'Somebody's gotta do it'

You may be familiar with the Discovery Channel show Dirty Jobs featuring Mike Rowe who takes on some of the most revolting jobs in the United States. Some of the work Rowe has taken on includes collecting road kill, catching catfish with bare hands (catfish noodling), serving slop to farm animals, collecting sperm from stallions and removing bones from fish.

The show's aim is to show you hardworking men and women who overcome fear, danger and sometimes stench to accomplish their daily tasks. Amelia Naidoo speaks to Rowe as we enter season three of the show.

Which of your experiences have left you with an emotional or psychological scar, if at all? The good news about being attacked by more than one animal is that you don't really dwell on the totality of the experience. You really focus more on the most recent infirmity & . The most recent memory happened last week, and it was a little bit of frostbite on my baby toe on the right foot that I got repairing a lock system up in Lake Superior.

How did you realise that playing in dirt is actually the job for you? It was an accident, to tell you the truth. Five years ago, I was trying to talk the Discovery Channel into hiring me to be a correspondent. I wanted to work maybe six months a year travelling around the world doing fun and interesting things. I wanted to host Shark Week and go to Egypt. I wanted to go to Everest and visit the Titanic, and we were talking about the terms of that kind of deal. And we made a deal, but in order to launch it, they wanted to have a three-hour miniseries about something, and we started to talk about what that might be, and I pitched this idea called Somebody's Got To Do It. & That became Dirty Jobs.

What is the most disgusting job you've done so far? The bat cave & not only because it was vile, but because it was the first one we ever did. Inside a bat cave really is like no other place on the planet, and when I was sinking into the bat guano and being bitten simultaneously by millions of flesh-eating beetles that live in the bat guano, and as I was lying there, and my face mask, which was slowly starting to jam up, and realising that millions of bats were giving birth on me from the ceiling far above, it was the moment, you know.

Do you feel that the people who do these jobs should be better paid? I do. I think that the reason Dirty Jobs is still on the air and the reason it's become popular around the world is because civilisation, as we know it, is really held together by people who do the kinds of jobs that nobody else wants to do.

And once you understand that the work we're talking about is not something people aspire to, then it's easy to understand why those jobs don't often pay well. We don't want to know about the road kill, so we don't want to know about the people who pick up the road kill [and so we don't] care how much the people who pick up the road kill get paid as a result of all of that.

You launched the mikeroweworks.com site last year. Why do you think enrolment in trade schools and technical colleges is in decline? There's no denying that trade school enrolment has gone down every single year for the past 15 or so years. And I believe the reason that happened is& because we have slowly redefined what a good job means. As the manufacturing base gave way to the financial service industry, we started to see examples of people who had a 'good job'&.

If you look at portrayals on television, if you look at the way people with dirty jobs are typically written about, talked about, you know, there's no doubt that there's been a real shift. And I think that as kids get out of high school, they're really impacted by that. We've become way more interested in the process by which things are bought than we are in the process by which things are made. And, consequently, we've redefined what work looks like, and we've just made it a lot less interesting for kids to affirmatively pursue a career in the trades.

Are there any dirty jobs that are well paid? Yes. Many, in fact. & There are many dirty jobs that are entrepreneurial in nature, and I've met a lot of people on the show who are wealthy to the extent that most viewers would just be shocked by. There's a guy in Connecticut named Matt Freund, and Matt is a dairy farmer& Matt realised one day that he was going to have to close the farm because the price of milk had become so cheap, it just wasn't efficient for him to keep running it. But he also realised that his cows were just obviously crapping all over the place.

And he created a device to turn the cow crap into heat, and he started heating his house and his neighbour's house. Then, he created another device that would allow him to make a flower pot out of this cow dung.He started putting his petunias and his chrysanthemums into these flowerpots, and then burring the pots in the ground. The flowers started to grow like crazy, so he started selling these flowerpots made out of cow dung. Now he's selling millions of them, and he's done really, really well. There are dozens of examples of guys like Matt.

Host Mike Rowe during the shooting of Dirty Jobs at Five Mile Quarry