Pet Cremations Faked

My late Charlie’s hair memento. It is best to do this I feel.
It is alleged that operators of a pet crematorium in the UK faked cremations. They sent the ashes of other animals to the owners and simultaneously dumping their dogs and cats in a freezer. We don’t know what happened to the cats and dogs in the freezer but I’d bet my bottom dollar that they were picked up by a man in a van acting as a dealer, selling the carcasses on to a pet food manufacturer or something equally sordid.
One cat owning woman was given the ashes of a horse.
The pet crematorium under investigation by the local authorities for faked cremations is The Swan Pit Crematorium in Gnossal, Staffordshire. To international visitors to PoC, this is in the north of England.
The owner of the crematorium, Allan McMasters has yet to make a comment about the allegations.
Are you surprised? I’m not. I would be very confident in saying that what has allegedly happened here, happens in other pet crematoriums across the country and probably in other countries too.
Historically, when I have requested an individual cat cremation I have attended in person supervised it to ensure that the ashes are those of my cat.
However disreputable the alleged behaviour is, it is ironic that the ashes of pets do not have any trace of the pet. Ashes are ashes. They contain no DNA or any marker which distinguishes one set of ashes from another, as I understand it.
Therefore to have a cat individually cremated, as I have done in the past, is an emotional exercise. It is not logical or scientific. I don’t have my long passed cats in my living room in an urn. I just have a substance made up of mainly metal oxides. Fortunately, I also have some of Charlie’s whiskers (taken by the vet) and some of his hair that I had groomed off him over a long period.
The top five substances in pet ashes are¹:
- Phosphate 47.5%
- Calcium 25.3%
- Sulfate (Sulphate) 11.00%
- Potassium 3.69%
- Sodium 1.12%
So there you are. It is all rather strange and unreal because what the fake cremations are intended to do it not give the ashes of a particular pet to their owner but the ashes of an individual cat, let’s say, are no different from the ashes of another individual cat. At a scientific level there is no fraud.
Source (1): Gayle E. O’Neill, PhD. TEI Analytical, Inc. Niles, Illinois.