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NARRATOR: Think you've seen weird?
You ain't seen nothin' till you've been down on the farm.
MAN: Now this is a weird farm.
WOMAN: These creatures feast on only one thing: blood.
WOMAN: They could break your leg without a problem.
WOMAN: You get used to it. You actually do.
NARRATOR: The only thing weirder than these farms...
MAN: Heh heh heh heh!
NARRATOR: ...are the farmers.
WOMAN: Look at this bunny,
and look what she can do for me
and look what she can do for everybody.
WOMAN: You've got to be kidding me.
NARRATOR: Welcome to Logan, Utah.
Normal barn.
Normal goats, producing normal milk.
It's all a bit short on weird.
Wrong.
Because this is the lair of the spider goat.
CARIN BONDAR: I had never heard of this before,
it's like a Franken-goat,
it's sort of something out of a horror movie.
Is it goat? Is it spider?
Of course it's a goat, but genetically...
It's a goat spider.
NARRATOR: Believe it or not this creature
is a transgenic blend of a spider and goat.
Though we think they've inherited most of their looks
from their goat mothers, especially around the eyes.
So why has farmer Randy Lewis bred these bizarre creatures?
RANDY LEWIS: Spider silk is a pretty amazing material.
It combines a very high tensile strength
as strong as Kevlar,
and yet it's as elastic as nylon.
LINDA RAYOR: It's got stretch to it,
but it just doesn't break.
It would be amazing if we were able to farm it in some way.
NARRATOR: Spider silk is terrific,
but running a silk farm is tough.
LINDA: The big problem with farming spiders
is that spiders are very happy to eat other spiders.
You can't raise them in big groups.
NARRATOR: Randy's solution is straight out of a comic book.
By introducing a spider gene to a goat embryo,
he created a farm animal
with more silk-producing superpowers than a spider,
but none of the casual cannibalism.
RANDY: So the whole herd started with a single male,
and he was used to breed a number of females.
And it passed the gene down,
and since then we now have about 40 goats
that have the spider silk gene in them.
CARIN: Humans have been selectively breeding animals
for many, many years.
We've also been combining animals of different species.
For example, a donkey and a horse makes a mule.
So this is taking this selective breeding between animals...
to the next level.
NARRATOR: These spider goats can't climb walls.
But they do have special power spider ***.
RANDY: The milk from the transgenic goats
is basically the same as a normal goat,
except we have one extra protein,
and that's the spider silk protein in it.
NARRATOR: Milk from the Franken-goat
goes straight to Randy's lab.
But in this state, it's only good for cappuccinos.
To get the silk from the milk
they must separate proteins from fat.
It's a bit like making very sticky spider cheese.
CARIN: This is really clever.
Separation of proteins from milk products
occurs on dairy farms all the time,
thinking about getting those cheese curds
out of the liquid milk.
Well, this is separation of another kind of protein,
only this time it's spider silk.
LINDA: One of the issues is, is that spider silk
is pretty complicated stuff,
and a lot of it changes structure
as it's being pulled through the spider.
NARRATOR: Just like a spider,
the machine pushes out silk under pressure.
One quart of milk produces enough super tough spider silk
to stretch more than 10 miles.
RANDY: So our goal is produce 1,000 pounds' worth
of spider silk from our goats.
We would need millions upon millions of spiders
to get anywhere close to that 1,000 pounds.
NARRATOR: You could spin a lot of webs with that
and catch an awful lot of flies.
But Randy has other plans for his spider goat silk.
It will be used in anything from parachute cords
to arrestor cables for landing fighter jets.
That's because this spider goat sticky stuff
is spectacularly strong.
CARIN: It doesn't make sense to farm spiders,
but perhaps it does make sense to farm spider goats.
NARRATOR: But spider goat has an archrival.
Spider alfalfa.
Yes, science is already engineering silk-giving plants.
Stand by for Spider Goat versus Spider Plant,
coming to a weird comic store near you.
This is one sad moth.
It just barely has sex,
and then after a few days it falls off its perch.
But this pitiful critter
is one of the most important farm animals
in human history.
This is a silk moth, and the larvae it produces
provide one of the world's most valuable commodities.
And unlike spider goats, it comes naturally.
Farming these little bugs is big business.
And this is how it's done.
During the moth's brief life it lays a few hundred eggs.
When an egg hatches, out comes a caterpillar or worm,
who immediately heads for an all-you-can-eat worm diner.
