A Call for Scholarship – Pet-Thanatology
From the President’s Desk
Popular conceptions of pets reveal animals traversing the borders of a coddled humanity, wild animality and property; these hybrid beings exist in the juxtaposed and changing realms of accepted cultural norms, idiosyncratic personal/familial relationships, and their own private awareness of self and personal experience (i.e., sentience).
Grief, another hybrid experience, may bring mourners to the very boundaries of life, time and the complex we call memory, and traverses borders between life and death, perceptions of natural and supernatural, and natural phenomena and cultural interpretation.
Boundary experiences – such as the ‘pet’ relationship and encounters with grief – can often stir up powerful psychological and sociocultural conflicts. Over the past 30 years much media attention and scholarship has seriously examined these experiences and the controversies and conflicts they arouse. Yet in the U.S., a general uneasiness regarding death and the disposition of the body still exists; and while we’ve generally become more accepting of familial relationships between humans and other animals, stigma regarding the emotional bonds between human adults and their animal companions continues to linger.
When these two hybrid experiences collide at the (impending) death of a beloved pet, the social unease may be compounded. As with any relationship, death is not always accompanied by an intense grief. But when one does grieve at the passing of a pet, in the absence of adequately developed social supports, it may be a horribly difficult, isolated and potentially traumatizing experience. Additionally, those sensitive to social stigma and cynicism may feel so overwhelmed and confused that they are unable to make effective decisions; some may even leave final arrangements to their vet, and grieve in silence or not at all.
Clearly, pet cemeteries can provide an extraordinarily comforting solution for those preferring a burial over cremation. Pet cemeteries do not merely mimic human cemeteries, they present a range of unique and varied histories, regulations, geographies, sensitivities, (mis)representations and business models. Moreover, after a mourner overcomes cultural hurdles to choose a pet cemetery, it may be too difficult to then address further complications, such as the lack of natural burial options or the lack of permanency.
For all these reasons, funerary arrangements available to people grieving for a beloved companion animal reflect broader attitudes and beliefs about pet relationships, death, grieving and connections to nature. Pet cemeteries are rich and rather neglected sites for research; their study would lead to a fuller cultural understanding of human relationships with those of other species.
I recently began researching state cemetery laws and am looking to network with others interested in research questions around pets, cemeteries and burial. It is the goal of the Green Pet-Burial Society to encourage a network of scholars interested in this field and to facilitate such research in the years to come.
Warm regards,
Eric Greene
March 12, 2010
photo credit: detail of ‘dog’, © Nick Palasin, on flickr.com
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