You Don’t Have to Cremate Your Cat
“Aquamation” is becoming more common for animals as a greener alternative to cremation.
When a pet is dying, many people reach out to their veterinarian one last time. By default, many vets double as undertakers, passing on a pet’s body to a regional crematorium that accepts animal remains. The owner pays the vet a fee for the arrangements, and the crematorium may return the remains in a small urn, an unassuming memorial to a lost companion.
Pet cremation has been common in the United States for decades now: Some of the first dedicated facilities popped up in the 1970s and ’80s as the practice slowly gained purchase among humans. Since then, cremation has become so much the default for pets and humans alike that many owners aren’t aware they have other options, Donna Shugart-Bethune, the executive director of the International Association of Pet Cemeteries and Crematories, told me. But animals remain on the leading edge of death care. Techniques first used to handle the remains of livestock and lab animals have become more common for well-loved pets: One such tactic, called alkaline hydrolysis, involves rapidly decomposing a body in a stream of water.
So-called “aquamation” has the advantage of offering pet owners a futuristic, planet-friendly alternative to cremation and burial. Although sustainability is hardly the first thing anyone thinks of when a beloved dog or cat dies, these decisions quickly add up. No one burial or cremation extracts such a terrible toll on the environment, but in the aggregate, the remains of pets and humans have a significant impact.
One major cost of cremation is the carbon dioxide these flaming chambers release. Burial may look better: If pets are interred in a pine box or some other natural container, the animal’s body will decompose rapidly, says Ed Martin, the vice president of Hartsdale Pet Cemetery. But metal or plastic containers will sit in the soil for decades. Among the more taxing impacts of burial is when land is permanently set aside for graves (rather than, say, for forests or prairies), and those graves are artfully maintained using significant amounts of water, pesticides, and more. Of course, burying a fish in a backyard doesn’t have a global land-use impact, but many Americans don’t have their own land for a burial or live someplace where backyard burials are impossible.
Aquamation, by contrast, is compact and efficient, and generates no direct emissions of its own (unlike, say, a fire), making it one of the greenest means of final disposition.
The process is fairly simple. Over a 20-hour cycle, alkalized water decomposes all of the body’s proteins and fats. The water drains into the local wastewater system. When the timer dings, all that is left of the pet are the bones, which an operator removes and pulverizes as one would in a typical flame cremation. Staff may also return those remains to the owner. By some estimates, aquamation has about one-tenth of the environmental impact of flame cremation or, if operators purchase their electricity from renewable sources, even less.
At Resting Waters, a boutique pet funeral home in West Seattle, sisters Joslin Roth and Darci Bernard aquamate a few thousand animals each year. They own and operate two machines, both manufactured by Bio-Response Solutions, that have capacities of 100 pounds and 400 pounds, respectively. That allows the company to aquamate anywhere from one to 28 small animals—arranged in their own individual Tetris-like pod—at a time. Services range from $90 for the smallest critters to $550 for bigger animals, and end up costing more than typical flame cremation. Today, there are about 400 animal-aquamation machines in the world, says Samantha Sieber, the vice president of Bio-Response Solutions, including about 20 super-size systems for horses. Many regions in the U.S. have dedicated, easily located pet-aquamation companies with competitive prices. In the future, vets might offer the service directly. “It’s a great model for veterinarians to be able to offer and cut out the middleman,” Roth told me.
No matter what path pet owners choose, memorialization is possible. At Hartsdale Pet Cemetery, owners typically choose large stone headstones, similar in design to those in human cemeteries but more expressive: Engraved silhouettes, enameled photos of pets in life, engraved nicknames, and religious symbols abound. “When you walk around here, there’s a lot of whimsy,” Martin, the vice president of the cemetery, told me. The same is true of pet urns, which can be customized in innumerable ways, including with paw prints or nose prints.
But there are more sustainable and less expensive ways of honoring a beloved pet too: Resting Waters will clean and prepare pets for viewing before they are placed in the aquamation chamber. People also ask for fur or whisker clippings, and sometimes for whole bones (instead of crushed remains). In-person or Zoom funerals, attended by close friends and family, can help owners grieve. And funeral offerings are always changing as the industry responds to the needs of consumers. Whereas human death care can feel locked in by tradition, Roth observed that “there’s something about our pets that gives us agency.”
Today, alkaline hydrolysis is an option for animals nationwide and is legal for humans in 28 states (although it’s not always available). It’s only the most recent evidence that the death of our animals helps us experiment with new ways to channel our grief and imagine our own death.
This story is part of the Atlantic Planet series supported by HHMI’s Science and Educational Media Group.