I once had a job where I judged diarrhea scores from 1 to 3.

This usually tops the list of dirty, sad, dark jobs when going around the room. Shitty too. For those vegetarians in the room, look no further than reason to be one.

The year before I had worked for a professor in a food research station. It was pretty interesting, so I signed up to work on his project again the next year. The dirtiest thing I did the year before was place hundreds of pounds of contaminated beef into 30 C incubators for a week, it couldn't get worse than that could it? Little did I know.

The project had already started, so I was shown the ropes by a graduate student. A daily routine went something like this. Go into the lab, perform the microbiological counts from the previous day's samplings then head over to the biological containment facility where the animals were kept. The biological containment facility was a place live (usually farm) animals were undergoing study with some kind of highly infectious or contagious animal virus or bacteria. This was not a lab with rats, it was a large underground facility holding chickens, goats, pigs and other larger animals in underground steel rooms. To enter the facility we entered a room something like a space air lock. Close a large steel door behind you, walk through 6 feet of a squishy disinfectant-soaked foam, then get buzzed through the second large steel door. Entering the dark hallways was disturbing itself. You could walk the halls and peak in on strange experiments holding various (possibly sick) animals. The facility was steam cleaned before and after experiments, so the steamy environment really added to the horror movie set look.

Next we would suit up. First we went down to our underwear, then donned cotton cover-alls and rubber boots. Next we put on rubber pants and a hooded rubber jacked, ear plugs, large goggles and a nose/mouth mask. To enter the experiment room holding the piglets, there was another 'air lock' type room where we showered inside of our rubber clothes. Showering in was mostly to protect the experiment, showering out was to protect ourselves.

Our experiment occupied 3 small rooms, each holding 4 piglets between the ages of 8 and 12 weeks. Our investigation related to the food borne illness salmonella. Salmonella can occur in pig herds and is this a food safety risk for humans, however it can also sometimes cause symptoms in pigs. The thesis was that perhaps bacteriophage, virus-like vectors that infect bacterial cells (salmonella in this case) but not pig or human cells could be used to control salmonella spread in pig herds. In order to test this, we needed to make sure the pig's and pig's environment was infected with salmonella. We literally fed the pigs and sprayed the room with billions of live salmonella cells, which made some of the pigs sick. I was shocked that we did not get sick too when spraying that much salmonella around.

Back to the daily routine. We needed to monitor the pig's health daily to make sure they were not suffering too much (hard to imagine it any worse for them) and see how they were affected by the experiment. First we would have to wrangle them by hand. This sounds easy, but pigs are pretty fast and strong and we wore horrible awkward suits. By the time they were 12 weeks they were heavy and strong. We all had bad backs from them flailing in our arms while we tried to do our duties. Everything was a challenge in the smell, steamy wet heat of the enviroment and awkward suits. I can remember laughing out-loud at ourselves a few times at just how ridiculous the situation was. We'd weigh the pigs, then take their rectal temperature, swab their asses. Something about being a sick pig and having a thermometer or swab stuck up your butt makes you take a crap. Luckily we were there to appreciate and score those bowel movements!

So this is the diarrhea scoring system in case you ever need it. 1 = pasty. 2 = a stream of liquid running about 45 degrees if the pig is held straight. 3 = a liquid stream running straight out of the big, horizontally.

I mean like this
my pig
-^(....)~ -----------------------------------------------------. A clear 3/3.

Repeat 12 times daily.

Doing this daily was enough to depress me, feeling bad for both myself and the pigs. The worst days were the ones the experiment ended, in which the pigs were euthanized by veterinarians. This didn't end it for us as we sampled some of their organs to check on their health. I don't need to share the details on that.

While this disturbed me, it wasn't enough to turn me off meat for good. I was a food science student, so I didn't want to give up on quality and humanity in animal products.

A couple summers later I tried to redeem myself to the piggy gods by raising a happy pig with outdoor space. I had some space outside where I was living, so enter Hamlet, the happy, healthy, outdoor edible pet. His life is another story.