I’ve had many cats over the years. If one of them dies at home, he gets buried in the back yard. But if he’s euthanized at the vet, what exactly happens to him? I never want the ashes, so that’s a moot point. I assume he’s not cremated right there, but transported to a crematorium. And I also assume it isn’t done individually, but only when a certain number of them accumulates.
Could someone explain the procedure to me?
You are given the choice of recieving the ashes or not. My vet was forewarned that my dog was on the way out. When the time came, the vet was ready, and my puppy was injected, and died in my arms in a cozy room (I was sitting on the same couch as my “Bertha”). I chose to keep her ashes, and I have them in a metal box. I looked inside once, and they’re not quite ashes, more like bone fragments.
My vet offered a single animal cremation and a less expensive group cremation, both with ashes available. I did not take either.
My vet offered single cremation, with the option to keep the ashes, or group cremation, without that option.
Similarly, my vet’s office offered a number of options. We chose group cremation with their usual method of disposal of group/unwanted ashes, which for them is scattering around the grounds of a rather large pet cemetery.
Depending on the vet, he may be rendered.
The majority of tissue processed comes from slaughterhouses, but also includes restaurant grease and butcher shop trimmings, expired meat from grocery stores, and the carcasses of euthanized and dead animals from animal shelters, zoos and veterinarians.
Wiki
Do you have anything to support (since the article doesn’t bother citing a thing) that this regularly happens to “cremated” beloved pets instead of just random abandoned animals that get dumped at the vet or people who don’t pay for the service?
Last cat we had to put down I took to the pet crematorium myself, and dealt with them directly, and saved a pretty good chuck of change. (If the kids hadn’t been involved, it would have been another backyard burial).
What’s the difference between a ‘beloved’ pet and any other pet ?
The exact proportion of cats and dogs to cows and pigs in any given rendered production batch is difficult to determine. One rendering company estimated that it “rendered somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 pounds of dogs and cats a day out of a total of 250,000 to 500,000 pounds of cattle, poultry, butcher scrap and other materials.”[180] Some states have attempted to establish precautions against this quasi-cannibalism. For example, California law requires that rendered dogs and cats be labeled as “dry rendered tankage,” a product which is rarely used in pet food.[181] However, due to the uncoordinated efforts of the pet food regulation system, such precautions are practically useless when pet food manufacturers operate on a national and often global scale. Consider that it is perfectly legal for tankage shipped outside of the state of California to be labeled as meat and bone meal.[182] Moreover, California does not inspect meat and bone meals imported from outside the state.[183]
While the rendering industry and even FDA officials defend the practice of rendering deceased pets as the most effective way to dispose of the animals and just another form of recycling, [184] it is telling that none of the celebrated “benefits” seem to include nutrition for our pets. In fact, the exact opposite appears to be true. Despite claiming that the “pets probably constitute a very small percentage of a day’s production at a renderer and an even lower percentage of the ingredients in a package of dry food,” the practice of the rendering industry (grinding the materials as soon as the vat is full) ensure that production batches vary significantly. Furthermore, although the actual percentage in each individual bag of pet food might be low – the industry ignores the impact of its promotion of feeding pets the exact same product every day, 2-3 meals a day for its entire life. How much, then, is a “small percentage” when considered cumulatively?*
*There have been reports of sodium pentobarbital, the chemical used to put animals to sleep, in products from major US pet food manufacturers, and according to one US pet website…
The problem with meat meal is that rendering plants accept a lot more than just cow and pig carcasses from slaughterhouses. They also take grease and other restaurant and supermarket waste, road kill, dead zoo animals, and hundreds of thousands of euthanized cats and dogs. It all gets cooked together and shipped off to pet food companies.**
http://www.pet-food-choice.co.uk/pet_food_ingredients.htm
*The Pet Food Institute (PFI) that manufactures the vast majority of dog food sold in the United States claims to use livestock rendering plants that do not render pets. However, in 2002 the Food and Drug Administration’s director of the Center for Veterinary Medicine (CVM), Stephen Sundloff, found low amounts of sodium pentobarbitol in dog food. The problem may be that rendering plants are only as good as their word, as there is nothing illegal in rendering pets, or selling pet-rendered product. *
WiseGeek
Personally I doubt if it matters much: what happens to the shell of a person is not nice whatever happens.
There are two main services the vets in my area use: Hinsdale Animal Cemetary. Here’s a picture of their crematorium room, and Saint Francis. Both offer similar services, and since they have cemeteries for burial and some acreage, they scatter the ashes on the grounds.
I have had several terminally ill animals euthanized by my vet. I hold them while they are injected and then I take them home for burial. Never cremated anything, what’s the point exactly?
Not every person has a yard, nor would every person with a yard be crazy about digging it up to bury a pet, I would imagine.
Many municipalities have ordinances barring animal burials.
Deaths in the middle of winter can be similarly difficult to deal with even if you have a yard. Also, even if you have a burial area, you may be reluctant to deposit your pet’s corpse in the ground somewhere that might not be a permanently-owned place.
If my parents had buried their dog in their yard back in the day all they’d have of that is a photograph… but instead they have a nice little wooden box (which apparently contains ashes… but I don’t think it’s ever been opened) that they keep in a nice honored location in the house they live in now (3 houses on since the dog died). My sister, on the other hand, did bury their cats in their yard… they took the little memorial stones when they moved.
I can see the practicalities of cremation (although I don’t care for the idea of carrying an urn around – I have my dead dogs’ ID tags though). Where I live, I know two people who buried their horse on their property when it died – in fact, where it died, as they are difficult to move, once dead. But that is the country; nobody found it unusual.
My father was a small animal vet for almost forty years, and I worked for him as a kennel boy. We had a dead animal disposal service that came by every week and picked up the bodies and made them into fertilizer.
My father did not say that the animals would be cremated. There was no bait and switch involved. He included “disposal of the remains” as part of the euthanasia fees. If the owner wanted, he or she could certainly take the body to a crematorium. But if the client said “yes I would like you to dispose of the body” that’s what happened.
The service that collected the bodies also picked up road kill under contract with the county. If you ever read the James Herriot books, it was the Jeff Mallock character. The guy who ran the service was somewhat similar - mildly eccentric, and quite well-off.
Regards,
Shodan
I used to work at an NHS hospital that had a commercial incinerator attached that supplied steam to the hospital as a by-product.
They burned clinical waste and a lot of other stuff like confiscated porn and drugs. They also incinerated dead animals from Veterinary surgeries - I once saw them tip a dead tiger into the pit. The ashes were sent to landfill.
When my cat died in 2009 at the age of 18, the veterinarian offered me several choices. Cremation had two options: a group cremation for $75, or individual for $95, and there was no extra charge for getting the ashes back. I chose the individual cremation, and picked the ashes up about a week later.
I have never opened the box and still have them. :o I guess my own cremains will be scattered along with hers and any other pets that die in the meantime.
And yes, cremains aren’t ashes like we would think of them (wood ashes and the like) but are mostly bone particles and dust.
Personally, I prefer this approach but, hey, to each his own.
