travel johnIf you carry a pee bottle into your deer stand, there’s a less messy and more sanitary, albeit more expensive, way.

The Travel John features a unisex “spill guard” attached to a plastic bag that contains a fabric LIQSORB pouch. Pee into the bag and the polymer pouch immediately turns the urine into an odorless, biodegradable gel that won’t spill on your hands or clothes or in your daypack as you hike out. When you get home, simply throw the bag into the trash.

I tested several Travel Johns and they work as advertised. After peeing, I immediately turned each bag upside down, and not a drop spilled or leaked. Each bag is reusable. Depending on how much coffee you had that morning, you can get 2 or 3 pees per bag.

A box of 6 disposable urinals sells for $11.41 from Amazon. More than 300 reviews from Amazon customers give the Travel John 4.7 out of 5 stars.

I would use the Travel John if I still carried a pee bottle into my tree stand or blind…but I rarely do. Now, I look around to make sure no deer are coming, then let fly off a stand or out a ground blind’s window. Several of the country’s top deer biologists have convinced me that urine is 95% water and with little odor, depending on what you’ve eaten (confirmed by several medical encyclopedias). One scientist from Auburn University went as far as to say that human urine is actually a mammalian attractant. I do not pee to attract deer, but in my experience it does not spook them.

But the movement and noise of peeing might, and that is another reason to consider the Travel John. To urinate off a tree stand or from a fabric blind, you have to stand up, move, shuffle and let fly. Urine hitting the ground makes noise. With the Travel John men can urinate sitting down, greatly cutting down on noise and movement.

Come to think of it, I’ll carry some Travel John bags with me and use them on those brutal 10-hour sits in a blind in Saskatchewan this November. No doubt my cameraman and I make noise when we stand up 2 or 3 times a day to pee.

No doubt the best deer hunters I’ve hunted with over the years are split: some urinate right off their stands, while others would never do that.

What do you do?