3 February 2010 – The Good Funeral Guide

Pets and people together forever

It’s intriguing to see what grabs the attention of people, especially when it’s something you don’t, yourself, reckon to be at all eyebrow-raising.

Down in Cornwall, Penny Lally at Penwith Woodland Burial Place is burying pets with their owners. So remarkable is this reckoned to be that the story has whizzed round the world in the last few days. People are needing to get their heads around it – but they’re doing that and they http://www.honeytraveler.com/pharmacy/ like it. Interesting to note that the Daily Mail ran the story in Femail. Ain’t it a bloke ting too, huh?

You can also be “Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course / With rocks, and stones, and trees” together with your dumb chums at Tarn Moor.

And at a natural burial ground near you, shortly, no doubt. Good oh!

(Love that memorial at Tarn Moor. See pic in the Mail story.)

Does mass burial horrify you?

Interesting piece in USA Today on mass graves in Haiti and the importance people attach to marking the spot where their dead are laid – a physical point of connection. “We are hard-wired to want to know where our dead are, whether we believe in a superior being or not,” asserts Curtis Rostad, an Indiana funeral director. Even Neanderthals, he reminds us, buried their dead with flowers.

Curtis, we remind ourselves, has a commercial interest in burial. And when he uses that seductive metaphor ‘hard-wired’, is that how human brains really work?

We pride ourselves on having evolved somewhat since the days when Neanderthals roamed the earth. We’ve done that by suppressing many of our Neanderthal impulses. We value reason over instinct. It’s what makes us civilised.

Or does it?

Read it here. Don’t miss the link to a sprightly piece on orphan-napping.