HAYLEY CHAMBERLAIN-NELSON: In order for a silk worm
to get to the point where it's mature enough to make silk,
it has to increase its bodyweight
by 10,000 times of that of when it was hatched,
and if humans grew at the same rate
they would weigh 60,000 pounds
by the time they were a month old.
NARRATOR: The greedy grubs pig out like a hungry Homer Simpson.
In fact they're so keen to stuff their faces
that they breathe in a bizarre way.
LINDA: Their mouths and how they breathe
are in different parts of their body,
so essentially they can keep breathing all the time
while just gobbling up as much food as they can get.
NARRATOR: After around a month of solid gorging,
the worms stop eating.
It's time to hit the gym and start weaving.
To make a cocoon they extrude a strand of silk
up to a mile in length
straight from their silk glands.
That's right-- silk is worm drool.
HAYLEY: We've been using silk for hundreds of years,
but when you think about it, farming silk is weird.
You are wearing clothes made by a worm.
NARRATOR: And the worm's reward for weaving a silk cocoon?
Boiled to death in a giant cauldron.
RAYOR: The reason why they kill silk worms
is because if they come out and chew their way out of the cocoon
they tear the silk into much shorter, shorter lengths,
whereas if they simply boil it
they've got one continuous thread.
NARRATOR: It takes over 2,000 cocoons
to make just 1 pound of silk.
That's a lot of worm spit.
To many folks around the planet, bugs aren't just useful,
they're also delicious.
In fact 80% of the world's people eat insects.
You want fried grasshopper?
You got it.
You want cricket on rye?
You got it.
You want silkworm on a bed of beetle with an ant sauce?
A bit weird...but we'll check the fridge.
GLORIA CARBALLIDO: iDelicioso!
NARRATOR: Order a leg and a wing
in Gloria Carballido's New York restaurant,
and you might be in for a shock.
GLORIA: All American people taste this.
Don't be afraid.
It's good...it's good, okay?
Mmm, very good.
JASON DOMBROSKIE: The thing that baffles me
is that most people have no problem eating shrimp,
but really, what's the difference?
In fact, people eat oysters.
Something that looks like snot and has a consistency of snot,
yet people have no problem eating it
because it tastes good,
and a lot of insects taste good as well.
NARRATOR: And speaking of insects,
this barn in Holland is infested with them.
But these guys aren't the exterminators.
They're farmers.
Owner Marieke farms 14 kinds of crawly critters,
including juicy cockroaches.
MARIEKE HASSELL: They are very basic,
they don't need much.
It's really an easy insect to keep.
NARRATOR: There are no fields here.
Just row after row of sealed drawers writhing with bugs.
They say they've got 40 million insects here.
How creepy is that?
COLE GILBERT: Farming insects produces a lot of protein
in a very small area,
uses less landscape than for beef cattle or aquaculture.
They also produce less greenhouse gases.
NARRATOR: But they still stink.
MARIEKE: These insects are producing
a little bit of ammonia.
The smell's not very nice.
Sometimes if it is really hot,
it smells a little bit like dog [bleep].
NARRATOR: These reeking roaches will be sold as pet food.
But these delicious-looking worms
are meant for human consumption.
NATHAN DAPPEN: I've eaten chocolate-covered ants,
termites, I've had grubs, crickets,
and I think probably my favorite were fried mealworms.
NARRATOR: It's morning,
and that means breakfast for the creepy crawlies.
These guys skip the OJ and coffee
and instead go for a few shovels of powdered veggies.
WOMAN: Worms are a little bit hungry, I think.
They have to grow a little bit more.
NARRATOR: If mealworms don't make your mouth water,
they also farm Chef Gloria's favorite--grasshoppers.
Some customers like them live and jumpy,
but this batch is freeze-dried for sealed-in freshness.
Perfect for today's special:
Melted cheese on tomato, basil and grasshopper.
Table 12, hop to it.
NARRATOR: This is the world's most expensive coffee.
This is what they use to make it.
And this is the farmer
who dreamed people would pay 50 bucks a cup for it.
BLAKE DINKIN: When I first told my friends
that I was gonna go ahead and produce coffee,
they thought I was totally out of my mind.
RON MAGILL: I'm not a coffee drinker.
I've never had a cup of coffee,
and this sure isn't the way to get me started.
NARRATOR: Blake Dinkin is the only farmer on the planet
who makes coffee using elephant manure.
CARIN: Elephant coffee.
[elephant trumpets]
You got to be kidding me!
