#since plants need an emotionally healthy environment when domesticated

[messenger-of-stupidity]

They watered the plants that sat in the bay window, soaking up the sun that peeked through the clouds - as if playing peekaboo with the world below.

"Grow little ones. I want Anton to be able to come home to a place that is lively." They whispered gently, a finger stroking the verdant sprouts in one of their more fresh plants they had purchased from the nursery.

Anton would probably need the life around him if he came home.

No. When. They needed to stay hopeful. They would see their lover soon. They could be patient. They blew a kiss to the plants before moving to the other window where more plants waited to be watered. They didn't see the the dying fronds of the love fern as they went.

[bonecorn]

I love your anatomy/references posts & I love skulls and skeletons & I would love to know how you convince people to give you their animal heads to clean. Also any bone cleaning tips for suburban areas?? When I was living on a farm it was easy to leave stuff out and let the bugs take care of it but my parents said hard no to dead things bleaching on the porch

Oh this is very easy!

Find a friend or acquaintance with land and leave your stuff there. Bug cleaning and tub maceration don't need a lot of hands-on attendance so you can check in however often you like.

There's also "hot water maceration" where you simmer (dont boil!) fresh heads in hot water and remove the cooked meat by hand. Make sure you scramble the brains first and then cook away inside or with a camping stove on the porch. And "bleaching" which is done with hydrogen peroxide can be done inside since the skulls are already clean by then anyway.

I don't actually convince people to give me their pets. For livestock, I ask because most people aren't emotionally attached to their livestock.

For pets, I wait to be offered the remains. More on that under the cut.

TLDR: Know the pet owner, wait to be offered bodies rather than asking. Make sure they are always in control. Ask for livestock no problem. Don't let scavengers eat euthanized meat.

holy crap lol

I don't ask for pet bodies. The trick is to be very open and excited about what you do so that people who know you know about bones and know that you are respectful of animal remains. Then, when a beloved pet dies, they might think about you.

Open up the conversation on death before it's relevant

You can also plant the seed ahead of time during a conversation about bones while the pet in question is alive and healthy. "Sometimes I do pets if their owner is ok with it, though most want to bury. Have you ever thought about that for Baxter?" It's in SUPER poor taste to do this while an animal is dying, when you'll need to be way more tactful.

Know your friend well enough to guess their feelings on it

It SUPER depends on the person and how they view bodies and death. My ex's dog passed away and he was always queasy about corpses. I comforted him and cried with him while his beloved 15 year old dog declined and passed. I didn't ask or even mention it because I knew him enough to know that he would say no, and that asking would be painful and upsetting for him to think about. Same with my dear friend and her 20 year old cat. She had a beautiful pet graveyard with headstones and everything. You just know not to ask some people because traditionally laying bodies to rest is important to them.

Other pet owners are chill about it, ESPECIALLY if they come from a livestock background. Livestock people are used to sending their animals to be recycled into glue and wax when they die, because it's generally not feasible to bury or cremate a horse. If someone does plan to take that on, you know they are absolutely dedicated to traditional burial and won't give you anything.

Make it their choice to offer, rather than it being your request

Anyway. If you know the person, and you know they might be ok with giving up their pet's body due to how they view bodies and death, then you work on making them think about you. First, you comfort and do everything you can to help the person through their grief. If you weren't already planning on doing that, then you have no business asking for their pet. Do not comfort someone in order to get something out of them. That's disgusting. Just straight up ask them for their pet and know that they will view you as tactless and rude, but its better than manipulating them.

What I do is not manipulation, it's reminding people what you do and then letting them make their own decisions. When your friend is feeling a little better and is not crying, you can ask about logistics. I ask "What do you plan to do for burial/with the body?" and that usually makes them think about me and what I do with bodies. If they already have a meaningful spot picked out to bury or scatter/keep ashes, then that means the body is important to them and I shouldn't ask further.

At this point, they should realize what you could use the body for and think about how they feel about that. This is when my sister (who has a livestock background) offered her dog to me. We talked about how she thought of bodies, and she thought that the soul is the only thing that matters and once her dog passes there's nothing important left. I did not say anything to convince her, these were all her own thoughts.

It's very VERY important to respect and love the pet owner because they're extremely vulnerable and emotionally raw. That's why I don't straight up ask, because when you're losing a pet, you don't want to feel like someone is trying to gain something from you.

If your friend says they don't know or haven't decided what to do for the body, you can gently say "Let me know if you want me to help bury it, to take it with me, or to just be there for you." This is a close-ended statement and not a question. A question means that your friend has to come up with an answer right there and then, while an offer is actionable. This puts the power and autonomy in your friend's hands, so that when they make a decision it comes fully from their wants and needs and is not about you and what you want.

Be there for them even if you get nothing out of it

If they don't offer at this point, they're not going to. Now hold up your end of the bargain and continue to comfort and help through the grieving process. Again, if you aren't already invested in this person enough to want to soothe and comfort and be there for the human person in the equation, then you have no business asking for their pet. When a pet dies, your first concern should be to the person. If it's not, then you aren't close enough to ask for goodies.

Helping someone grieve is not payment for their pet's body. If you realize they aren't going to give you something in return for your comfort and so you abandon them, you're a terrible person using their grief to manipulate them for your own gain. Comfort is not payment. Closeness in grief is a metric by which you measure "Do I have any business to ask?"

