Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Worst stank you ever smelled?

A bag of catfish heads locked in the cab of a crane over the weekend in July. Ain't a man alive who could have spent a Monday operating that damn crane.

Back in the 70's when I drove a garbage truck we used to have an animal hospital client. The head vet. there routinely put old, sick and injured dogs "to sleep" for people. They had the option of taking the carcass if they wanted to bury it someplace, or for an extra fee he would see to it that they were "properly disposed of". What those people didn't know was that he just put the dead dogs out back in large heavy gauge metal garbage cans with a lid that would be on firmly and be air tight. We only went there once a week and in the summer some of those dead animals could be "cooking" in those big, sealed, metal cans out in the sun for as long as a week. I would take a lungful of clean air and hold my breath while I took the lid off, dumped it into the hopper of the garbage truck and cycled the packer to get it packed in with the rest of the refuse as quickly as possible. If you unintentionally got a whiff of that it was enough to trigger vomiting. No problem in the dead of winter, though, as they were all frozen solid. Eventually we didn't see any more and I heard that veterinarian got caught for ripping off folks that were paying extra fees for the "proper handling" of their deceased pets. What they were paying extra for and what actually happened were two entirely different things.

I wouldn't say this was at the height of the mutilations, but around that time there seemed to be more than you hear about now. I don't know the last time I heard about one. I'm not an expert though.

Humpback whales breath when they blow. Get down wind and close to them when they blow for the ultimate bad breath.

Alligator bait (rotting chicken sitting in the sun for a few days.) Next, the blood/grease/etc. under an old commercial pit barbeque set directly on the slaughter block -- we put the new one up a bit on blocks. Last, the deer lease boneyard/graveyard where we dumped guts and skins during the season. (Good bushpig bait. cus hogs will eat anything.)

We have the winner!!!!!! Peuuuuuuuuh

....almost lost my lunch just reading this thread a couple times.

But, once you list spoiling human whatever....i dont think anything else can come close. Unforgettable.

That’s happened to me as well. A well rotted human body leaves an impression too.

Other than dead humans, the worst smell I've come across is huge abscess in cattle.

Had to lance several that were the size of a soccer ball. When they erupt with chunks of solid gunk, puss and blood, it'll send you running for fresh air PDQ.

Calves that have died inside the cow, but have to be removed are no walk in the park either... They usually come out in decomposed pieces.

I have the record at my vet clinic. About a year ago a client brought in a mature bull with a "swollen shoulder and brisket"

Abscess, right at 11 gallons of cream with a few chunks drained from it. With just a little blood added, It looked like tapioca pudding with a strawberry sauce garnish

One of my buddies use to raise mink. I made the mistake of walking into the skinning shed during harvest. It was like being hit in the face. I didn't puke but I did cry.

When I was a kid I worked for an old Quaker who kept dairy calves. Cleaning out the pen, by hand, with a pitchfork released some of the foulest scents imaginable. I did puke with that one.

25+ freshly ventilated skunks in the tractor bucket.

#2 would be the gut truck that rear ended another truck sloshing said contents over the cab of the truck. Thick blood, chicken intestines, lips and beaks. They limed the heck out of the ditches but it stunk for months.

Pulling dead calves rates right up there. So does mink crap. Baby diapers can be pretty bad, probably because you're up close and personal to the source.

We had neighbors that raised mink, their farm was on one hilltop and we were on the next. Hauling hay through the valley between us on warm humid summer evenings as the air settled was enough to rip your eyeballs out. I remember they cleaned the barns once and spread manure on a field just after making second cut alfalfa grass. Damn cows wouldn't eat the 3rd cut hay from that field.

Dale

Worst smells I can remember.

1. In the Civil Air Patrol, we hunted for a plane crash for about 3 weeks in the Sacramento Mtns.. When we found it, the bodies were more than ripe.
2. A friend of mine in college got a job driving a rendering truck. He asked me to help one weekend. We drove out to a ranch and winched up 3 dead cows to take back to the rendering plant. All three of these cows could have been a stand in for the "touch a dead cow" scene in the movie Summer of 42. If we hadn't been desperate for money, No Way!!
3. I was barreling down a west Texas ranch road and topped a little hill, to find a congress of vultures just on the other side. They lifted off the road, but one lowered it's head and puked right on my windshield and into the fresh air vent. I will take dead bodies and rotted cows everyday before I will willing smell vulture puke again.

There was a dead whale (rotten,white goo) and as we circled to get a pic we got downwind and the stench burnt our eyes and nose, bye far worst ever!!

Puke gets to me. Poop does too. both just at times.

We've had freezers go out before. Not nice, not so bad. Though the last one we loaded on the tractor and just drove it to the pile. Even with bobcats and such in it, including a 16 inch spike I shot a few years back that I wanted the skull of. Didn't want it that bad though.

The worst by far was one of our frequent flyer EMS calls, had her on Tuesday, trouble breathing. Ok. Got her loaded up, EMS hauled her off. Next Tuesday( summer) we get a phone call, not a page, to come help the funeral home. It was beyond horrible, purple, fluids and blood all over the floor, bloated, popped when we were putting her in the body bag. I had to go out and put paper towels in my nostrils cause chief said we didn't need SCBA.... I'll never again touch one without SCBA on for all the smells and germs etc....

I came across a dead eel that was in one of the intakes at Indian Point Power plant in N.Y.,that was pretty ripe.worked with a guy,"big ed the boogeyman man",he smelled like a garbage truck in summer.

2 that were equally bad... A burned body, and a decomposing body that had been laying outside in the sun for 10-12 days, according to the coroner.

I don't even want to review it. ;-{>8

It wears off after awhile, tho I never got a direct hit. It ended my racoon trapping days. Score was 5 skunks, no coons. I was so looking forward to a Davy Crockett hat. A few years afterward I decided a skunk-skin hat would have been even cooler, had I thought of it.

In the face would be bad. Might even blinding if in the eyes.