NARRATOR: Blake feeds the coffee he farms to his monster herd
and waits for the beans to come out the back end.
The beans that emerge from the elephant's backside
then cost a staggering $2,000 a pound.
BLAKE: This is my coffee-making machine.
What basically happens
is the elephant will consume some fresh coffee cherries,
and the stomach's basically acting
as a slow cooker for the coffee beans.
NARRATOR: Blake believes an elephant's back passage
improves the flavor of the beans.
BLAKE: Basically the acid in the stomach breaks down the protein.
Protein is responsible for bitterness.
Less protein, and less bitter-tasting coffee.
NARRATOR: But his prototype poo brew tasted shhhhocking.
BLAKE: When I first tried it,
it tasted exactly like what I picked it out of.
NARRATOR: But he had faith in filth.
And 10 years later,
Blake has 20 mammoth coffee makers passing brown gold.
An elephant eats 10 times as much as an average dairy cow,
and their intestine is almost as long as a basketball court.
CARIN: All of this vegetation
undergoes a fermentation process in their guts,
so when they ingest those coffee berries,
this is where the magic happens.
NARRATOR: And the magic can't be rushed.
Between 15 and 30 hours after eating the coffee, nature calls.
But no barista would serve this steaming brew.
So a lucky team of *** polishers
pluck out the good stuff.
Each elephant can produce 500 pounds of manure a day.
That's equivalent in weight to an adult gorilla.
Major monkey business.
RON: That's a lot of dung to sift through for coffee beans.
NARRATOR: No bull.
Just 3% of what goes in the front
makes it out the back as usable beans.
RON: Because of the very poor yield,
only about 50 kilograms a year,
this coffee is extremely expensive.
You got to really love your coffee.
NARRATOR: Time to see if the crappuccino catches on.
MAN: Very smooth, very earthy, just wonderful.
CARIN: We've all had a crappy cup of coffee,
but this is literally a crappy cup of coffee.
NARRATOR: This is a farm of slimy *** deviants.
HELEN DYBALL: Good morning, guys,
I'll open up your pens for you, give you some fresh air.
NARRATOR: Helen Dyball and her husband farm edible snails.
MR. DYBALL: Ready, darling. HELEN: Thanks, darling.
MR. DYBALL: There you go.
Wash those little slimy buggers, will ya?
Okay, I'll be back shortly.
NARRATOR: Their farm in New South Wales, Australia,
produces thousands of snails each week.
And they're all destined for the dinner table.
NATHAN: Countless tons of them are eaten around the world
every single year,
so it makes sense that somebody has to farm them.
HELEN: They're not heavy, they don't bite back,
they're just beautiful.
NARRATOR: And ***.
COLE: Snails don't need any encouragement to mate.
You don't need to play Barry White music
into the greenhouse.
NARRATOR: Of course you do.
We present the guide to escargot love-making.
Foreplay: caress your partner for up to 12 hours.
Then, prepare your reproductive organs.
You'll find these growing out of side of your head.
Finally, at the moment of ecstasy,
fire a sharp spear into your partner's face.
This will either help your *** survive, or prove fatal.
And if the love dart doesn't kill you,
the childcare costs might.
You both get pregnant.
CARIN: Each one has both male and female parts,
which means that after having sex,
both are gonna lay eggs.
It's double the *** for your buck.
NARRATOR: Each snail lays up to 130 eggs.
But snails sell for just 30 cents.
So Helen needs big numbers.
Baby snails are just 1/10 of inch long
but have huge appetites.
COLE: Snails can eat about 40% of their body mass in a day.
They scrape their food with mouth parts called a radula
that contains up to 25,000 teeth.
If I were a snail,
I wouldn't want to floss those teeth every day.
NARRATOR: After two years
a snail is old enough to go to a restaurant.
Helen prepares them for the big day.
COLE: After they're harvested
they're held for 7 days without being able to eat
so the gut is cleaned out.
Nobody wants to eat snail poop in their escargot.
NARRATOR: Of course not.
Mucus, on the other hand, mmm.
Snails slide on a river of slime.
And when on the move, this species, Helix aspersa,
maxes out at .03 miles per hour.
And look at this one go, escaping from the farm
in a spectacular bid for freedom.
Others, aren't so lucky.
NARRATOR: This soup contains bird spit.
And these New York diners have just found out.
MAN: Oh, my God.
WOMAN: That's what this chunk is. Weird.
