The Troubled Cremation of Stevie the Cat (Rebroadcast)

We spend billions on our pets, and one of the fastest-growing costs is pet "aftercare." But are those cremated remains you got back really from your pet?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 0:43Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:11Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey, podcast listeners. The show you're about to hear was first released in the fall of 2013. For those of you who listen to every episode, we hope you will agree it's worth hearing again. And for those of you who haven't heard it, please stay tuned for the troubled cremation of Stevie the cat.

• 3:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  A few months back, we got an email from a fellow named John Remkus in Willowbrook, Illinois, just outside of Chicago. He wrote, quote, "Hello. This is kind of a long shot and a bit out of left field, but I was curious to see if there would be any interest in trying to prove that the cremated remains from certain pet crematories are unlikely to be those of a particular pet," end quote. "Is there any interest?" Hey, John, does a kitty cat say meow?

• 3:45Speaker 01

  All right. Well, I can give you the tour of the ground.

• 3:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  It turns out that John Remkus himself is in the pet cremation business, and he also runs the Hinsdale Animal Cemetery. He took us on a tour.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  What you're looking at is the oldest part of the cemetery directly in front of us. We don't have any famous dogs in particular, but a whole lot of love out there.

• 4:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  The cemetery is a family business. Along with John, there's his brother.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  I'm David Remkus.

• 4:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  His father. My name is Bill Remkus. And his mom.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  My name is Nancy Remkus.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  So, I'll take you around to a couple of my favorite epitaphs. There's a Yoda here.

• 4:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  The cemetery has been in the family since 1950, when John Remkus's grandparents bought it.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  The epitaph says, "May the force be with you, sweet pup." 1978 through 2000. Although, and my inner nerd's gonna show, Empire Strikes Back didn't come out till 1980, and that's when Yoda made his debut. And this pet was born in 1978. So, maybe I'm nerding out, but I'd like to know the story behind that.

• 5:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  There are thousands of cats and dogs buried here, along with bunny rabbits, birds, hamsters, horses, a three-foot shark, and about 30 human beings, too.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  This is a place where people come to rest alongside their pets. And Rosendo is one example. His stone says, "We will never forget you. You will always be in our thoughts and in our hearts. We love you."

• 5:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Some of the animals buried here are in corpse form, and some have been cremated. Which brings us back to the reason that John Remkus wrote to us. He thinks there is something fishy about the pet cremation industry. He thinks that some of his competitors are not playing by the rules. Now, a few years ago, Remkus hired a private investigator to try and prove it. So, you might call him a motivated whistleblower. Motivated, that is, by casting guilt on his rivals, and in the process of making his own business look better. Maybe so, but does that necessarily mean that John Remkus is wrong?

• 6:23Speaker 03

  From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 6:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  So John Remkus, who runs a pet crematory outside of Chicago, wrote to say that he suspects his competitors a fraud and that he hired a P.I. to try to prove it. Producer Catherine Wells takes it from here.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  I met up with John Remkus and his father, Bill, to talk about this investigation. Here's Bill.

• 7:08Speaker 04

  Cremation is a mystery to most people. And with it being a mystery on how cremation should be performed, or what it's all about, it's easy to take advantage of people because they don't understand it.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  To understand the investigation, you need to understand how cremation works. Say you've just had your dog put down. You're at the vet with the body. You're probably distraught. The vet will ask you what you want to do. Do you want to take him home? She might suggest that you cremate the pet, and she might offer to take care of the process for you. If you don't want the ashes back, the vet will send off the dog for something called a group cremation, where a bunch of pets are cremated together. If you do want the ashes back, though, she'll suggest you do a private cremation. John Remkus showed us how this process works.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  When we do a private cremation, it's just one pet at a time, and the client receives back all of that pet's cremated remains, and only that pet's cremated remains.

• 8:13Speaker 02

  The cremation machine is a big silver metal block with a little door in front.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  And when I press the button for the door to come up...

