Just so you know, dead human in a damp, hot environment smells like bad cheese. A friend of the family died accidentally in his home on a Friday and wasn’t discovered until Monday morning. In a closed house in New Orleans in high summer with the A/C off. The house still reeked that evening, although the body was removed before noon.
The smell of spoiled white rice is debatably worse.
I once bought a package of pork chops to cook for my hubby when I was out grocery shopping, this was on a Saturday…in July…in Utah…so Monday morning I opened my car door and the smell of one thousand dead pigs wafted out of my car…and let me tell you, NO amount of Fabreeze can get rid of that stench…ack…
Margo
I worked in a pet store for awhile too, and they used to have fish dying in the tanks everyday due to stupidity. Anyway besides that evil sick-dead-fish-water-rot smell, the fish would often get encased in white fluff and start floating. they called the practice of looking for dead fish “stiffing the tanks”…in other words, looking for stiffs.
When birds reptiles and mammals died they had to keep them in the freezer and send them back to the distributor so they could prove the animal had died, and get their money back for it. So the store’s freezer was filled with dead rabbits, lizards, guinea pigs, parrots, baby mice (snake food), and ice cream.
I never ate the ice cream from there.
Once my cat had just killed a mouse and left it on our doorstep. It was headless. When we found the head it had a surprised look on its face.
A squirrel died in a vent downstairs in an house I was living in years ago. Ugh. The downstairs bathroom was unusable for a couple weeks until someone could get the rotting corpse out of the system.
A dead starfish that decomposed in my fish tank - IMHO, nothing else even comes close to the rancid stench this tiny, little critter can produce.
If this were a contest, butrscotch, you win hands down.
Note to self: If dog eats something icky keep outside until it passes through the dog.
The worst smell for me was when I accidentally left a grocery bag full of hamburger in my car over a hot Texas weekend. I absolutely had to go to the store that day and took the rotting meat out, threw it in the lake and drove to town. All the while thinking that the police would be surrounding my car looking for a body when I came out of the store.
We eventually got the smell out though with a lot of Febreeze, newspapers and steamcleaning the carpet. Ick
I just wanted to second all the comments regarding the awful smells encountered in the aquarium world.
Anyone who’s had to clean out filter material after a bad algae bloom should be familiar with THAT terrible smell.
I just wanted to second all the comments regarding the awful smells encountered in the aquarium world.
Anyone who’s had to clean out filter material after a bad algae bloom should be familiar with THAT terrible smell.
pic of roadkill that they forgot to scrape off…kinda funny cuz it has freshly painted yellow lines on it.
http://www.llubder.com, pic#514
sorry, should be http://www.llubder.com ,pic#514
The worst smells do seem to come from the sea. I’ll see your algae bloom and raise you a dead Turbo Snail. I made the mistake of picking it up with my bare hands - MY BARE HANDS!
I’m feeling too sick to read the other stories but i have one myself. I doubt its anywhere near as disgusting as the others here but it was still horrible. You see, my brother was working at a supermarket and decided to let an open box of prawns putrify behind a shelf for a few weeks. It was disgusting.
Dead, totally decomposed cow. Found on banks of McKenzie River, Oregon, 04/12/03. Approached from upwind with no hint of odor. Once downwind, the stench was staggering. The air was so thick with the smell that I wanted to jump in the river and swim for it.
This too involves dogs, and squirrels. We lived near a golden retreiver named Dexter used to get loose from his house and go around the neighborhood liberating other dogs. He could lift the latch on chainlink-fence gates with his snout.
One day he set our Molly free, and the two of them scampered over to the park, unbeknownst to me. I only saw them later, in my living room. (I used to keep the back door propped open for Molly to come in and out.) Whew what a STENCH. Both dogs’ necks, sides and back were covered with smelly, black unidentifiable glop.
I shooed Dexter out, wiped Molly down and picked the sticky, stinky glop out of her fur, then bathed her. I later discovered at the park the dead squirrel or squirrels! (there was a lot of glop) the two of them had undoubtedly rolled in. It was decomposed to the point that its body was a mushy consistency.
We have a large fresh-water aquarium, and HAD lots of fish in it. After a bout with a bad batch of feeder guppies, every living thing in the tank died.
Hubby said he was going to take the dead fish to the pet store, and show them what they did to our tank. Fine, no problem. (But hubby is a procrastinator.) …
Picture me, Groggy, stumbling into the kitchen early Monday morning and open the freezer. No smell, but OH THE HORROR! 25 fish, all very dead and frozen in various positions, set throughout the freezer. No zippy bags, nothing - just billions of little dead fish eyes staring at me!!! I do the only thing I can - I scream. LOUD. Hubby leaps out of bed to my defense… from frozen fish.
He had to clean the freezer.
I recall a story once told to me by an author friend of mine who used to live in Utah.
She had learned of the discovery of a body in a car along a deserted stretch of Utah highway.
Apparently, the body had been there a while, in the desert, in a car completely closed.
According to my friend, when the police found it and finally opened the door, the body exploded.
I can’t compete with “exploding corpse,” but…
The woods of western Pennsylvania. Myself, my cousin, and a friend of ours, all of us about 13 years old, walking through the forest between the swimming hole and Grandma’s house. This rural idyll was suddenly interrupted by a strange sight: A steel drum, with what appeared to be several lengths of rope draped over the top. The three of us stared blankly at it for a few moments. Finally, my cousin figured it out. “Rotten deer guts!” At that second, the smell hit us like a fist. We ran. I think it was about five minutes before we were out of range of the stuff.
Thanks, Copper_moon, for the dubious honor. It wouldn’t have been so bad if not for the fact that (a) the golden retriever was so PROUD of what he’d found to eat, and (b) he was so zealously preventing the yellow lab (aka Garbage Hound) from having any, while Garbage Hound was lurking sadly waiting for HIS share. Ewwwww. “This is MY stinky, maggot-infested, rotting mess!” golden retriever was saying as he smiled at me through the goo…
Growing up in the country, not far from a highway, I’ve seen and smelled more than my share of dead animals. Chickens are damned stupid creatures and yet ours managed to kill themselves in inventive ways. Like the one who caught her claw in the fencing and must have hung from the perch as the rest of them pecked her to death. By the time I got home that evening the flies had had at her and she was doing a horrible twitchy dance.
Then there was our neighbor’s horse, poor thing died on a friday and nobody would come out to take the body till tuesday. Legs stuck up in the air, getting more and more swollen every day, but it didn’t burst. Until they came to cart it away and then all hell broke loose, blurgh. Ten years later, I can still smell that horse whenever I look over at that part of their property.
Funniest bad animal smell happened to my dad. We had about a dozen bantam hens who never stayed in ther pen and would lay eggs everywhere. One of them m