NARRATOR: But this isn't "waiter's revenge."
The edible saliva is one of the most expensive ingredients
in cooking.
It comes from these 6-inch-long birds--
Southeast Asian swiftlets.
In the wild they hang out in colonies of up to 1 million.
And their spit-covered crash pads
are used to make bird's nest soup.
ROLAND KAYS: So what's so special about these nests,
why do people make soup out of swiftlet nests,
but not any other bird's nest?
Well, it's because these nests are made entirely of saliva,
and it's this sticky saliva
that allows the birds to stick their nest,
glue their nest onto a rock wall in a cave or on a cliff
where no predators can get it.
NARRATOR: Restaurants will pay $1,000 a pound
for these sticky protein strands.
And just 6 pounds of nest
is worth more than the average annual salary in Thailand.
So Thai bird farmers
have hatched an ingenious plan to farm them.
Man-made nesting caves.
They blow 3 times the average annual wage building one,
and months preparing it,
all in the hope that some wild birds will want to move in.
ROLAND: These swift farms,
they're getting a free place to live and raise their young,
and they are basically paying rent with spit.
NARRATOR: 300 feet up, swiftlets fly at 100 miles per hour.
They're among the world's fastest birds,
and the lightning-fast flock seeks somewhere to roost.
But there are 50 nest farms in town.
The trick is tempting the birds back to yours.
ROLAND: The difficulty for these farmers
is making their farm more attractive to the birds
than all the others,
because these are wild animals
making a choice to live in one of these birdhouses.
NARRATOR: Welcome to farmer Saksit Kannage's
luxury accommodation.
Our V.I.B. package includes sumptuous cave-like features.
Deep pile carpets of bird poop
to appeal to a swift's acute sense of smell.
And a liberal dose of bird perfume
for that authentic wild aroma.
If you believe the farmers,
this is like Chanel Number 5 to a roosting swiftlet.
Next they crank up a mist machine
to simulate a bird cave's 80% humidity.
And the weird farm transforms
into the world's worst nightclub.
All that's missing is music.
So DJ Farmer blasts out a nesting sound megamix.
[birds chirping]
KIM BOSTWICK: You can just imagine these birds,
they're out looking for bugs,
and they hear there's a party going on over there,
and they're like "Maybe we should go and check it out.
There's good stuff going on over there."
NARRATOR: And if that doesn't work,
it's the dark art of swiftlet farming:
waving a bit of sack in the air.
How this works is a total mystery.
But hundreds of birds soon fill his bizarre barn
and start weaving treasured nests.
After a month, the farmer checks his harvest.
Broken nests are worthless, so each is carefully removed.
These nests are good, but no chef wants a side of droppings.
It takes a farmhand 2 full hours to clean each nest.
But the spit and polish is worth it
to win a slice of this billion-dollar industry.
Quite a nest egg for the weird farmers of Thailand.
This is the land of the vampire.
CARIN: These creatures feast on only one thing: blood.
They are like little balloons;
once they start sucking blood, they can increase their weight
by up to 10 times in one sitting.
NARRATOR: You wouldn't want to live next to this guy,
because Carl Peters-Bond is a leech farmer.
He has a herd of 50,000.
And they're looking for blood.
But if vampires make your blood run cold,
give us two minutes to convert you.
HAYLEY: Leeches are extremely under-appreciated,
I mean, most people look at them and they think,
"Ah, they're just a bunch of blood suckers,"
but they can be put to some really good uses.
NARRATOR: Leeches farmed here save lives.
As they feed, the blood suckers release beneficial chemicals.
CARIN: There are a lot of uses for leeches in medicine.
Any time you want to promote blood flow,
using a leech is a good idea.
NARRATOR: To make these suckers breed,
cold water tanks are hotbeds of love
for live leech-on-leech action.
CARL PETERS-BOND: It'll copulate in water,
so it breeds under the water,
and then it comes up onto land and it lays a cocoon.
And each one of them contains
between 12 and about 35 little baby leeches.
NARRATOR: The slimy babies need to reach 2 inches.
Instead of mother's milk, Carl feeds them blood.
CARL: They don't really have a preference
for the sort of blood that they like.
Anything as long as it's sort of warm and fresh.
Today we've got some sheep's blood in there,
and they seem to be liking that.
NARRATOR: Fully grown, the leeches are almost ready.
Most farms fatten livestock for market;
here they starve it for a month.
Now the livestock is ready to eat the customer.
