Beaver Butts Emit Brown Goo Used In Vanilla-Flavored Foods

Vanilla-flavored foods get that delicious taste from a chemical in the butt of a beaver.

Yes, really. A chemical compound used in vanilla flavored foods and scents comes from a beaver's castor sacs, located between the pelvis and the base of the tail.

The compound, castoreum, is extracted from the beaver's castor sacs. Because they're so near to the anal gland, castoreum, which is a slimy bround goo, is often mixed with urine and gland secretions.

Joanne Crawford, a wildlife ecologist at Southern Illinois University, revealed the process.

"I lift up the animal's tail,"  she said. "I'm like, 'Get down there, and stick your nose near its bum.'"

"People think I'm nuts," she admitted. "I tell them, 'Oh, but it's beavers; it smells really good.'"

The thin, molasses-like brown slime is used to mark territory. The smell--something akin to musky vanilla--is due to the beaver's diet of bark and leaves.

Castoreum isn't a new phenomenon; it's been used as an additive in food and perfume for centuries--800 years, in fact.

The brown slime is hard to come by, though. The beaver's anal glands have to be "milked" to obtain the vanilla-scented results.

"You can milk the anal glands so you can extract the fluid," Crawford said. "You can squirt [castoreum] out. It's pretty gross."

Becaue of the difficulty of the process, only 292 pounds a year is collected.

Don't see castoreum on the label of that delicious vanilla ice cream? That's because the FDA doesn't require it to be listed. Manufacturers may list "natural flavoring" instead.

Nature isn't always pretty, unfortunately.