• 8:25Speaker 01

  The door goes up and then we see that there's a single pet inside the cremation chamber floor. And then there's a jet of fire that comes down from the ceiling and makes contact with those cremated remains in order for the cremation process to complete.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  When the burn is finished, they'll sweep out the remains, which are mostly bone, grind them up,

• 8:54Speaker 02

  and pour them in an urn.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  That is about it.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  Pretty simple, right? If you don't want the ashes back, go with a group cremation. If you do, go with private. Well, it's not actually that simple. Because there is yet another option you might be offered. It's an in-between, not-quite-private option. How it's done is several animals are cremated together in one machine, but they're separated with bricks or on metal trays. So theoretically, you should still get most of your pet's ashes back. This third option is usually called segregated or partitioned cremation, but the terms can get confusing. You might also hear it called semi-private or even individual. It is usually cheaper than a totally private cremation, but there's a problem.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  What private, or individual, or partitioned cremation really means depends on who you're talking to. And the lower the prices go, the murkier the definitions get. So when John Remkis saw that some of his competitors were offering very low prices for some of these services, he got suspicious.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  Generally, just the ridiculousness kept increasing in the market. It just got sillier and sillier how low the prices would go.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  Remkus charges about $180 for a private cremation of a small animal. But what he started to see was that his competitors were offering much lower prices and doing things like giving away free TVs to vets who funneled business to them. Remkus says he just couldn't imagine how his competitors could be making a profit off of these services at those prices. So he decided to do something about it. He hired a private investigator and they devised an experiment.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  So what we did, we came up with a tracking compound that would allow us to chemically test for its presence after the cremation process is through.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  Remkus had on hand eight dead stray cats that had been passed along to him for disposal. This gets a little gory, but what he did is he had a vet implant each dead animal with this tracking material, titanium dioxide. Now cremation machines get very, very hot, like 1,600 degrees hot. But titanium dioxide's melting point is way above that. It's 3,350 degrees Fahrenheit. So this material would make it through the burn and still show up in the ashes afterwards. So after this material was implanted, the private investigator took the dead animals to several of the competitors with the very low prices.

• 11:50Speaker 02

  He asked each one of them to do a partitioned cremation, the in-between sort of private option.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  We got the ashes back and, you know, they all look like cremated remains. And in fact, they were cremated remains upon having them analyzed.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  So far, so good. But when a lab analyzed the cremains for the tracking material, three of the eight samples weren't right.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  We discovered that there was such an insignificant amount of the tracking material in a number of these samples that at best you were given a scoop of a larger group cremation.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  When you send in your cat to be cremated, how do you know that the scoops you get back are full of fluffy? What if they were Max the dog, or a gerbil, or a rat? Or all of those mixed together and topped off with some parakeet? The truth is, short of doing a test like this, there's really no way for you to tell how any cremation happens, unless you go and watch it yourself.

• 13:04Speaker 02

  Now, John Remkus felt like the tracking material experiment was pretty solid proof that his competitors were not doing cremation in the way that they advertised. But he wanted to be really sure, so he did a second test.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  So what we did is, we had the investigators procure two stuffed animal cats.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  Where do you get a stuffed animal cat, by the way?

• 13:28Speaker 01

  There was a place online that had realistic stuffed animal cats that were actually manufactured using rabbit fur.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  They were so soft that you couldn't tell the difference.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  And what we had the investigators do is stuff them with some hamburger meat and some Crisco, just to approximate the weight and feel of a deceased cat, and then had them freeze the stuffed cat up.

• 13:55Speaker 02

  That last part may sound strange, but it's not that unusual for people to freeze an animal until they can take it for cremation. So off these frozen fake cats went for another partitioned cremation. Now, it's important to reinforce here that bone is really the only part of the body that survives the heat of cremation. Everything else burns away. So with these fake boneless cats, there would be almost nothing left.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  So we sent two through directly to this particular competitor. And in both instances, we got back bone ash in the amount of what you would expect for a pet of that size.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  Okay, so you sent the fake cats through with no bone in them?

• 14:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  And you got bone back?

• 14:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, not just some bone, exactly what you would expect for a pet of that weight.

• 14:49Speaker 02

  So what does that suggest? Complete the circle for me.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  Well, that suggests that this company is just taking a scoop of a group cremation and doling it out based on the weight of the animal that comes in. So to simplify it, a big Labrador might be three scoops, a cat might be one scoop. And that's what we believe was happening in these instances.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  Why would a crematory do this? Well, it saves time, labor, energy, money, and it means more profit. But I think it's worth pointing out that I can also imagine a much less nefarious way for this to happen. Cremation is a turbulent process. It's a huge fire, after all. And it's possible that these companies did, in fact, separate out all of the bodies. But in the process of burning, the remains become mixed. But in the end, it doesn't really matter whether the mix-up is intentional or not, because the bottom line is that the pet owner is not getting back what they think they're getting back, which is only their animal.