Carl seals the leeches in gel
to keep them moist and prevent escape...
then mails them to clinics all over the world.
In San Mateo, California, Dr. Vladimir Bokarius
is treating Jonah for long-term hip pain.
Paging Doctor Leech.
VLADIMIR BOKARIUS: They're live creatures, they have big teeth,
but they need to bite through in order to help you.
MAN: Oh.
VLADIMIR: Now you feel it?
MAN: Yeah. So it's just burrowing deeper?
VLADIMIR: Yes.
NARRATOR: The suckers feast on Jonah for two hours.
And Doctor Vlad loves every minute.
VLADIMIR: They use their teeth to grind through the skin...
MAN: Yeah.
HAYLEY: The mouth of a leech has 3 jaws in sort of a Y shape,
and each of the jaws has hundreds of razor-sharp teeth,
sharp enough to cut through a hippo's hide.
NARRATOR: The leeches extract excess blood from the swelling.
And a dollop of leech anticoagulant
prevents Jonah's blood from clotting.
Leech saliva is also being used to treat strokes
and blood clots on the brain.
So while you might not want to live next to Vampire Farm...
one day you might be glad it's there.
Especially if there's a crisis of masculinity in the house.
HAYLEY: You can buy leech oil on the Internet
that is said to help with *** enlargement.
I don't know if it works, and I do not want to know.
MAN: Ow!
NARRATOR: You've just been bitten
by a Sydney funnel web spider.
[siren]
Your racing heart may soon slow...then stop altogether.
You urgently need...a farmer.
JOHN MOSTYN: One drop of venom from this guy
could probably take out about 88 people.
NATHAN: This may seem like a really weird farm,
but it's a farm that saves lives.
NARRATOR: This is a venom farm.
JOHN: So these guys are extremely nasty.
Even I don't like getting close to these guys.
NARRATOR: It helps provide antivenom
for some of the most lethal spiders and snakes.
JOHN: He's got a head the size of my fist.
NARRATOR: And it just might save your life.
That's if the farmers survive the harvest.
JONAS STENSTROM: Everything is fatal,
anything can kill you,
so one small mistake and you could be gone.
NARRATOR: To produce antivenom, John Mostyn milks his animals.
But unlike dairy farmers he's not tempted to try the produce.
NATHAN: Venom toxicity is measured on the LD50 scale.
On the top of that list
are the inland taipan and the brown snake,
which are two of the snakes that are being farmed
right here at this venom farm.
JOHN: Okay, so this guy is a black tiger snake.
NARRATOR: Of all Australian snakes,
the tiger snake is the second biggest killer.
And these guys are crazy enough to keep 5 of them.
JOHN: They're venomous at both ends.
Tigers like to spray [bleep] everywhere.
NARRATOR: Its fangs are prehistoric hypodermic syringes,
injecting enough venom to kill an adult human
in as little as 30 minutes.
JOHN: And then it paralyzes your limbs,
it paralyzes your heart,
and it paralyzes your lungs, so you can't move,
you can't breathe, and your heart doesn't beat.
RON: The most dangerous part of the job
is collecting the venom itself.
So the snake bites through the membrane,
and thinking it's biting into something defending itself,
and collecting the venom in the bottom of the cup.
NARRATOR: For John, each drop is liquid gold.
The antivenom that is produced
sells for up to $42,000 an ounce,
making it more valuable than fine beluga caviar.
JONAS: To produce the antivenom
they inject small doses of the venom into a horse,
and then they increase that dosage over the next 12 months,
and during this time the horse starts producing antibodies
against this foreign substance,
and once you extract the blood, there's your antivenom.
JOHN: There's a lot of good that will come out
of a nasty little fella like this, you know?
NARRATOR: But that's no use to you.
Your heart is slowing, and your limbs are seizing up.
Mercifully, in the neighboring lab,
Liz Vella may have the antidote.
LIZ VELLA: So this is a male Sydney funnel web spider.
It's one of 40 that we've got at the moment,
but we could have up to 200 at any given time.
NARRATOR: The Sydney funnel web is likely responsible
for all recorded spider-bite deaths in Australian history.
And it packs serious fangs.
LINDA: Funnel webs are nasty spiders.
They've got incredible strength when they strike,
such that it could totally crush a mouse skull.
This is not a spider you want to be bitten by.
JONAS: To milk venom from a funnel web spider,
the first thing you've got to do is to make it really angry.
NARRATOR: With this spider, that's not difficult.
