You’re on stand. Disciplined. Quiet. The wind blows from the approaching buck toward your position. It’s a perfect setup until the deer unexpectedly raises its head and stares right at you. What the hell happened?
Mike Slinkard, a skilled bowhunter and the founder of Winner’s Choice Custom Bowstrings, believes he has the answer. His solution—a very unique clothing system—came after years of bowhunting and long hours of discussion and research with co-inventor Max Maupin, who has an animal science background.
“At first,” Slinkard says, “we figured deer that suddenly spooked must have seen movement or maybe the wind shifted and dispersed scent, or there was some kind of static electricity from clothes or the stand. It finally dawned on us while we were watching a hunting video that this just couldn’t be the case, yet there had to be a physical reason….
“In early 2007 we recalled the old hunter’s adage about not looking a game animal in the eye and we put two and two together. That old saying is absolutely right!
“Because their brains contain biogenic magnetite—iron synthesized by living organisms—animals are attuned to electromagnetic energy fields in their environment. They are very sensitive even to minor changes in electromagnetic fields (EMF) and this is how animals identify nearby danger and sense the first hint of movement.”
The secret, Slinkard says, is that EMF are emitted and received by all living things through movement, heartbeat, and normal body functions like breathing. Naturally, as a deer approaches your heart beats faster, breathing quickens, and tension rises. All of this intensifies the electromagnetic field and alerts the deer.
“Not only are predators alerted by electromagnetic fields—what we have thought of as a ‘sixth sense’ in addition to vision, hearing, feel, taste and smell—but prey animals are sensitive to them as well. Think of salmon finding their way home to the exact stream where they spawned after years swimming in the ocean—or homing pigeons crossing battlefields—or something as delicate as a butterfly flying a thousand miles to lay its eggs in a particular valley.”
Consulting with scientists and animal behavioral experts (and professional studies are cited on the HECS website), Slinkard and Maupin realized that if they could block or even slightly impede the transmission of electromagnetic energy, they could significantly enhance a hunter’s ability to remain undetected when game was nearby.
They began to ask informed questions: What is EMF? How is EMF measured? Can EMF be blocked? Do humans emit measurable electromagnetic energy? Do animals sense or react to non directed EMF signals or energy?
The result—and Slinkard admits it sounds like science fiction—was an understanding that using EMF-blocking garments could make a human significantly less-detectable by animals. Their ideas were born as HECS, Human Energy Concealment Systems. Once they grasped the theory, actually developing energy cloaking garments was easy.
Slinkard and Maupin designed a fabric that would attenuate, if not totally block, the passage of electromagnetic energy from the human body. Based on the design of a “Faraday cage,” (a mesh shelter designed to shield instrumentation from EMF) their fabric combined an interlocking grid of conductive carbon fiber with a durable-but-flexible polyester cloth. Energy Cloak fabric is 86 percent polyester and 14 percent carbon, Slinkard explained.
Once they had identified a material supplier in New Zealand and tested samples, Slinkard realized they had a breakthrough for hunters. The biggest challenge then became getting their message out and overcoming an inherent conservative learning curve while asking hunters to check out the new technology.
They brought Scott Eastman aboard as CEO and formed HECS to educate the hunting community and build a dealer base.
Are Energy Cloak garments “invisibility” suits?
Slinkard laughs at that idea.
“No, but they give the hunter and especially the bowhunter who has to be close to his quarry a real advantage.
“We know it works with ungulates like deer and elk, and lately we’ve been flooded with enthusiastic messages from turkey hunters. It turns out that birds see infrared where a lot of energy is emitted and our suits, worn on the outside when it’s warm or beneath outer garments when it’s cooler, allow hunters to get away with movement that would normally spook wild birds. Turkeys are definitely calmer in the proximity of a hunter wearing our suits.”
The medical field has used materials that incorporate conductive fibers woven in a specific grid pattern for years to block EMF. (“Think of a microwave oven door,” Slinkard says. “You can see through it but you can also see the fine mesh that protects you from the microwave energy emissions.”) HECS Energy Cloak fabric contains a patentable conductive carbon fiber grid that blocks up to 90 percent of the electromagnetic energy emitted by the human body.
A small and unexpected byproduct of the conductive carbon weave is that the fabric adsorbs some human odor and it can be washed … and dried. Slinkard recommends a “low” heat setting but says they have washed and dried garments more than 500 times without a loss of effectiveness.
HECS garments are available in camo and dark gray and may thus be worn as an outer- or an under-layer. “The clothing is light and breathable,” says Slinkard, “perfect for treestands or ground blinds.”
Slinkard explains they have recently lowered the cost of HECS garments to develop greater market penetration. “We’re confident that the development of garments with conductive woven carbon grid fibers helps hunters get close and stay undetected. Numerous recordbook animals have already been taken where hunters swore they couldn’t have done it without HECS Energy Cloak garments. That’s great for us and terrific for bowhunting.”
For more on Winner’s Choice Custom Bowstrings see www.winnerschoicestrings.com.