and possibly even general fitness and dominance ranking. If a deer can tell all that about another deer’s urine, they can almost certainly differentiate deer urine from human urine, or other animals for that matter.
The question is: Does it matter? The woods are full of urine left by almost every creature that lives there. Deer encounter it every day but probably pay little mind to it. However, no mammal passes in the woods without leaving other olfactory clues to their identity, which could result in a negative reaction.
If you’re still not convinced that deer can tell the difference, note the odor of your own urine the next time you pee after drinking a cup of strong coffee or eating asparagus. If you can smell it with your crude olfactory system, imagine what it smells like to a deer, whose sense of smell is probably 100 or 1,000 times more acute than yours.