Equally relevant, how much of the ashes are filler? Incinerated human remains do not take up a whole lot of space, and some places will fill it out with wood ash.
this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2024
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I think it depends entirely on the integrity of the cremator. I have a good friend who does pet cremations. He cremated one of my pets and told me that he had a hell of a hard time getting the bag of ashes into the box I gave him. I laughed and asked him why he didn't just pour some out so the bag would fit more easily. Who would know? Who would care if there were a few grams missing? Especially if the reason was that the client-provided box was too small. But he was genuinely shocked and said he would never do that.
That's surprising to hear, because I heard that pet cremation services generally cremate multiple pets at once and give you some random ashes. That's why we buried our dogs instead of having them cremated.
This is how it was done where I worked. If you asked for ashes, we just went and scooped out an appropriate amount of ash.
Sometimes the animal was still just sitting in the burn pile (we only burned on certain days). Also the 'cremation' furnace was just a modified 50gal drum. So you had to cut up any of the larger dogs. Small animals (kittens or anything smaller than a regular sized cat) we just threw in the dumpster.
As you can imagine, that job sucked.
At my local pet crematory, I was able to pick which service I preferred. Having your pet cremated by itself is much more expensive so they give the option to have them cremated together with other animals to save money (or actually be able to afford it)
You can tell by the taste
I’m going to attempt to answer your question for real. I have never had to cremate a person, but I have cremated pets before. One time I think I may have gotten a symbolic collection of ashes, and the other time I was pretty sure I got my exact cat. The difference was visible in their system.
The first time I did not ask many questions, and I ended up with a bag of ashes that had a sticky note with my name on it. It would have been very easy for the wrong bag to be placed with my name, or for the notes to fall off and get mixed up. It was clear that accuracy was secondary to creating a chance for closure. They were very nice and professional, it was just clear that they had not felt it necessary to have an iron clad ash delivery system.
The second time I needed to cremate a pet, I asked a lot more questions, and all were answered without any surprise. Considering the type of business it is, it is always ok to ask a lot of questions about the process.
They put a tracking barcode on my deceased kitty as well as on the body bag he was placed in. When I picked up the ashes days later, the same barcodes were on the tightly sealed bag as well as on the carrying bag, plus they had his collar and a pawprint memorial in the bag too. They could have given me random ashes still, but the care that they clearly put into their system gave me a strong feeling that they had held up their end of the bargain.
The sad truth is that there is probably no way to be 100% sure, and it is likely normal for some ashes to get left behind while others may be unintentionally scooped in. The best you can do is make sure that you ask all the questions you need to (don’t let anxiety shut you up), and try to pick a place that will treat your loved one with dignity.
The place I sent my parrot to when he passed puts a numbered metal tag on each pet before they go in and the tag stays with the ashes. They also did a foot impression and sent the ashes back in a simple but lovely clay urn. It was a little weird seeing the ashes in a ziplock inside the urn but I totally get it since they were a small family business.
This happens with people too. If you don’t get an urn they’re in a bag inside a box.
I was a funeral director in Ontario, Canada. The law here is that the contract you sign with the crematorium will have a cremation number which will be stamped into a metal disk and that disk will be placed with the remains. After cremation, the disk will be in the cremated remains. People who receive the cremated remains can check that the number on the disk matches the number on the contract they signed.
This system stops honest mistakes but nothing stops people from intentionally swapping disks. Say a funeral home worker is filling urns with a batch of cremated remains they recieved from the crematorium. They accidentally put remains A into the urn for family B and remains B into the urn for family A. The worker should swap the remains...but swaping the disks is easier. Most people I've worked with would do the right thing but the system still relies on people being honest.
You get a stone with a number carved in it beforehand. You put the stone with the deceased body. Afterwards that stone is in the urn.
Edit: bonus fact, if the person was heavy, their ashes will be too.
How's that going to help when they burn multiple corpses at the same time?
it lets you know they lied about what ashes you got
Because nobody could ever put the stone with some random ashes?
