Dispose Of The Meat
A Pet Owner’s Final Choice – washingtonpost.com
“Five or 10 years ago, it was only a handful of people who were paying for services like individual cremations,” says Bob Vetere, the association’s president. “People have humanized pets to such a degree that they are doing almost everything to pets that they do for humans. I am waiting for pet wakes in the future.”
Don’t get me wrong. I love my cats — a lot. But I think this kind of thing is a little crazy. I mean, once they’re gone — they’re gone. All that’s left is meat and fur. I feel the same way about human bodies, too, by the way. I just can’t see spending a bunch of money on all sorts of “special treatment” for the body. It’s just meat! The person you loved is gone, gone, gone.
I like the idea of returning the elements of the body back to the earth as quickly as possible. If there were fewer of us (humans and animals), burial without chemicals or a box would be a good way to go. In highly populated areas, cremation and scattering of ashes isn’t bad.
The body disposal technique I like best of all, though, is sky burial. Now THAT would be a very cool way to go!
Posted by RebeccaHartong on February 29, 2008 under Life
The Parsi in India have the same sort of Sky Burial. Best known Parsi is Tata. They have a place in Bombay, called the Tower of Silence where they put their dead to be eaten by vultures. They don’t chop them in pieces like the Tibetans, they leave them there to be eaten. Some habitants have complained the vultures sometimes drop pieces of their meals on them or it falls on one of the large water tank kept at temples. Anyway vultures are getting rare these days so they have a system of mirrors to hasten the job.
Me I must say I like cremation. For some reason I think it’s cleaner, though I probably could not argue objective reasons for it. I just dont’ like the idea of my beautiful body (ahem…) rotting in the ground. If I have the opportunity, I would do the same for my dog when he passes away.
There is also another reason. I personally believe the spirit survives the death of the body. Sometimes people hang around their corpse instead of moving on or up in this case. They are used to their body and care for it even when dead, a bit like people sometimes care about their car and they want it treated well. Cremation relieves them from that worry so they can move up. Of course if you don’t believe in such things it’s a moot argument.
I’ve read that in areas where there’s a sizable population using sky burial, they sometimes also have problems with the vultures not being interested in every meal offered to them.
We always have our cats cremated when they die — mostly because we live in a fairly congested area where burial would be difficult. Also because our cats generally die from being euthanized at the end stage of a terminal disease — so they’re already at the veterinarian’s office anyway. (It’s the vet who manages the cremation — I think they just freeze the bodies and ship them out every week or so to a contractor who does the actual cremating.)
We always do the “group cremation”, though. It’s cheaper and we don’t care about getting the ashes back, so… it makes sense for us.
On the theory that a quick oxidation is better than a slow one, I’m all in favor of cremation. I have, however, buried most of my pets (cremated and not)and planted trees by them as a way to remember their spirits.