LINDA: Funnel Webs are really ill-natured spiders,
they're just cranky, and what they do is they rear up,
legs up, fangs out, with venom dripping
out of the bottom of their fangs.
NARRATOR: Spiders don't produce enough venom
to be milked like snakes.
Instead, Liz sucks it off with a miniature vacuum.
LIZ: Come here, beautiful. Ooh, you've got some good venom.
NARRATOR: Thanks to spider antivenom
there have been no deaths from bites in three decades.
But Liz isn't taking any chances.
LIZ: Even though he's a small male,
if he was to bite, he could kill all of us in this room today.
That's a scary thought.
NARRATOR: And scary farm-- but thanks to their crop,
you're going to make it after all.
[heart beating]
What's weird about an oyster farm?
What's strange about harvesting juicy, edible mollusks?
What's odd about farmers like Douglas McLaurin
mucking out livestock?
DOUGLAS McLAURIN: If the oysters are clumped together
too close to each other like this,
they won't be able to feed properly.
Their mouths will not be able to open,
they don't get enough water with the nutrients,
and of course, also, these are animals,
so they even have an ***.
That means that their feces are flying into each other's faces.
So we want to avoid this as much as possible.
NARRATOR: Doug's team in Mexico clean 40,000 oysters a year.
The weird thing is they won't be eaten.
Doug's farming pearls.
RON: Pearls are formed
when a foreign object gets into the oyster
and as a defense mechanism, it builds the pearl around it.
NARRATOR: Essentially, the oyster imprisons
the foreign object inside the pearl.
DOUGLAS: In nature, out of every 10,000 pearl oysters
you will find one natural pearl.
What we are trying to do with pearl farming
is get the odds better in our favor.
NARRATOR: And to do that,
this scuba-diving farmer is playing God.
Doctor Mollusk will see you now.
Scalpel...bivalve...clamp...
DOUGLAS: What we are trying to do is trick the oyster
into believing it's being attacked by a parasite.
One wrong move, you kill the oyster.
NARRATOR: The oyster can only survive outside water
for 30 seconds;
Doug has to work fast.
DOUGLAS: Well, If things go wrong,
at least I can always eat the oyster.
NARRATOR: He inserts an artificial bead.
Guess where.
No. He puts it in the oyster's ***.
Ow!
DOUGLAS: It sounds painful, but don't worry, it's not.
NARRATOR: He inserts a piece of flesh from a donor oyster
called the mantle.
DOUGLAS: This piece of tissue is mantle,
the only part of the oyster's anatomy that produces pearl.
Without this, we won't have the cultured pearl.
RON: What they are doing here is carefully placing a small bead
and a piece of another oyster within the oyster shell,
triggering an autoimmune response.
The whole process is a bit like oyster ER.
NARRATOR: Having a bit of grit in your eye is bad enough.
Having it in your *** doesn't bear thinking about.
DOUGLAS: Tres.
NARRATOR: But after 2 years in the ocean with a gritty ***,
the oyster produces a pearl.
Or so the farmers hope.
Sadly, not all oyster testicles
produce things fit to hang around a lady's neck.
DOUGLAS: So this is the moment of truth.
NARRATOR: Farmers' livelihoods
depend on the success of this operation.
And after 2 hours they hit pay dirt.
DOUGLAS: There you go.
Wow, wow, wow!
NARRATOR: Pearls can fetch up to $4,000 each.
DOUGLAS: Our kids will be very happy this Christmas season,
lots of presents for them.
NARRATOR: Just 1% of these oysters
will produce a flawless pearl.
DOUGLAS: We have this ritual, that every year
all the bad pearls are thrown back into the ocean.
We dedicate those pearls to gods...
so next year's harvest will be a good one.
NARRATOR: Weird enough for you?
ROB: This is a place where you have to perform surgery,
and you wear a wetsuit.
Now, this is a weird farm.
NARRATOR: Ramona near San Diego has a proud farming history,
from turkeys...to horses... to these.
NANCY RIEGLER: We both had regular jobs,
and we both kind of came from a more city background.
I never drove a tractor when I was a kid,
which is probably why I think it's totally awesome now.
NARRATOR: Nancy and Gil Riegler
are America's first camel farmers.
They threw in the desk job for a life of weird.
Think camels,
and we usually think pyramids and Arabian deserts.
But, curiously, the prehistoric ancestors
of these hump-backed beasts came from North America.
ROLAND: It makes a lot of sense to farm camels in California
instead of cows,
because camels are much better adapted to dry environments.