Unless the cremator knows about this stone, that wouldn't happen
Of course they know about it.
How? Just because you get the right token back doesn't mean you got ashes from the body you asked them to cremate. They could be from any body in the oven with them.
Well I don't think they do cremations in groups like that. If they do then yeah there is no way to know who's ashes, but I would also say theres no way to prove they aren't and really in the end its all just carbon.
It doesn't bother me at all. I don't even really need a bag of ashes back. The memories are important.
I'm set up for my body to got the University because that's the cheapest way to dispose of a body. They tell you that your family can get ashes back but they all get mixed together.
Same here, my body goes to the local ned school. They'll return to he ashes if you want, but I don't care. I cleared it with my sister before signing the forms because she does care about cremains etc. Apparently the university has a memorial garden where they spread the ashes.
They don't do that in my country.
Radiate the body before sending it to the crematory. That way you can test radiation levels when you get your urn back.
Isotopic tagging. Nice.
Cremation doesn't burn everything to ash. Pieces of bone are left intact and must be mechanically pulverized to make the remains a powder.
When my dad's dog was cremated many years ago, the remains they gave us were partially ash, but the larger pieces hadn't been pulverized. It still had many intact pieces of bone. We could see evidence of some injuries and degenerative disease the dog had experienced in his hip and spine.
I'm not sure how many people would be down for rooting through their pet's remains for proof that it is the right animal.
I think the machine in question is called a Crembobulator.
Why are you keeping dead bodies in your house, ashes or not.
"These other guys did it,"
Honestly...my pet Oreo died while I was away and my mom got him cremated and I just brought it up the other night asking how can we tell if it is his ashes. No dead bodies in the apartment I am at
Sorry for your loss mate.
You have to cremate them yourself. Sorry.
If possible, wait until after they die
But then Uncle Gary's ashes get mixed up on the shovel with those from the building he was in.
Well, you likely can't, since that would require witnessing the entire process. You aren't likely going to be allowed to do that. Afaik, no state in the US allows anyone other than the people running the crematorium to be present, and that have to have various certifications to do the job.
Which is where you can reach as close to certainty as it can get.
You look at the laws and regulations for the state you're in. The states that have stricter requirements are going be essentially certain as long as they've been inspected regularly. Most places just aren't going to risk being shut down or fined just to move a little faster.
The process for certification in some states even specifies, or requires the crematorium to detail, the exact process used to insure the right remains go in the fire, and that all reasonable steps are taken to remove all of the remains before further processing.
The stricter the state, the more certain you can be. Iirc NY is one of the tightest ones, and there's something about the tools used to remove remains having to do the job, and how much is acceptable to be left behind. And, iirc, even the remains that can't be sent out after that have to be cleaned up in a way so as to avoid mixing remains with the next. Maybe it's California that goes that strict? Can't remember exactly, but the process is pretty rigorous.
Other states just specify "all reasonable effort" be used, and don't require the plan for more to ensure no mixing happens.
There's a mortician that does a YouTube channel about funerary issues, Caitlyn Doughty. She's pretty good about explaining things in an accessible but detailed manner. That link is to her video on cremation, but her other stuff is fascinating too.
Fwiw, I looked into all this stuff over a decade ago as research for a book series I was planning. Talked to medical examiners, morticians, and other death related jobs and the people that do them. There are places that cut corners, but even those tend to be reliable enough that what you get is almost entirely your loved one. They just skip some of the cleaning steps, so there's "leftovers" in the crematorium or other workspaces. But it's fairly rare. Most of the people doing the work are aware of not only how important it is to the bereaved, but how much it would cost for them to fuck up. So even the big chains don't cut too many corners.
It was kinda reassuring talking to those folks. They're talking to me off the record, no recordings, no written notes, no names. So they were all pretty open about mistakes happening, and the industry problems. They weren't afraid to tell stories about them fucking up, and that fuck ups weren't as bad as you'd think. We're talking more about some of the remains being unrecoverable, but not all. Stuff like cleaning agents spilling, unexpected problems during the process. But none of it would result in someone getting the wrong remains entirely.
