That’s not how eyes work. Color blindness means an inability to distinguish between shades of colors, not that they have some sort of selective filters that block those colors out, turn objects of that color invisible, or convert them to grey.

Yes. Explaining how color blindness works to people who think an orange vest combined with green and brown camo is going to be an invisibility cloak is... an even bigger undertaking than explaining how camouflage works in the first place. Hence "grey"

Explaining what a Red/Green person sees is... literally like explaining sight to the blind. Err, blindness to the sighted? Whatever, it is that.

Hence, making the simple assumption rather than doing a deep dive on what we believe deer can actually see (got bored and did some wikipedia trawling and chatgpt corroborating. Allegedly they can distinguish blue, but most greens and browns and oranges all look like "green"). So the original statement of "Camouflage still matters while you have a giant orange safety vest on" is patently moronic no matter how you spin it and can ONLY make sense if orange is "invisible" (which it obviously isn't) and it is, at best, no different than wearing a solid color shirt... at which point why do you need camo pattern pants?

From there, the ante was upped to insist people need to go buy clothes that look like Gritty nutted all over them that incorporate the orange into the camo pattern itself. If you get the colors right? Yeah, that is theoretically comparable to green/brown camo. Which would actually work IF camouflage actually served a purpose against deer to begin with (outside of MAYBE covering a blind with a tarp, as I mentioned in a different branch). Which gets back to the undertaking of explaining how camouflage even works and that it isn't like Metal Gear Solid 3. The blob of broken up colors moving across a solid-ish tree is still going to be very noticeable. Let alone the one standing up straight and walking around on hunting trails.

You think this because you live in a suburb where people feed them, “in a park”, or “bordering a forested area”. No unconditioned wild animal in the world, except maybe things that live on tiny islands with no predators, is chill with an unknown human sized animal standing next to it.

When I hike I sometimes see deer as close as a hundred feet or so away, but if one started walking towards me I would consider that behavior so far out of the ken that I might think it has rabies or wasting disease.

Yes, I live in a town with a big animal problem. I also spend probably cumulatively weeks out of the year on both hiking trails and camping well off the trails.

Deer walking up to you when you are stopping for lunch is not common but it also isn't super uncommon if you are off the major trails. It is almost a horse shoe effect where you have the deer who are totally used to humans and the deer who have so little concept of them that they get curious and... deer are REAL stupid. Ironically, the average area zoned for hunting is a lot closer to the former since there are jackasses swarming around and leaving food everywhere broken up by sudden bangs and corpse defiling.

But a deer not caring that you are within 100 meters (honestly, more like 10-30...) which is the perfect range to aim and heroically shoot it? Yeah, that is 100% believable anywhere along that horseshoe.

The point was more "I am so invisible the deer walked up to me", which is a common refrain when you see articles or discussions on this, is idiocy based in ignorance of the animals that these brave men and women of the muja-err, hunters constantly "harvest".

Understand that I’m not even arguing that shooting a deer is some sort of crazy achievement.

And on that we both agree. Like I said, the average hunter is just those two guys from south park who screamed "They're coming right for us" as an excuse to shoot whatever they want. Everything else is the same gun nut "if you buy this you will be unstoppable and your dick will get bigger".

But, to loop back around to the original point before I apparently angered 5.11's community manager: Wearing "human" camo while hunting is idiotic because you are literally making yourself harder to see for the people with guns. Wearing "deer" camo is idiotic for other reasons but... is still way better than rocking the flecktarn?