• 16:09Speaker 02

  After John Remkus did his experiment, he brought his findings to the Attorney General of Illinois's Consumer Protection Division. The division reviewed the procedures of one of the competitors, a company called All Paws. No further action was taken.

• 16:30Speaker 02

  The Remkuses are still convinced that fraud is out there. Here's John and Bill again.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  It made me more sad than anything that pet owners are being taken advantage of and they don't even know it.

• 16:44Speaker 04

  When you choose cremation services on price, chances are you're going to get burned. 90 times out of 100, you're going to get burned.

• 16:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, as we noted earlier, for John Remkus to claim that his competitors are being dishonest, well, he may not be the most unbiased source in the world. We contacted several of these other crematories. Most of them didn't return our calls or emails, but one did. He didn't want to go on tape, but here's what he told us. He said, "I run an honest business. We've been doing this for 40 years. We don't mix things up." And he said, "Sure, I've heard of that happening, but not here." And he said, "I'm in the business of helping grieving pet owners, not of pointing fingers or calling my competitors' names on the radio. And this story makes Remkus look bad for doing that."

• 17:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  And he said, "I'm not thrilled to hear that this guy brought a cat laced with chemicals to us, and then we burned those chemicals. What if they were combustible? What if somebody got hurt?" So, we don't have enough information to say who's right here. But, look, people do cheat, just about every day, in just about every realm of life. Should we assume that pet cremation would somehow be exempt? Of course not. Unfortunately, we couldn't find any worthwhile data that would help us definitively answer this question. For now, the only proof is a homemade investigation of the hamburger and Crisco variety.

• 18:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, coming up on Freakonomics Radio, we run our own experiment to see what happens when you send a crematory a cat that has no bones. Now, we're peeling the rabbit fur.

• 18:38Speaker 05

  Just one piece. Oh, my gosh.

• 18:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  And if phony cremation happens with pets, does it happen with people, too?

• 18:47Speaker 06

  One of the cases on the human side that really made a change in how everybody handled the human side of cremation was in Noble, Georgia.

• 19:20Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 20:25Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 20:58Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 21:32Speaker 03

  From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 21:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  According to government statistics, there are well over 200 million pets in America, not counting pet fish. Why government statistics don't include fish, we don't know. Maybe that's an episode for another day. Now, we spend a lot of money on these pets, about $61 billion a year, which is roughly the size of the US wedding industry. And just wait till pets start getting married. Over the past 20 years, our pet spending has tripled. One area that's growing very, very fast is pet aftercare. The International Association of Pet Cemeteries and Crematories tells us that 10 years ago, only a handful of places specialized in pet aftercare.

• 22:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  But today, there are more than 700 pet funeral homes, crematories, and cemeteries. Here's producer Catherine Wells again.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  If you want to find out about the pet cremation industry and the people in it, a good place to start is the annual conference of the ICCFA. That's the International Cemetery, Cremation, and Funeral Association. This year's annual conference was held in Tampa in the springtime. The ICCFA is mostly an organization for funeral directors for humans, but every year, more and more pet funeral professionals come. Colleen Ellis is one of them.

• 23:11Speaker 07

  I'm a fur mama, so all of my children have fur coats.

• 23:14Speaker 02

  Ellis is the head of the Pet Loss Professionals Alliance, and that means she loves pets. She's not alone.

• 23:22Speaker 07

  First of all, 62% of people own a pet, okay? 83% of the 62% refer to themselves as mommy and daddy. Baby boomers have empty nested, and the pets are the new kids. And they want to make sure that when they have those new kids, they're giving them every spoiling rights that they would give to any child. The younger folks, the X's and the Y's, right now, they are maybe holding off on having kids, so they're test-driving with a puppy and a kitty. They're finding the treats that are organic. They're finding the little doggy spas that they can do facials at and they can have fun time. They're finding the doggy daycares where they can go socialize them and they can be fun and good pet parents because they've taken their child over to play with other children, okay?

• 24:05Speaker 07

  So the trend of life is going to push the trend of death. And when you honor death, you honor life.

• 24:11Speaker 02

  And that means that no expense is spared when pets die, too. Ellis points to a necklace she's wearing. It's a big silver heart with little paw prints on it.

