If you’re a fan of Mike Rowe and Dirty Jobs, you’ll love this: A segment that was rejected by the Discovery Channel for being “too gross” even for our favorite show.
The job? Roadkill taxidermist.
Part 2 is definitely the grosser of the pair.
That guy has serious issues.
I thought they were suppose to air a show showing a whale autopsy but I’ve never seen it.
Marc
I wish I didn’t have dial-up. 
They did show the whale autopsy. And fish molds for fiberglass replicas. Which were both pretty damned gross.
eta Yummmm…Mike Rowe… 
Have they ever shown someone giving rectal exams? Because I haven’t done one yet*, but I hear it gets pretty foul sometimes. 
*Nursing student.
There was an episode of Penn and Teller’s Bullshit! where they showed, in quite graphic detail, a guy getting colon hydrotherapy. (AKA colonic.)
That gave me nightmares.
Till they do a show on cleaning colostomy bags or dealing with immobile nursing home patients, they haven’t done anything to induce a gag relflex in me yet.
In fairness to this guy - at least his “subjects” are already dead before he starts working on them. He doesn’t go out and kill animals for the purpose of doing his artwork. I think it’s tacky, but it’s probably more environmentally responsible than a lot of conventional taxidermy. IANAT (I Am Not A Taxidermist).
We have a couple whale skeletons on campus that classes cleaned in 1993 and some other year. Apparently the smell is (ETC: was!) the dominant feature (I’m certainly not jealous!)
If he wants a really dirty job he could try working in the laundry of a large metropolitan hospital.
Gross beyond imagination.
Worst job I ever did was unpaid favour for a friend.
A cow had died in May of the year and had been buried in a 5 ft deep hole (It was pretty rank by the time we got done)
In August of the same yr, there was a disease scare and the local authourities needed to inspect any remains of animals which had died mysteriously.
So we had to exhume poor Bessie…
As we lifted her out with straps attached to the front end loader, she broke open, and a bunch of semi liquid, putrified cow guts fell out and spattered me.
Today is the 15th anniversary of that, and I am nearly gagging at just the memory of the smell.
Regards
FML
I read in an interview somewhere when asked if there was a job so dirty that he wanted to do it and still couldn’t do it on TV, and he said he’d always wanted to do a slaughterhouse, start with the animals going in and ending with cutlets coming out in shrink wrap, but the higher ups say absolutely not. Evidently you can show that godawful one with the skeleton cleaners and assemblers, and you can show all the human excrement you can pack into one vat, but not where our dinner comes from.
I adore Mike Rowe. I’ve watched his show from the beginning and he’s a hoot.
However, I am NOT clicking on any of those links. Nuh-uh.
Nah. I’ve done several and they’re not a big deal.
I spent some time working in the slaughter houses as the tongue saw operator back when work was really scarce.
I’ve got to agree that decomposing marine mammals are perhaps the worst smell ever. I’m currently in the process of clearing and cleaning a harbor porpoise carcass, and I thought the smell was memorable enough for its own thread. Rowe actually did a show on my workplace before I arrived here. I’ve never seen it, but I wonder if it was the one with the whale necropsy (a whale performing a dissection of another dead whale would be an autopsy.)
I’m not talking about the fact he does taxidermy. I’m talking about the freakish creations he makes. Some of that is just nightmarish. The kind of thing you see in a Tim Burton film.
[Hearsay Alert] I met some guys who were overseeing the crews cleaning out abandoned refrigerators in New Orleans after Katrina. They told me that the group had invited Dirty Jobs down, and they came down and did some filming, but it never aired.
Too bad, because I think for smell, that job would be very hard to beat.
My creepy high school biology teacher was an amateur taxidermist. He used to request students to bring in any “fresh” roadkill for his little hobby. I don’t recall anyone taking him up on it, though, not even for extra credit. Not that I knew of, anyway. We did end up with a couple of scruffy looking birds dangling from the ceiling by the end of the year.