They can go a long time without water,
and they can eat the tough desert vegetation.
NARRATOR: And we can eat them.
Camel meat is prized in parts of the world.
But hold the hump burger,
because this isn't a meat farm.
It's a dairy.
GIL RIEGLER: Camels only give milk for 90 seconds at a time.
So you have to milk fast.
ROLAND: When you milk a camel
you only get about 2 gallons per day,
whereas a cow you might get 6.
However the milk that you do get is more nutritious,
it has more vitamin C and lower cholesterol.
GIL: Some people say that camel milk tastes like human milk,
but I don't really remember.
NARRATOR: Milking a 7-foot-tall, 1,500-pound camel
is bit more dangerous
than milking your usual friendly, docile cow.
NANCY: A camel can do like a roundhouse,
a kind of karate kick, and it's very powerful.
If they were really going to plant one on you,
they could break your leg without a problem.
ROLAND: They really don't have to worry about predators.
A coyote is like a joke to a camel.
In fact camels can kick sideways,
which is something to look out for if you're a camel farmer.
NARRATOR: Camel milk is a staple for desert tribes.
But Americans find it weird.
NANCY: Gil and I drink our camel milk every day.
NARRATOR: Well, most of us.
But Nancy isn't trying to make us drink it.
She wants us to bathe in it.
NANCY: The product we make and sell is camel milk soap.
The stuff is great, it's really, really moisturizing,
I mean, 65...I'm only 50. For 65 I look hot.
For 50 I'm kind of raggedy,
but really it does make you look pretty soft and smooth.
NARRATOR: And if these city-slickers
are to convince the locals about camels,
they'll need a whole lot of soap.
NANCY: You know, when bull camels
are trying to smell beautiful
they throw their urine over their head,
and that gets on us sometimes, and, you know,
we still have to go into town and go to a nice restaurant.
Doesn't bother us.
Might bother our table neighbors.
RON: Though they've been beasts of burden
for human beings for thousands of years,
camels are still disgusting animals.
NARRATOR: This yarn is being spun
straight from a live animal.
A man-made beast of living fur.
The farmer who created this creature is Louise Walsh.
LOUISE WALSH: Hi, guys, how ya doin?
How is everybody today?
NARRATOR: Louise loves rabbits-- so much that she made her own.
LOUISE: Houdini! [smooches]
NARRATOR: This fur ball is a giant angora rabbit,
and Louise actually developed the breed 25 years ago.
ROLAND: These rabbits started as normal wild rabbits
that were brought into captivity,
and the farmers each generation
would select the ones that had the best fur
to breed the next generation.
NARRATOR: Each fat fur ball weighs in
at up to 12 pounds of solid fluff.
What's up, doc?
KIM: Take your basic wild, brown, normal rabbit,
make it white, make it gigantic, and then give it a '70s Afro.
NARRATOR: '70s Afro, fur coat-- it's Starsky and Rabbit Hutch.
And Huggy Hare says word on the farm is
this Afro's a killer.
LOUISE: Bunnies have to have their wool harvested
once each season.
If you don't do that, your bunny is going to get wool block,
and that can kill your bunny.
NARRATOR: One rabbit can produce up to 40 ounces of wool a year,
making them 24-carrot bunny-money-spinners.
LOUISE: These are the greatest bunnies in the world.
Lots and lots of fluff that can be spun into beautiful yarn.
Very, very, soft and very, very warm,
7 times warmer than lamb's wool.
NARRATOR: The wool is thinner than human hair
and sells for up to $10 an ounce.
So this haircut is worth $400 a year,
And there are 100 more monsters on the farm.
LOUISE: We produce probably
a couple of hundred pounds' worth of angora fluff a year.
That really would fill a huge room.
It does.
NARRATOR: Combing loosens the fibers.
And hairy Houdini doesn't try to escape.
LOUISE: She's liking this.
She'll be able to scratch what needs scratching
as soon as I'm done.
She's gonna be real happy,
she'll spend a whole day just plain checking herself out.
NARRATOR: Louise spins wool into saleable yarn
straight from Houdini's back,
bunny to ball in the time it takes to boil a pan of water.
LOUISE: Feeling good, huh, yeah.
NARRATOR: But this is no salon-- it's a working farm--
and its rabbits poop 500 pellets per day.
Louise's son Ray was at the back of the line
when they dished out the jobs.
But the rabbits help out by eating their own feces.
