It's funny. I really love this thread. I'm a pro-staffer for a deer hunting magazine. We get a thread over at that forum about camo, and it goes in the completely opposite direction.
The reason is that a good number of the responders are the kind of guys that read magazines a lot. More importantly, these are the kind of guys that take magazines seriously.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not bashing magazines or magazine articles or magazine writers. It is just that, if you are just getting into hunting, or if you don't have a whole lot of people around you that hunt, you may not know the reality of hunting. I was like that for probably the first decade of my hunting experience.
If you read a magazine, you have people in camo talking about the need for camo. It is all very consumer-oriented information. The question is never "is camo necessary?" It's always "Which camo is best?" When you pick it apart, it all starts looking like grown men diving into the same hole as teen fashion.
I'm somewhat of a heretic, in that I came from that kind of mindset. Over time, I started to question a whole lot of things, and actually started to test ideas. Take camo for instance. I started deliberately hunting in brown Carharts just to see what would happen. Nothing. Eureka!
It is not that camo is counter-productive. It does help up to a point. It is just that you don't necessarily NEED camo, and you also don't NEED to be all that concerned with it.
One other observation and then I need to run. A big difference between the folks here and the folks elsewhere is that you keep hearing from them this idea of "The Edge." It embraces a whole bunch of consumerist attitudes, but basically the idea is that you can somehow buy your way into successful hunting. A better camo will somehow substitute for lack of experience, or practice, or knowledge.