The pet owner runs the show, not you

Throughout this process, stress that the owner can change their mind at any time. You don't want the owner to think "I hate this but I can't back out now because I promised..." Even when they animal is all wrapped up an in your vehicle and ready to go, quietly tell the owner that they can still choose what happens and if they have second thoughts, that's ok and you won't be mad.

My sister let me be there for putting her dog down and it was all about her and her love for her dog. She carried him out and laid him in my trunk and we stood in the rain and talked and hugged. She then told me she was happy that he could bring happiness to someone in life and now still in death, but that she didn't want to know anything. I agreed not to tell her or post anything about processing her dog, so for her it would be like burial. The same thing happened with my other friend's horse. She spent some time with him and then as soon as he passed she drove away and let me do what I wanted. She didn't want to hear Any of it. Again, I didn't ask or even offer, she came up with the idea of giving me the body all on her own even before I knew he was dying.

Horse people are much closer to pet owners than livestock owners, but they are used to sending their friend's bodies off to a different kind of processing (at Tallow factories, livestock remains are ground up, cut apart, cooked, and spun around to extract various substances that become soap, glue, candles, etc) so they know not to think about what happens after death. It still depends on how well you know the owner and know how they think about death, but if you offer to handle logistics like dealing with the tallow guy, they can actually save money by letting you have it.

You're actually doing livestock a favor

Livestock people are generally chill and have a much more utility/asset view of their animals. If the animal doesn't even have a name they probably don't care what happens when it's dead. In fact, most farmers will jump at the chance to give you their animal for free because calling the tallow company to haul it away costs them money. This is also why in areas with lots of livestock, you sometimes find bodies dumped in ditches or left on the side of the road, because the farmer didn't want to pay to get rid of it so they made it everyone else's problem. Even pet animals like dogs and cats are more Utility than pure companions on a farm, so you might have a better chance of getting remains from a farmer than a neighbor.

One more thing about pets and livestock.

When I find a dead deer, I flay it open and let the vultures eat it. For domestic animals, they are often put to sleep via chemical/drug.

THIS IS POISONOUS TO SCAVENGERS.

DO NOT LET SCAVENGERS EAT EUTHANIZED ANIMALS

Seriously. If you like nature, you need to protect it. Deflesh it yourself, throw all the meat/blood/offal away or bury it 6 feet down. Idk what it does to the environment so I always freeze it and then throw it away on garbage day.

Rot bacteria and beetle larvae dermestids don't mind. In fact, dermestid droppings and pupa shells can be analyzed for toxins by forensic scientists to determine cause of death. Neat! Just make sure that if you process outdoors, the remains are EXTREMELY SECURE and cannot be opened by vultures, coyotes, or wild pigs.

Remember the living, human person

I know I look very clinical by picking apart human emotions, but I respond, feel, love, and grieve just like everyone else. I didn't plan how to get any of the animals in the above stories, I just acted on instinct and these are the ones where that paid off well.

Most of the time if I go "huh. I feel that may not go over well" I can then take that feeling apart and figure out why. So hopefully explaining how my feelings work it can help you listen to your most useful and most compassionate ones.

The living person is always more important than a dead pet. Sometimes you can get the dead pet without distressing your friend, sometimes you shouldn't even try.

Respecting the dead

A final note on working with pets vs wild animals. This is someone's family member, so don't play puppet with it like you might with a skunk skin. Don't take pictures of any part of the process until they are rendered to bones. Pictures of dead pet species are even more distressing to the general public than wild animals, and sick freaks might take your photos and send them to people for kicks or attention. Better to just not have photos than for that to happen.

What processing a pet feels like

Working on a pet is always going to be different for you, the vulture, than a wild animal. Everything you see is touched by human hands. My sister's dog was... beautiful. You don't really realize how moved you're going to be by seeing the perfect amount of healthy fat covering, or beautiful muscles that speak of exercise and attention. She rescued this starving pup and turned him into the healthiest animal I have ever seen. She's a vet assistant and the care and love she put into this dog had me sitting there crying while I held his paws; with their perfectly maintained clipped and sanded nails. I'd only met the dog once for a few minutes when he was alive, but his body was a canvas and every inch was painted with layers and layers of love. It made me so, so sad that his neurological issues couldn't be helped because his body was proof of someone who would stop at nothing to cure what could be cured, and that the last months of his life were happier than he ever imagined.

On the flip side, pets whose bodies show signs of neglect and abuse are going to hit you harder than any deer could. The dog I found discarded in a garbage bag on the side of the road had rotten teeth and nails so long they curled over themselves into hoops. An overgrown and suffering deer is just the sign of nature taking its course. An overgrown and suffering dog is the sign of human cruelty, of shirked responsibility.

Most pets you get will between these two dogs. No owner is perfect. Most old dogs have lost teeth to rot, sick cats too weak to scratch properly may have overgrown nails.

Death as beauty

A pet's body usually a beautiful story full of ups and downs; of owners doing things wrong and then doing things right. A vulture or an artist can read a body like rings on a tree and feel the heart beat in their chest that tells them how strong and full of love this life had been. You need to be ready for this part. Every detail is a message from your fellow human and even though we are all animals and we decompose into the same dirt, we're meant to connect to each other here and now.

Keep your emotions open when working with remains.

Listen to what they have to teach you.