I was not prepared for my fourteen year old Vizsla to die, even though I saw it coming. I was so consumed by anticipatory
grief that I didn't plan ahead of time what would happen to his body. I thought about it in theory, of course: we would bury him up in the mountains near our cabin. But I neglected some important details, like what would happen if Ody died in the middle of winter when mountain burial was not an option. So when the in-home euthanasia vet offered to take Ody's body and arrange for cremation, I agreed. After the euthanasia procedure and our tearful goodbyes, my husband wrapped Ody's body in a purple blanket and carried him out to the vet's car. A week later, Ody's remains were delivered to a local veterinary office, packed in a small wooded urn.
I felt a wave of regret when I picked up Ody's ashes. I felt like I had failed him by not seeing him through to the very end. What had happened to him from the time the vet drove off to the moment I went to retrieve his remains? Was his body handled lovingly or treated like a piece of trash? I decided I needed to see.
Along with Ody's remains came an envelope containing a "Certificate of Cremation," signed by Pennylane Pet Cremation Services. I found the Pennylane website and phone number, and finally got up the nerve to call. The man who answered the phone was the owner himself, Chuck Myers. He was as nice as could be and told me to come out anytime and he would show me around. I set an appointment for the next day.
The crematorium is on his home property in Mead, on the flat farm country that fans out from the base of the Colorado Rockies. As I stepped out of my car, Chuck walked over and shook my hand in warm greeting. He explained how his main business was running a human mortuary and funeral home, but he used to get so many calls from pet owners that he decided to start a pet crematory business on the side.
He took me straight into a big red barn, which had been retrofitted into a crematory. The oven was making a low hum and the air had an acrid sting to it which made me a bit queasy. Chuck explained how the oven works; how there is a U-shaped space under the platform where the body is and there are baffles down there breaking up the smoke, and that 1680 degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature that the EPA requires them to use, to minimize pollution.
The oven is the exact same they use for cremating people, only designed for smaller bodies. It can hold up to 750 pounds, so group cremations might be made up of seven to ten animals, depending on their size. He said they get all kinds of critters in addition to cats and dogs: they've had goats, rats, snakes, birds. They even had a request for cremation of an alpaca once, but had to turn it down. The oven can't handle anything that big without cutting it up first, and they didn't want to do that kind of work. An average burning takes between one to three hours (one hour for a dog like Ody; three maybe for a group cremation). He said some families will come and just sit by the oven for the whole time their animal is in there. I feel a stab of guilt when he says this. I should have been with Ody for this final part of his journey.
Next he showed me the apparatus called "the processor." I already knew that cremains are not ashes from the body, but are really just crushed up bones, but I'm still a bit unsettled by the idea of Ody being blenderized. Chuck said that the bones are very recognizable when they come out of the oven; you can tell that there is a skull, the long leg bones, the shorter leg bones. The bones are fed into an industrial size metal blender and crushed into a powder. He showed me a bag of remains that was about to be closed and put in an urn. Most of the powder was very fine, like ash you would clean out of your fireplace, but there were some slightly larger pieces, about the size of small pebbles, and these were recognizable as little pieces of bone. I tried to maintain a detached curiosity.
Along the back of the work table were stacks of urns made of very light wood. I recognize Ody's urn, which is midsize-about 6 inches high by 4 wide. The teeny ones, Chuck said, would be for cats and maybe dachshunds. The big ones were for dogs 70 pounds and upwards. The urns are only for the ashes of animals cremated privately. The remains from the group cremations—the ashes that owners do not want returned—are spread on the Myers' property. "They never go in the trash," he assured me. They go out in the ample fields around the farm or in his wife's flower garden.
The remains are poured into a plastic bag and tightly closed with a zip-tie, so they won't spill out when you open the top of the urn, or if you happen to drop it. Also in the urn with the remains is a small round piece of metal—an ID tag—that was burned along with each animal. This serves as a way to make sure that the crematory doesn't lose track of which remains belong to which animal.
Chuck also showed me the freezer where they store bodies until they are ready to cremate. He reluctantly admitted that the animals were "bagged" (quite literally, in plastic bags), "but only because we have to. We never treat a body like trash." Incidentally, the use of trash bags is one of the things that advocates of better animal aftercare want to change. Instead of black Hefty bags, they say, we should use real body bags, which are becoming more readily available for pets.
I asked Chuck how people felt toward their pets' bodies, as compared to human bodies, since he has daily experience with both. His impression: people are concerned about their pets, and very attentive and loving. He said he comes across a surprising number of people at his mortuary who will say things such as, "Can't you just hold on to mom's body until I'm back from vacation?" or who seem put out by the death of a family member. They just want the whole thing over and done with and out of their hair. Not so with pets. People are really concerned that the process is done right and that their animals are treated well, even after death.