How cute is that?
LOUISE: How could you not be proud of something like this?
Look at this bunny and look what she can do for me
and look what she can do for everybody.
NARRATOR: Isn't that right, Ray?
NARRATOR: Behind these high security fences lurk 13 killers.
Some farms farm meat. Some farms farm milk.
This one farms information.
[hyena laughing]
This research farm in Berkeley, California,
is the only spotted hyena farm in the world.
RON: When you study hyenas, you realize they have
a very intricate system of communication,
and a good way to study them is to be able to study a pack,
which is what they're doing on this farm.
NARRATOR: Hyenas have over 14 vocal calls,
more than any other carnivore.
From hungry...to angry.
[growling]
Old McDonald never had anything like this.
Here a... [moan]
There a... [groan]
Everywhere a... [growling]
And thanks to reinforced wire, Dr. Frederic Theunissen
can study the calls without becoming lunch.
FREDERIC THEUNISSEN: We set up these situations,
we can observe their behavior,
and from looking at their behavior
try to deduce what the meaning of these different sounds are.
NARRATOR: He's a regular Doctor Doolittle.
FREDERIC: "Hello," and "I'm your friend"
would be mmmmm, mmm.
That would be a hello.
When they're frustrated
and they want to call other members of the clan,
they'll go "Heh heh heh heh."
NARRATOR: The most famous hyena call is its laugh,
which can be heard up to 3 miles away.
RON: Hee hee hee hee hee hee hee!
NARRATOR: Frederic has discovered
what makes a hyena laugh,
and isn't the one about the cheetah and the fast food.
FREDERIC: So when a hyena laughs it's not having a good time.
It usually has something that it can't get.
They have an even more aggressive sound,
which is watch out, I'm about to attack you,
which is a "hcck!"
If you hear that sound, you're in trouble.
NARRATOR: The animals get regular check-ups.
And with predators like this, that means heavy sedation...
which allows farm researcher Mary Weldele
to inspect this huge female's impressive dental work.
RON: The hyena clan is dominated by the female,
it is a matriarchal society.
She is not only bigger in size, she is more aggressive.
NARRATOR: In fact, she's bigger everywhere.
Believe it or not, this is a female.
And she's hung like a horse.
The female's *** looks like a ***
and extends an eye-watering 7 inches.
No wonder they're always laughing.
Mary's examination, on the other hand, is less fun.
MARY WELDELE: Now I'm going to look for *** gland secretions.
NARRATOR: On the other side of the farm, it's feeding time.
On the menu, 1 1/2 pounds of pork and a bone.
Wolfed down in seconds.
ANNA CHUNG: These animals have incredibly powerful jaws,
and the jaw strength is the reason
why we have to reinforce so many things with metal.
Just so that they don't devour it. Ha ha ha ha!
CARIN: These guys have among the most powerful jaws
in the animal kingdom.
They can chew through bones, they can chew through teeth.
All they spit up is pretty much the hooves and the hair.
NARRATOR: They can apply 14,000 Newtons of force--
200 times the pressure needed to crush a human skull.
RON: Though most people think they're simply scavengers,
they are in reality very effective predators.
They have huge teeth in the back of their jaws
with a very powerful bite
that enable them to get through bone.
As a matter of fact they are the only predator known
to be able to chew through elephant bones
to get to the marrow.
NARRATOR: They may sound like monsters,
but they're big-hearted, really.
A hyena's heart comprises
a massive 10% of its body weight.
Something for prey to think about
as a hyena gnaws through their skull.
After lunch, Mary likes nothing more
than a cuddle with a killer.
MARY: Come here, good boy.
NARRATOR: Winnie may have a cutesy name,
but he's 110 pounds of bone-crushing muscle.
MARY: Hey, Winnie, yeah.
Can I come in here with you?
NARRATOR: Mary hand-raised him in the US,
but Winnie's just one snap of his jaws from the Serengeti.
MARY: Hey, Winnie, what are you thinking about, huh?
NARRATOR: Let's hope it's not his next meal.
MARY: Sweet boy.
NARRATOR: Lunch results in mountains of white droppings,
which can be analyzed at the farm
for insights into feeding habits and anatomy.
ANNA: When I first came to work here,
the smell really was more pungent than it is
now that I've worked here for some time.
You get used to it, it sounds weird,
and you don't think you will, but you actually do.
NARRATOR: Poop duty is no fun.
But these guys think it's hilarious.
[hyenas laughing]