The Misappliance Of Science

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It's a leather wax, it's a dessert topping,... Llama Dung(tm)!

Unknown: Leather saddles used to be treated with llama dung to alter their smell, to avoid scaring horses.

The story goes that the British Army, back in the days of the Empire, had a constant need of new horses for their men, horses newly-broken and apparently scared of the scent of new leather saddles. It was found that smearing the saddles with llama dung would mask the leather smell and not incite the horses.

This story is widely told, or at least as widely told as any story involving llama dung, but concrete proof of this practice has so far been elusive.

Unknown: This British specification regarding leather saddles was reborn as a US Army specification for leather jackets, leather airline seats, etc.

Here is where the more meaty UL resides, the "bureaucracies are full of old, stupid regulations that no one questions". The British practice of treating leather saddles with Llama dung was copied by the US Army, it is told, but under the understanding that it represented a more general usefulness, that leather of all sorts needs to be treated with Llama dung. The supposition is that the US Armed Forces made their soldiers wear jackets and sit in seats covered in shit, because Things Have Always Been Done This Way.

Though the image is somewhat appealing, it has a distressing number of problems that make it appear unlikely on the surface: it is scarcely imaginable that the US was filled with people unaware that leather didn't require llama dung smeared on it to be good or useful. With a frontier population that had good experience with horses and tanning, and little exposure to llamas, it is quite probable that the Army had a sufficiency of people who knew what they were doing better than this UL implies.

It also relies on the concept that the US Army was in essence a direct descendant of the British Army, to the point of copying every last little regulation without question. The composition of armed forces in the United States in its earliest years relied heavily on citizen militia, and it beggars belief that these militias went in for this rather strange practice when there were so many more important practices of the British Army that the Americans did away with wholesale.

You can find this story repeated here, without attribution. Given that they also vector the UL regarding railroad track width deriving from roman chariot wheel specs, the credibility of the page is questionable.

References:

• Rich Wheeler vectors this UL