The worlds oldest fuel. Poop, Dung, Feces whatever you call it, the stink is universal.
My question is… How could they stand the smell? Wouldn’t smoke from roasted cow patties get into your clothes & hair? Wouldn’t the person carry that smell with them?
Which dung is suitable for fuel? Is it only herbivores?
Is human poop burned as fuel to heat & cook anywhere?
I find cow dung to be fairly inoffensive, same with horse. I would venture that a completely dry chip (as would be used for fuel) would be pretty neutral.
Herbivore dung (ever taken a good look at horse poop?) can have quite a bit of un- or partially digested plant matter in it. That helps make it a good fuel.
ETA - I would also guess that, living in close enough proximity to livestock that you use their poop as fuel, your clothes and hair are likely to already be pretty thoroughly saturated with animal smells!
Herbivore dung is almost entirely bits of plant matter. It’s collected when thoroughly dried, so less stinky, and has very little smell when burnt - mostly the smell of burning grass.
When I was young, we once experimented with burning a dried cow patty. It had a kind of funky smell, but not necessarily bad - a little like manure smells when it’s ready to be used for fertilizer. And I know plenty of farmer types who say they enjoy the smell of manure, so it’s the kind of smell you might come to appreciate over time.
I’ve never heard of anyone burning human feces, but I’ll let the experts weigh in on that piece.
I would imagine that the bulk of offensive odors in herbivore dung are volatile organics which vanish when it dries out. Non-herbivore dung is probably not a very good fuel because of the lack of plant material.
Why would that be? It isn’t like feces have been burned/oxidized (only the stuff that is absorbed by your body, and that leaves via the lungs); there are plenty of complex molecules that can be burned even if they aren’t cellulose. It is much smellier though (at least when fresh) and may also smell much worse when burned.
What others said. When I was last in India, I watched an old woman patiently sticking cow patties to a wall to dry them out. She had a whole wallfull, and I was standing less than ten feet away from her and I could only catch a faint whiff of it, and it’s not as smelly.
Even burned they don’t smell that bad, and the men say they give a certain…aroma…to their cigars. Not being a smoker, I couldn’t say!
I have heard a song, which was purported to be from the time of dcrossing the plains, with a line about how it was “fun to cook with buffalo chips … throw on one that’s newly born … if I knew then what I know know I’d have gone around the horn.” That suggests that dried out, aged chips were relatively odorless, which I can well believe – ruminant dung has a LOT of undigested grass i it, and once the volatiles have evaporated and the water’s gone, what’s left isn’t going to be as malodourous. It’s not as if burning it is going to resore the moisture.
The song is “California Trail”. I have no idea how old it is, but several sites have the lyrics:
http://www.kbapps.com/lyrics/cowboy-songs/CaliforniaTrail.php
Cow manure smells more like a freshly mowed lawn than it does your own poops, and because my grandmother used to have cows and a barn, to me it smells like just barely stinkey nostalgia.
I never tried to burn it, though; unless you count putting fire crackers in fresh ones, which we ran away from and tried not to get any on us.
I’ve wondered if sheep dung is/was used for fires like cow? Cow is sort of unique because they have unformed stool that makes a patty after drying. I’m pretty sure sheep put out small pellets.
My uncle raised a few calves and we sold them at auction or had them butchered for the freezer. We never had sheep.
Small ruminants like sheep and goats have pelleted feces that are very hard to collect in any useful quantity.
Herbivore feces don’t smell bad at all. That isn’t true in forced mass confinement like feedlots, though.
Worst smelling domestic animal poo in my opinion would be ducks (not strictly poo as there is only one product), and pigs. Pigs is bad.
I am also not a big fan of cat urine. But that’s off topic. We have not yet been reduced to burning cat urine for fuel.
It’s not true that all poop stinks and it really depends on the food that made up the poop. Herbivores tend to have much less offensive odor, while carnivores and omnivores tend to have much stinkier poops.
I think you are assuming all humans have access to other means of fuel. In many place say Mongolia or Tibet, you don’t have trees so if you wanted fuel for a fire, you burnt what you had. They probably did smell like the cow dung, but also their own body odor, the animals, outdoors etc. Person cleanliness is secondary to survival, plus you’d have grown up with the smell and it would be normal.
Domestic animal dung would be preferred over human poop due to larger size, frequency and burn ability.
To address the OP, I understand cattle/horse dung is the default fuel for fire in dry areas where there is not much vegetation, such as the Mongolian steppes. I suppose the people living in those areas got used to whatever smell was produced, given that the usefulness of fire probably outweighs dealing with smell of the fuel.
Would human poop smell like herbivore poop if we were to eat what they eat?
We can’t eat what cows eat, we don’t have a ruminant stomach to break down the cellulose.
Why does horse manure smell so bad then?
It’s being discussed (if not already done) that sewage treatment plants are considering using the excess sludge from human waste to use as fertilizer for crops. God help us if this happens. Can you say Mad Human Disease? Hepatitis salad? HIV Veggy burgers? Cancer Cauliflower? Etc.
This bus is running on clean natural ass.
It does NOT.
Growing up on a horse farm, spending years at horse shows & events, serving 20+ years on the Minnesota Horse Council, I don’t think it smells bad at all.
Which just shows how human perception and familiarity affect what smells we perceive as ‘good’ or ‘offensive’. It seems to be all human conditioning – the smells themselves don’t have any such actual values.
I used to have to clean up after our precious “Mr. Ed”, a white (not grey) mule, and I never minded it one bit.
He was our “plow horse” and he was my friend to whom I taught all the gaits.
Yup he was a mule, but we both held our heads up high as we showed everyone on Stockmar Road, Villa Rica, what we could do. They couldn’t believe their eyes, and I never minded cleaning his stall for him.
Lord, he was such a pleasure to ride and I’ll never forget him.
Quasi