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Comment by gxqoz | Hacker News Reader

Heh: "Tryon, for example, denounced musk, 'the dearest of stinks', as 'an excrementitious matter - or the fume or froth proceeding from a fierce, fiery, violent-natured creature'. Had it been scarce, he said, hog's dung would have been equally sought after; as it was, some people esteemed cows' dung as 'a good perfume'."

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In certain parts of the world you can easily find cow urine sold as "medicine".

https://www.google.com/search?q=cow+urine+medicine&oq=cow+ur...

It was used to make ammonia at one point, wasn't it? I'm not sure of ammonia's medicinal uses though.

It's a food preservative, though not a particularly commonly used one these days. It's used in so-called pink slime, for instance (which is why that's illegal in the EU).

In the early 1900's ammonia was needed to make sulfa drugs but that's on a commercial production level and there's much easier ways to get mass amounts of ammonia without milking cows for urine.

On a more accessible level, low amounts of ammonia is useful for topical treatments of itch, like from bug bites.

I've only smelled animal musk because a roadside salesman handed us a sampling box while we were stuck in traffic above Manali (this was only a few years ago). Quite a nice scent, actually, although I think dilution is key. The fact that it's animal gland makes it a bit disturbing for me, though.

You might have smelled it more often than you know. It's still common as a perfume base note.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Note_(perfumery)#Base_notes

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