• 24:21Speaker 07

  I have an urn on around my neck right now. I don't have cremains in here. What I have is the hair and the fur and a little whisker of all the living and deceased animals that I've had in my life. And so for me, this is a way that I can honor them. I can keep them with me.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  Urn necklaces seem to be pretty popular. Ellis wasn't actually the only person wearing one at the conference. Hers even opened up and had a USB port inside where she keeps videos of all of her pets. She sent them to me.

• 24:50Speaker 07

  Everybody sit, Rudy. Sit. Crisco, sit. That's good. Look at my babies. Oh, they're so good. Do you want a treat?

• 25:09Speaker 02

  So obviously Ellis is really proud of her animals. And she knows that pet owners like her would be really devastated to find out that the ashes they got back didn't belong to their animals. And a question that came up at the conference was this. Would a pet owner ever be so devastated that they'd sue?

• 25:33Speaker 06

  Pets are a big market and that means there's liability.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  This is Paul LaMasters. He was at the ICCFA conference, too. He used to be a funeral director and embalmer, but today he works with human and pet funeral homes on legal issues.

• 25:48Speaker 06

  I always tell people, you can't expect to make money off of something and not create a liability at the same time. It just doesn't work that way.

• 25:58Speaker 02

  Lately, LaMasters has been thinking a lot about the legal implications of cremation fraud. And he told me there's actually a precedent for this pet mess in the human cremation business. It happened in 2002, in the town of Noble, Georgia.

• 26:13Speaker 08

  We discovered one concrete vault stuffed or packed with more human remains.

• 26:21Speaker 09

  A large garage-type building was found today filled to the top with decomposing human remains. So far, 92 sets of remains have been recovered, and some of these remains date back decades.

• 26:33Speaker 10

  We have found some mummified bodies.

• 26:35Speaker 06

  One of the cases on the human side that really made a change in how everybody handled the human side of cremation was in Noble, Georgia.

• 26:44Speaker 02

  The tri-state crematory in Noble had been receiving bodies from funeral homes for years, but an investigation uncovered something awful. The owner had been dumping corpses in the woods and giving other materials like cement dust back to the families. In total, more than 300 bodies that were supposed to have been cremated were found.

• 27:05Speaker 06

  So they ended up going after the crematory and also after the funeral homes that were using them. Many things were discovered. They included that a lot of the funerals were using this crematory purely because of their price, because it happened to be the cheapest. They also found out that nobody was inspecting. Nobody was even going to look.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  The case set an important legal precedent. The guy who ran the crematory was sentenced to 12 years in prison, and both he and the funeral homes that used him were fined millions of dollars. After this scandal, states tightened regulations of the human cremation industry. Now, there are all sorts of certifications and licenses and permits, emission standards, and specific requirements for proper procedures to identify and keep track of remains. But pet crematories don't have nearly the same amount of oversight. It varies from state to state and even from county to county, but in most places, all

• 28:09Speaker 02

  you need to do to open a pet crematory is fill out an application for a license and get a permit from the EPA. Paul LaMasters thinks the reason there might be less oversight of the pet cremation industry is because there hasn't really been a high-profile pet cremation lawsuit in the U.S. But what if there was one?

• 28:44Speaker 02

  At the ICCFA conference this year, LaMasters staged a big mock trial. It was in a hotel ballroom. They set out folding tables in the shape of a courtroom and about 75 people showed up to watch. LaMasters wanted to know what would happen if a case of cremation fraud ever came to trial. How would a jury react? What kind of price would they put on a pet? And who would have to pay it?

• 29:10Speaker 10

  All right, let's begin. Plaintiff, counsel, with your opening statement.

• 29:15Speaker 06

  Thank you, Your Honor. May please the court, the actions of the defendants, what you have here today, are horrific and unimaginable.

• 29:26Speaker 02

  That's LaMasters again, playing the role of the prosecuting attorney. He gives his opening statement and calls the first witness up to the stand.

• 29:34Speaker 06

  Do you solemnly affirm that the testimony you may give in this matter will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?

• 29:41Speaker 11

  I do.

• 29:42Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 29:43Speaker 02

  This is Roberta Knopf. She's a counselor at a pet funeral home in Ohio, and she volunteered to play the role of plaintiff.

• 29:50Speaker 06

  Tell us about Molly.

