Finding the Perfect Urn for you Best Friend
The loss of a beloved companion animal can be one of the most heartbreaking events to a pet owner. Many a pet parent has been shocked by the blow felt upon losing a treasured pet, as well as the profound grief that comes with the loss. Creating a permanent remembrance of a treasured companion can help ease grief, as it honors the life of the pet as well as offers us a place that we know is dedicated to their memory alone. Pet urns come in a variety of styles and colors to suite the personality of most any pet and the temperament of the pet’s owner, making them ideal memorial tributes for our lost fur-ever friends. The variety of pet urns available is astonishing to many people, and the popularity of pet urns has grown so large in recent years that establishments selling them must sometimes tread carefully to avoid creating a controversy: many pet urns are beautiful enough to be used for human remains.
Plenty of retail outlets and manufacturers today offer large, beautiful selections of urns for pets. But what is a salesman to say, for example, if a customer is so struck by a particular pet urn that he decides to buy it for a human loved one instead.
This quandary has become so extensive in recent year that many establishments now, quite routinely, have created two separate company branches: one to sell pet urns and one to sell urns for humans. In many websites and retail stores, it is common today to see signs directing visitors to the separate departments.
But, no matter how separate the departments are in a company, it is often the case that they offer a number of the same urns. An urn depicting a kitten lounging on a ball of yarn, for example, may be intended by the artist to be used for the remains of a beloved cat. But would it not also be a perfect fit for the remains of a woman whose passion was to knit sweaters every night with the every-present “help” of her pet cat?
Of course it would. But offering such an urn for both purposes is tricky business for urn manufacturers and retailers alike.
One famous example of this problem occurred in the spring of 2008 when a U.S. soldier who was arranging the cremation of a colleague who had died in the Iraq war, paid a routine visit to the crematory the government had contracted for the job.
Not far from the front entrance to the crematory, the man noticed a sign that said the establishment performed cremations for pets as well as humans.
The establishment noted that it is careful to assure that human cremations never occur in the same part of the facility as pet cremation, but the idea of mixing the two even in the same company was too much for the soldier. Deeply offended by the prospect, he pressed the case with high level military leaders, and national media reported it with outrage. The result is that the U.S. government no longer contracts cremations to establishments that also offer pet cremations.
Presumably the military will not buy human cremation urns from those that sell pet urns as well.