As an animal cremator with Pets @ Rest in Auckland, Mary Dormer devotes her days to giving our furry (and finned, and feathered) friends a dignified send-off.

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Coming from a farming background, I’m not shy of operating heavy machinery, but the most alarming thing for me when I first started – and I still get a bit of a rush –  is the fire. You’re dealing with close to a thousand degrees of heat and you always worry about what would happen if something went wrong. You’ve got to remember the machines are built for keeping that combustion happening in the chamber. So if the door doesn’t shut – and that has happened – you just have to be like OK, yes, things are cremating right in front of my eyes, but it ain’t gonna come out and burn the building down. 

We run three different types of cremation at Pets @ Rest. There’s communal cremation, for people who want their pet cremated but don’t want the ashes back. The animals are not mapped in the chamber, you can’t identify each individual pet and the ashes are disposed of. Then there’s separate cremation, where each pet is placed in the cremation chamber in their own individual area. We could do, say, three large dogs and a row of cats (or exotics) at the same time. At the end of a cycle when we open the door, each skeleton is extracted using a rake and it falls down a chute, and that’s what we take out and cremulate. A lot of people think that when you cremate you’re getting the ash straight away but you’re not, you’re left with a chalk-like skeleton. We cool down the bones and we cremulate them – grind them up in a machine similar to an industrial coffee grinder, and that’s what makes the ash. 

The third type of cremation we do is private cremation, where you book out the whole crematorium for your one pet. We’ve got a viewing room – we call it our mourning room – where there are couches, a table and candles. Each cremation cycle takes about two-and-a-half to three hours, depending on the size of the animal, and you can have that room for the whole time and watch what we do. A lot of people sing hymns or do their own kind of service. It is more expensive – upwards of a thousand dollars, compared to under a hundred for communal cremation and for $300 upwards for separate cremation. A motivation for people who are apprehensive about getting 100% of their pet’s remains returned is to pay for the private cremation – it gives them peace of mind.

We have an open-door policy at Pets @ Rest, so we tell people to come in and have a look at how it works, but if they’re still not comfortable with it, they can get the private cremation and witness it all, and get the ashes back straight away. We do at least a couple of those a month. 

My largest animal to date would have to be a Sumatran tiger. We work with Auckland Zoo, which is pretty cool, we’ve had seals and stuff come through as well. We also get very tiny animals – bearded dragons, budgies, fish. We do get a few prank calls. Someone was constantly asking if we’d cremate their monarch butterfly. And it’s like, “well, there is no skeletal structure…” But you’ve got to just go with it.

You have to treat every inquiry as a legitimate request. When people ring up about fish you’ve got to say look, there’s not going to be a lot there, but if you’re wanting to pay for a space you can pay for it. But it gets a bit awkward when there’s really not much left. We’ll get birds, rabbits, guinea pigs every other day; we’ll get a fish maybe every month or two. 

When I applied for this job I was waiting on going into the air force.  I’d moved back home to the farm and was going through my savings and I thought  “I need a job”. I remember looking through Seek and there was this position at an animal crematorium. My first reaction was “I’m used to death on the farm, I can deal with all that.” That was 14 years ago. Eventually the air force called and said “we’re ready for you”, but I weighed it up and the pay wasn’t that good going into the air force, so I stayed.

I remember I said to my dad I’m going to apply for this crematorium job and he replied “You’re bonkers! Dig a hole – bury it!” But pet cremation has definitely become more popular, because there’s a lot more apartment living and people don’t have land to bury their pets on. We also get a lot of inquiries about exhuming bodies now because people are selling the family home. We don’t exhume the remains ourselves but we very much welcome it if you can do it – dig them up, bring them in, and we’ll cremate the bones. That’s super popular.

Mostly we’re dealing with vet clinics – it makes the process a little less stressful for the owners. Not everyone wants to go to a crematorium, so the vet clinics take the payment and fill in the documents, we collect the pets from the clinics and return the remains in the selected urn to them. We also do house calls. You’re sometimes going into situations where you have to hold yourself together – you have to be a bit strong for the family because they’re grieving. You have to be very respectful about the whole process.

One of my first home collections was a dog that had passed away in a kennel so I had to figure that out. You want to do it in a tasteful manner, not just grabbing a dog by its back leg and slinging it into your boot. We always take a stretcher. Sometimes you just have to ask for help – like hey, I can lift a decent weight but I will maybe need some help. 

You don’t want to be an emotional mess because it’s their grief, not yours. I once had a lady whose golden retriever had just passed away, and her husband had recently passed away too. I was taking her buddy. And I just remember as I was leaving, driving down this driveway and I could see her in my rearview mirror waving at her dog and I just burst into tears. It was heartbreaking. She was trusting me to take her mate away. It’s almost like a nice feeling, but it’s a horrible feeling. But you go in and do your work and go on to the next one. 

I like it because every day’s different, and it’s social. I’ve met a lot of amazing people – all my good friends are vet nurses and vets. It fits well into my lifestyle, I think it complements what I do on the farm. I’m not really a sit-down-officey sort of person. And at the end of the day I think I really like helping people. I’ve hopefully broken down some barriers of what people think about crematoriums. 

As told to Alice Neville