For that to happen, you'd have to have someone intentionally ignoring procedure, ignoring all the verification, and just dumping a body in essentially at random. It's not that it couldn't happen, it's more that it would take more work to cause it than it would to do it right.
I wanna say there was a case of it in Virginia? Might have been North Carolina. But it was small crematory, and they got a lot of bodies in at once, and paperwork got fucked up enough that the guy telling the story wasn't ever able to sort things out and be certain everyone got the right remains. He was relatively confident it got sorted out, but not 100%.
And rumors do get told about things going wrong after big disasters just because workers are overwhelmed. But they're rumors, and it was always "I heard from this guy I met at a conference" kind of stories.
I intend to be cremated. I consider the risk of errors to be so marginal as to be irrelevant. Mind you, I don't care for my own sake at all. Idgaf what happens to my corpse. Feed it to the birds, stuff it and mount out, whatever. But cremation is cheaper than other options, and I'm not willing to jump through the hoops to donate my body to anything.
Taste test
Basically, you can't be sure. More of a problem with pets. When I had a pet cremated, they sent a video of the entire process up to and including them putting the ashes into the container. I was kind of like wtf? And they said I didn't have to watch it, and they were happy to not give me the video, but that people were often concerned about just getting random ashes and that it was apparently common for some places to just cremate multiple pets and then dole out ashes to various containers, so they started videoing the entire process for each person so they could be assured they were getting their own pets ashes.
Seemed a little overboard to me, but I also didn't realize it was happening so often.
There are much more stringent policies in place for human cremation, including the use of identification disks that don't burn, etc. But, frankly, if someone wanted to, you could still end up with different or mixed remains, but I don't really see that being likely for human remains.
I am about 90% sure my dog's ashes are bullshit because the bag lacks about $3k worth of titanium implants he had. If I wanted to keep picking that scab I would have totally made a deal about it, but at the the end of the day, the urn is about the memories and those are there regardless of the contents.
The remove metals during the cremation process and usually contact with a metal recycling company. You can imagine if they left metals intact it would make it difficult to put them in the pre-sized containers. Standard procedure, as I understand it. You could have asked for them returned with the cremains, but most people don't want them, so I don't think it's common to prompt people about it.
I imagine you meant the procedures were expensive, not the metal itself.
They probably sold the implants to be used in another pet
You can't make sure.
You can only trust in logic: why would the crematorium mix them up? It makes no advantage for them, but some risk in case the public finds out.
Not talking about just mixing them up. But what if one person goes home and gets ashes out of a fire place then sell them to you as a deceased loved one?
The ashes from cremation are ground up bones. They should look quite different from wood ash.
sell them to you
I am not paranoid enough to imagine such a thing.
What incentive would they have to do that? They need to burn the body anyways to dispose of it; using other ashes would literally be more work. Also there's a pretty big difference between corpse ash and wood ash. They are going to be giving you the ashes of a burned body, there is no logical reason for them to deliberately give you someone elses ashes.
Sniff test
Pretty sure there’s going to be tight controls and a state licensing board (at least in the US can’t speak for other countries) that set standards and codes for the handling of remains to when they are returned to the family.
Yeah just checked for the state I’m in lots of licenses and regulations. But I guess there’s nothing stopping in unscrupulous funeral home from just giving ashes of anyone or anything, but pretty sure if you’re caught doing something like that you go to prison for fraud and miss handling of human remains.
There are quite a few scandals with crematoriums, including a Colorado crematorium that was caught giving out cement instead of ashes in 2021. There absolutely are regulations and criminal charges for this sort of thing, but it doesn't mean it never happens.
Pretty sure there’s going to be tight controls and a state licensing board (at least in the US can’t speak for other countries) that set standards and codes
HA! That's a rarity.