Reasons to Memorialize your Pet

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Just a few years ago, as one internet blogger has written, finding memorial products for your pet was very difficult in most parts of the United States. But, today, a quick search of the internet will yield at least dozens of companies offering pet urns, pet headstones, pet cremation jewelry, and any number of other pet memorial items. The vast majority of these companies make most of their memorial products sales via the Internet because, well, the demand for pet memorials has not quite reached a level to justify brick-n-mortar stores in most cities. But one imagines that’s coming as memorializing a pet becomes a bigger and bigger part of modern society. Stories abound that should do nothing but encourage that phenomena by giving pet lovers plenty of reasons to properly memorialize the beloved animals in their lives. Here is a summary of the reasons:

As many a commentator on the Internet has noted (often with disappointment), it is common today for families who have lost a pet to simply pay a “disposal fee” to a municipality or veterinarian office and, well, be done with it. Often, a pet owner will take a sick animal to a veterinarian, learn in a phone call that the pet’s condition is terminal, order an euthanasia, mail a payment for the disposal fee and then simply never see his or her beloved friend again. This is scenario has become routine in the United States today, but it can have some sad emotional consequences for the pet owner and his or her family who are never afforded a proper opportunity to grieve. Many pet owners have stumbled upon pet cremation jewelry, pet grave markers and other such products many years after the death of a pet and bemoaned the fact that they did not adequately memorialize their cherished pet.

That is just one reason why even experts in psychology today have begun to seriously recommend that pet owners establish some form of memorial for their lost pet. Grieving over a beloved pet is perfectly natural and should never be minimized or dismissed, the experts say.

But, for those who remained unconvinced of the benefits of building a memorial, stories of what at least sometimes happens to the bodies of pets who are not properly may be chilling:

Investigative reporters across North America have made a number of attempts to find out just exactly how dead pets are disposed of, and some of their results are startling: some reports say that many bodies of pets end up in rendering plants where they are mechanically stripped of their fur and flesh (sometimes while still wearing their collars and other such items), and each part ground up and churned into a variety of other products, ranging from fertilizer to, yes, pet food. While these reports are usually denied by leaders of the rendering industry (which does recycle farm animals), they are so numerous that they seem plausible at least in some cases.

Even if the bodies are not sent to a rendering plant, however, they are typically unceremoniously cremated – often in ovens with many animals at once – and the ashes are informally disposed of in a simple dumpster or even open air outside the crematory.

So today’s experts – and just those who speak from experience of having a lost a pet – highly recommend that, when you have lost a pet, the best thing to do for your families emotional health is to invest a few dollars in some sort of memorial and give your cherished friend a memorial befitting the treasured memories.

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