Elephant Snot is not the solution to every problem. The Arizona Daily Star confirms that, in this article:
Elephant Snot isn’t the answer.
Saguaro National Park officials tested a viscous product — with the odd brand name of Elephant Snot — to remove graffiti from saguaros at the park. It didn’t work.
“Elephant Snot is out,” said Brad Shattuck, chief of maintenance for the park. “It was corrosive. On the two tests we tried, it did some cracking on the saguaro. So we stopped. Obviously, we want to clean the saguaros without hurting them.” Shattuck said there’s still hope for removing graffiti from 11 saguaros along the Douglas Spring Trail in the park’s east district that were defaced in May.
BONUS: Testimonials for Elephant Snot
(Thanks to investigator Robert Sparks for bringing this to our attention.)
BONUS (possibly unrelated): The 2010 Ig Nobel Prize for engineering was awarded to Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse and Agnes Rocha-Gosselin of the Zoological Society of London, UK, and Diane Gendron of Instituto Politecnico Nacional, Baja California Sur, Mexico, for perfecting a method to collect whale snot, using a remote-control helicopter. [REFERENCE: “A Novel Non-Invasive Tool for Disease Surveillance of Free-Ranging Whales and Its Relevance to Conservation Programs,” Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse, Agnes Rocha-Gosselin and Diane Gendron, Animal Conservation, vol. 13, no. 2, April 2010, pp. 217-25.]