ABSTRACT
After death, the body. Anyone who has a pet die faces this question: what now? In the contemporary US, the geographic focus of this chapter, human death sets into motion a series of post-mortem events. Depending upon personal and familial preference, and community norms and legal or religious practices, human bodies may be embalmed or not, buried in a cemetery, or burned, the resulting “ashes” placed in a columbarium, kept at home, or scattered to the wind. There is no question of simply burying the body in the backyard, or tossing it out in the trash, both illegal modes of disposal for human bodies, but not uncommon, even if not strictly legal, options when the body is that of a non-human animal. In this chapter, I investigate one key choice for post-mortem disposition of non-human animal remains—the actual process of pet cremation, whether by flame or water, based on industry reports, interviews with workers, observations of animal cremations, and accounts of the dispersal and disposal of the material that remains after cremation, called “cremains.” I chart the similarities and differences in the post-cremation life of the cremains when the deceased is human or animal. Cremation reduces the animal from subject, to body-object, to cremains—an odourless, colourless last trace—the ultimately tidy long-lasting remainder and reminder of the dead. By comparing the symbolic and material practices of cremation for human and non-human beings I reveal how the optional dimensions of caring for animal remains enables the enactment of special attachments to the non-human animal dead.
