So there is no reason for this ruling, except a monumental amount of cheap pettiness.

I can hear the sound of teeth grinding, coming from my conservative and libertarian acquaintances who bitch about our entitlement culture. And yet it’s such an obvious matter of gatekeepers blocking harmless actions because of control and money.

The cemetery isn’t licensed for holding human remains. Given that we’re all made of star stuff, given the number of humans and animals that have lived and died and the migration of parts of their remains everywhere, there are probably very few places on the Earth or a few blocks down into it that are free of human remains and animal remains. This cemetery just wants fewer parts per million, I suppose.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqfqqciQLPQ

For one thing, ashes being ashes, they can and will be spread anywhere the heirs damn well please. It’s not like the Funeral Cops will be surveilling the pet cemeteries. As awjtawjt notes, this isn’t about the existence of a particle of ash, it’s about the State of New York implicitly sanctioning someone who wants to say, HERE IS THE RESTING PLACE FOR ALL ETERNITY OF A REAL HUMAN BEING.

This is something that societies tend to give themselves permission to care about. We can rail and rage about how silly it is, and how the Klingon view of the body after death is the more enlightened one (etc.), but that doesn’t change the reality that yeah, on the whole we and every other population of humans since before history have been happier knowing Where The Bodies Are Buried. Or, more accurately, what is and isn’t a gravesite. If we didn’t care, we wouldn’t halt the bulldozers every time an Indian mound or slave graveyard was found.

Besides which, if you let human remains into pet cemeteries, it’s only a matter of time before someone accidentally buries grandpa in the pet sematary, and that’s how you get zombie outbreaks.

Finally! I thought I was going to have to make that reference myself. :-)

I emailed the ship and they contacted the environmental officer, and well, it was cremains. It was seriously awkward calling the passenger back to tell her she’d inhaled dead guy.

I don’t care about animal remains. I also don’t care about human remains, aside from the very recently dead (their bodies treatment, naturally, is going to be very important to their loved ones while they still resemble their living selves… all the more reason to cremate, scatter, and forget that physical body).

However, many, many people care much more than I do about human remains and go on doing so for a very long time, with many people venerating the resting spots of people they didn’t meet. People do not often go on caring about animal remains, nor are many people like to venerate the resting spot of an animal they never met from 200 years ago. Animals themselves do much better than us in this regard, with animals very seldom growing attached to where their ancestors remains are buried.

I think it is a proper reflection of general cultural values, then, that pet cemeteries be treated as much more mutable than human cemeteries and I see why you’d want to keep them separate. If in 200 years, a demand for land use (to, you know, house or feed living people – or maybe to reclaim the land for living plants and animals) means they want to build over this pet cemetery, it would suck to have to hear from some superstitious descendent of this lady.

This isn’t about bureaucracy and licensing, it’s about preventing problems for future generations.

(LOL)

What if someone wanted to renounce their species identity? Like changing one’s gender expression or renouncing one’s citizenship?

It was my first Stephen King book, I was 12. I prefer his short stories, more punch.

As for the future zombies, there shouldn’t be too serious a problem as long as they only accept cremains. And it’s not 200 years from now that matters so much as the 10 years right after the death of the person with the uppity relative.

The fact that this just became a problem might mean that the current property owner is looking to sell, and doesn’t want encumberances.

I want to trick people into fighting over my carbon!

oh yeah…i forgot FINES…we need more fines too.

and PRISON time…almost forgot that.