a bluebackground with an illustrated coffin, an urn, a dog statue and a framed photo of a cat

Image: Archi Banal

SocietyAugust 9, 2023

I deal with your dead pets – this is what I do

Guest Post

Image: Archi Banal

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.

All week long The Spinoff will be opening up about the end. Click here to read more of our Death Week content.

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

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Gabi Lardies
— Staff writer

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Design: Tina Tiller

PoliticsAugust 8, 2023

Thank you for doing the shopping, Sam Uffindell

Tara Ward

Staff writer

Design: Tina Tiller

The MP for Tauranga recently revealed that he sometimes does the supermarket shopping to ‘give his wife a break’. Fellow grocery shopper Tara Ward thanks him for his service.

Sam Uffindell is a man who loves supermarkets. He knows where they are, and sometimes, he even goes inside them. That’s why in June this year, the National MP for Tauranga was pleased to speak in parliament in support of the Grocery Industry Competition Bill, a piece of legislation that aims to make the supermarket industry more competitive. Usually, talking about groceries in public does not open a portal to your soul, but for Uffindell – who has already had a highly controversial political career – this was his moment to shine.

At the start of his eight-minute speech, Uffindell reminisced about how he once lived in Sydney, a city bursting with supermarkets and affordable cheese. “Down the road, there was a Woollies, and it had a fantastic cheese room,” he recalled wistfully, before comparing it to New Zealand, a bad cheese dream. “I looked at a block of cheese the other day,” Uffindell said. “I was stupid enough to pick up the Tasty from Mainland, the one kilo block – it’s a great cheese, yes, it is – but the price of $20 really smacked me.”

What smacked me was what followed from Uffindell: an unexpected story of bravery and selflessness that begs further analysis. What came next were the musings of a politician who occasionally takes an intrepid voyage into an alarming world filled with everyday people, commonly known as “doing the shopping”.

“You walk into a New Zealand supermarket and you get a bit of a shock, which is what I try and do at least once a month,” Uffindell began, opening up to a near-empty house of representatives. Uffindell feels the fear and goes grocery shopping anyway, at least 12 times a year.

“I get out there and take the shopping list off my wife and go out there and fill up the trolley,” he confessed, as both trolleys and wives around the nation squeaked their wheels in admiration.

And why not? Carrying those shopping lists can get heavy for our lady arms, given that women today do twice as much domestic labour and childcare as their male partners and the division of labour remains gendered in most New Zealand households. Raise your cheese fingers in salute to Uffindell, especially when his wife has already checked the cupboards and done the meal planning and prepared a comprehensive inventory just for him.

As if preparing to receive a vision from his Sydney cheese room, Uffindell then put his hands on his desk and leaned forward. It was like he was pushing his beloved trolley, and was about to take a metaphorical stroll down the aisle of equality, past the bulk bins of authenticity and straight to relatability check out. Presumably feeling sharper than a set of New World Smeg steak knives, Uffindell continued.

“Not only is it an excellent way to get a bit of publicity with a National Party jacket on my back, looking like the everyday man…” he said, before steeling himself for the final push, “…it gives my wife a break, and I get to understand what the current prices are.”

Ladies, gentlemen and little baby cheeses, it seems likely that whenever Sam Uffindell walks into a supermarket, ‘Hero’ by Mariah Carey automatically comes over the loudspeaker. “Giving your wife a break” may well be the fifth point in Uffindell’s delightful anecdote (it’s always good to know where women sit on a cheesemonger’s power ranking), but what will us wives do with all that free time we get on the fourth Sunday of each month between 5-5.30pm? We made you a medal out of cheese, Mr Uffindell, and it only smells a little bit.

After all, if there’s one thing people love to see when they’re worrying about whether they can afford fresh fruit and vegetables, it’s an MP using the cost of living crisis for their own political gain. What luck that once every 30 days (at least), Uffindell chooses to step inside a supermarket and pretend he’s just like the rest of us.

The super shopper circled his trolley back to the fascinating world of Sydney supermarkets (“you had your Coles, you had your Woollies, you had your Aldis,”), but these ears could hear no more. Once the applause for Uffindell’s service to womankind dies away, you too might find yourself bewildered by his words. But calm down, ladies. Sometimes Sam Uffindell goes to the supermarket, and sometimes, doing the bare minimum deserves an extra cheesy pat on the back.