Have you ever experienced stench so bad you could taste it?

I worked 12 years in a rendering plant,you just can’t imagine what real stench is.

Visiting a tannery in Marrakesh. Even the mint bouquet we were handed to hold up to our nose as we toured it was ineffective at masking the stench.

An ad agency I once worked for had a meat packing company account. Thankfully, my first plant tour was my last.

Every day, from January 2001 – January 2009

Opening a refrigerator after it had been turned off for three plus weeks. The tenants skipped out, had not bothered to clean it out before they left and the power had been off for at least as long as they had been gone. Meats had been left in the freezer and open food dishes from several meals in the main refrigerator portion. You could smell it as you walked into the house and the kitchen was at the opposite end of the house from the front door. How the hell do flies get into a closed refrigerator???

We duct taped it shut, transported it outside, opened it,cleaned it out and power washed the interior, the drain pan and drain lines, bleached it out several times, filled it with charcoal and newspaper to try to take out some of the smell. Changed the charcoal and newspaper out daily for a couple of weeks before giving up and taking it to the dump.

Bodies in the desert

Like squeek, I was at a rendering plant. But I had the good fortune to arrive in Winter, and knew within the first 20 minutes that I would not be there to experience the “wonders” accompanying the Spring thaw.

I can’t begin to imagine what a rendering plant interior smells like, especially in the summer. And, yes, the scent given off by dead skunks is pungent to the point it cannot be accurately described.

I’ve also heard that (especially large) pig farms emit indescribably bad odors that can be smelled for miles. Having grown up in a region that doesn’t have a significant pork industry, I have no basis for an opinion one way or the other.

However, an uncle ran a modest commercial egg farm throughout my younger years, with 1,500 laying hens housed in three uninsulated, wooden chicken houses. Periodically, the collection trays under the roosts needed to be scraped out using a large rubber scraper mounted on a long pole. The collected stuff then had to be hauled by hand over to his well-used manure spreader & dumped into the hopper.

Nothing was worse than needing to clean the roosts in August, when the temperature outside was north of 90 (Fahrenheit), which meant the temp inside the building had to be at least 100 (Fahrenheit.) A main component of chicken manure is ammonia. And ammonia well heated is . . . even today, decades later, as I write this description I notice my nose & throat becoming mildly sore from the memory.

The first time that I opened up an anaerobic bacteria specimen jar in the microbiology lab, the smell was so bad! How bad was it? One small whiff about knocked me over. I could not breath through the choking and gagging. I started to run for the door but noticed that the women were just laughing about it. I kept thinking over and over this is crazy, I can’t stand it, and I can’t breath! I remember the smell as being like that of rotting flesh mixed with poop and totally overwhelming. Breathing through my mouth was of little help. However after 3 days of this I was completely use to the smell and it was no big deal.

1) Outhouses, and not the modern ones.
2) Moved into a rental that the previous renters had just abandoned. Their electricity had been off for about 2 weeks, and the had a freezer full of meat. This was in the month of July, when temps routinely get to 100+.

as a kid a caught a huge catfish and brought it home in a cooler, then forgot about it. A few weeks later….

OH! The time I found a big turtle shell. It was empty. I brought it home, set it to boil to clean the last of whatever out, went outside with the daycare for about 20 minutes. WhenI came back in the house…OMG! Rotting dead turtle smell permeated every thing in the house! Gross.