And yet doctors prescribe it all the time.
The dose makes the poison. Medical nitroglycerin dosage is around 1 milligram, whereas the LD50 dosage appears to be around 8 grams.
This is a plot device in the 1977 movie Sorcerer; dynamite is needed to snuff an oil well fire in Central America, and the only stuff available has been neglected in a remote shed in the jungle and not turned for some time. The sticks were just dry clay; all the nitro leached out into the crate lining, which looked like wax paper or plastic, and would go off with the slightest bump. That creates the tension for the rest of the movie, as they move four crates of the stuff over 200 miles of hazardous jungle terrain.
Nitroglycerin is a powerful vasodilator, hence its medical use. Handling dynamite all day without gloves can allegedly give you a “nitroglycerin headache.” Consuming a large quantity of it orally would likely be unpleasant, assuming it didn’t explode.
One storage issue with dynamite and nitroglycerin is self-acidification by reaction with water. Wet nitroglycerin forms acid, which catalyses further acid formation in a self-accelerating reaction that can lead to spontaneous explosion. Dynamite mixtures contain carbonate to neutralise acid and prevent this. Whether there’s enough carbonate in dynamite to neutralise the stomach acid of a goat, or if the acid-carbonate effervescence in its stomach may be sufficient to set off acidified dynamite, is a question I suspect even GQ may be unable to answer…
From: http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/4514341/description.html The development ofacidity accelerates further decomposition of the nitroglycerin. It has been found that when 0.3 gms of nitroglycerin with 5% HNO3 added thereto was sealed and stored at 41° C. an explosion occurred within 320 minutes although the sampletemperature rose by only a few degrees as a result of the catalytic effect of the nitric acid on the nitroglycerin.
1 mg is a bit high, at least for sub-lingual tabs. I’ve been using the 0.3 mg tabs for a couple years now; they work well enough for my angina that I haven’t had to go to a stronger dose.
Yes, it was an old Carnac joke.
My favorite part of the Andy Griffith goat show was when they shooed Otis away, telling him that one loaded goat at a time was all they could handle.
Just don’t stand behind that goat.
I just emailed this thread to AC/DC.
If the goat were to be put into a trebuchet, would it most likely explode upon launch or upon landing? What about a cannon?
And if the goat was a pig, would the result be kind of the opposite of pulled pork?
Sounds like a fairly close remake of The Wages of Fear, which I think is a much better-known movie. (In fact, I’d never heard of Sorcerer until just now.)
OK I get the Nobel gasses, but I’m lost on the Farmer Smith joke.
Abominable = A Bomb In A Bull.
Yep, it’s a remake (directed by William Friedkin of The Exorcist). I should have added the note, but I’ve only seen bits of The Wages of Fear, so I didn’t know how much that film showed about the nitro seeping out of the dynamite.
You win the internet! 
And how about Farmer Smith’s much bullied hens for whom he bought little suits of armor to make them impeccable.
And when the bull exploded, the startled Mrs. Smith backed into an electric fan. Disaster!
But, he said, dragging the thread back on-subject, do we have to worry about the goat manure? Or would passage through the goat’s digestive tract break down the nitroglycerine?
That’s another interesting question!
The first thing to note is that production dynamite very quickly deviated from the dictionary definition of NG absorbed into diatomaceous earth. Cellulose absorbants such as wood meal or even apricot pits were cheaper, and then you could use the cellulose as a fuel by adding a nitrate salt as an oxidiser and so reduce the amount of NG. What you’d end up with was a mixture of cellulose absorbant, nitrate oxidiser, carbonate to prevent acidification, and just enough NG to propagate a detonation through the material. Ideally the nitroglycerine would also be blended with nitroglycerol, a similar liquid explosive, since they act as mutual antifreezes and prevent the dynamite from freezing.
The “equivalent strength” of actual dynamite to a straight NG+diatomaceous earth dynamite was determined by ballistic pendulum, so a 20% equivalent dynamite wouldn’t necesarily contain 20% NG - it would just swing a pendulum “cannon” by the same amount as 20% straight dynamite.
So what happens when a goat eats this stuff? Let’s assume it’s “ditching” dynamite, which actually contains around 20% NG IIRC. Ditching dynamite is handy for making ditches because you can set in a line of holes and only have to fire one of the charges - the shock triggers the others.
One thing I missed earlier is that goats are ruminants, so there’s a whole multi-stomach, cud-chewing thing to consider. If the goat has a really good chew, it’ll squeeze the NG out of the absorbant and might just be able to set it off as soon as it eats it. Nitroglycerin is absorbed in the mouth in humans, and possibly also in goats, so there’s a chance the goat might be poisoned and die at this stage before we have to worry about goat poop.
If the goat makes it past the chewing stage, the dynamite will hit the multi-chambered stomach. The first chamber is the rumen, basically a fermentation plant for breaking down cellulose, and the goat will periodically bring up cud to chew on. Presumably the NG will seperate from the compacted cellulose, which after all is simply holding it like a sponge. NG and water don’t mix well and so the NG will likely exist as floating globules in the rumen contents. It will hydralyse and begin its self-acidification reaction, which makes it increasingly sensitive. The effects of the goat’s digestive enzymes and the goat’s body temperature is hard to gauge, but I think there’s at least a chance of an NG-contaminated lump of cud blowing the goat’s head off on re-chewing. Unless the fermenting bacteria actually break the stuff down, which I suppose is possible but I doubt it. The bacteria in the rumen form fatty acids from cellulose, and fatty acids are kind of similar to glycerine. The fatty acids aren’t broken down but are absorbed later.
If our goat is still alive, the dynamite passes into the 2nd stomach where metal and other indigestible material apparently settles out. I don’t know if liquid NG would end up here, and I don’t know what happens to the stuff here afterwards. Let’s presume it carries on into the third and fourth stomachs.
The third stomach absorbs water. This will concentrate the NG.
The fourth stomach is the one where the gastric juices are introduced, including hydrochloric acid and enzymes. The acid will sensitise the NG, and again I guess there’s at least a chance that churning of the NG in stomach juices might detonate it. You’re certainly going to lose any carbonate here.
If we still have a functioning goat as opposed to a dead or well-distributed one, the NG will pass into the gut. No clue if it will then be absorbed, broken down or whatever. This paper suggests that nitroglycerin is decomposed within the body, but whether it passes through a gut wall in appreciable amounts is unclear, or how a goat liver handles it if it does.
Ooh! Google books adds a data point!
“This can increase the bioavailability for a drug, such as nitroglycerin, which is essentially metabolised completely by the liver after oral administration.”
So I guess the poop is okay, if goats’ guts and livers are anything like ours.
This. This is why I love the Dope.
and THIS is why I’ve got to clean splatters of Raisin Bran off my laptop keyboard.
Wow. What a great answer! Thanks!