I’ve been spending more time in my room, watching stuff on my laptop lately, as compared to downstairs watching TV, mainly the lighting there is better for other things. One of the new shows that I’ve just started watching is Dirty Jobs. It’s an interesting show, the host, Mike Rowe, goes around trying out either “dirty / gross” jobs or jobs that are challenging. The episode that I just watched was entitled “Dairy Cow Midwife”.

One of the things I learned about cows whilst watching the show was that stuff seems to be constantly coming out of their mouth and nose. Or was it highlighted to seem that way? Anyway, apparently the cow is able to lick the stuff coming out from it’s nose! Yeuch!

What were some of the tasks that the host took on? Well, there were these huge containers in the farm containing a lot of erm…excrement or manure, would be the polite word. One of the containers sprung a leak, so Mike was given the task of cleaning the containers with a big hose. And these were really huge containers, many hundred feet high, so, not a quick job! One of the admirable things is that apparently the contents of the containers can somehow be converted to some form of energy, I think it was methane? And eventually, the farm will be running 100% on this energy. Amazing, isn’t it, what good can come out of waste!

Next, he had to clean the cows’ udder. When a cow has a hairy udder, the likelihood of the milk being contaminated by stuff on the hair is higher, so they had this pseudo-blowtorch thingy, which they use to singe the hair off! I have no idea how it doesn’t hurt the cow, but Mike tried it on his hand, so I guess it really doesn’t hurt. One of the harder tasks that he had to perform, was to try and impregnate a cow with a bull’s sperm. In order to do it, he had to stuff his gloved hand into the cow’s rectum! Now, that’s really nasty.

I’m amazed at the different types of jobs he’s tried out, they range from jobs like scraping dead animals off the highway, to sewer inspector, to avian vomitologist (I’m not exactly sure what that entails, but there’s the word vomit there!).

We sure owe a lot to the people that handle these kinds of jobs, I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to handle most of them. Every job has it’s bad points, but I must say, I’ve never been sprayed by faeces before!

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