• 29:52Speaker 11

  Molly was my best friend. She was a wonderful companion, and she was very close to my heart.

• 30:00Speaker 06

  Your Honor, this time, I'd like to introduce the following photos.

• 30:06Speaker 02

  Knopf starts to tell the story of the made-up dog, Molly. She says Molly died from cancer at an old age and was cremated through the vet. Everything seemed fine at first, but a few months after she brought the ashes home, Knopf heard that the crematory owners were being investigated. They'd apparently been dumping animals in a field and returning random ashes back to people.

• 30:29Speaker 11

  The veterinarian clinic called me and said there had been an investigation. And they told me then that it wasn't Molly's ashes that I had in that urn. And even the police investigation said that...

• 30:47Speaker 11

  They weren't hers.

• 30:49Speaker 02

  Noff was suing not just the crematory, but the vet, too. Because the vet had outsourced the cremation to the cheapest company and then stuck Noff with a hefty up-charge, which it turns out is not uncommon practice. Noff had no idea.

• 31:04Speaker 11

  I don't have Molly. I'll never have Molly.

• 31:15Speaker 02

  Now, at this point, Noff starts crying, real tears. She told me later that her pain was real, because she knows this actually happens to pet owners. The mock jurors, who had been recruited off of Craigslist, were moved.

• 31:31Speaker 10

  On the issue of infliction of emotional distress, what do you find?

• 31:36Speaker 12

  The defendant, Oceanside Crematory, we do find liable and award damages in the amount of $150,000.

• 31:44Speaker 10

  On the issue of negligence, what do you find?

• 31:47Speaker 12

  Oceanside Crematory, we do find liable and award of damage of $350,000.

• 31:54Speaker 10

  And finally, on the issue of punitive damages, what do you find?

• 32:00Speaker 12

  Oceanside Crematory, we do find liable and award of damage of $3 million in punitive damages against that defendant.

• 32:15Speaker 02

  This mock jury charged the veterinary clinic with damages, too, for not going out to check on the crematory.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  LaMasters was really excited about this result. Excited because it confirmed his hunch that a jury would be willing to punish fraudulent pet crematories, that they wouldn't dismiss it as just a dog or a cat. LaMasters and I talked about what could happen after the trial was over, and he said that if a real jury ever did the same thing, and there was real money involved, it could completely change how the pet cremation industry works.

• 33:00Speaker 06

  In the court system, pets have typically always been considered property. However, over the years, courts have started to recognize that pets are people, too, and to give them more and more latitude, and their owners, parents, more latitude to recover damages.

• 33:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  That was Catherine Wells reporting for us.

• 33:31Speaker 13

  Okay, we're here to talk about Stevie, Stevie and Stevie.

• 33:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Did we name them Stevie the cat? Are they called, they're all called Stevie the cat?

• 33:37Speaker 13

  Just Stevie.

• 33:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  And this is Susie Lechtenberg. She's the executive producer of Freakonomics Radio. The cats are named after Levitt or after me?

• 33:45Speaker 13

  Both of you.

• 33:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  The cats named Stevie that she's talking about? Well, we decided to run our own tests at three pet crematories here in New York. We wanted to see what would happen if we did what John Remkus told us he did in Illinois: send a fake cat out for cremation. So, we bought three fake cats from a store called This Place is a Zoo. They market the cats as, quote, "not very cuddly, but great for a display or to replace a missing pet."

• 34:21Speaker 14

  Yeah, and the head won't look like a head anymore because it's the fore, well, I don't know.

• 34:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  We were excited when they arrived. They are very realistic, orange and white kitties, curled up asleep, a stiff body covered in real rabbit fur.

• 34:34Speaker 13

  That's good, that's good.

• 34:35Speaker 14

  Now we're peeling the rabbit fur.

• 34:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  We stripped the rabbit fur off the cats and stuffed each of them with a few pounds of hamburger meat.

• 34:45Speaker 14

  We had 10, so each 10 to buy by 3, so they should...

• 34:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  Then we put these burger-stuffed rabbit fur cat skins in a grocery bag and froze them for a few days until we could arrange for the three crematories to pick them up. By this point, they didn't really look that much like cats, but apparently they were cat-like enough for the three crematories to take them off our hands.

• 35:04Speaker 14

  Yeah, that looks real enough.

• 35:05Speaker 15

  It must seem when I was applying for this job, this was not in the description.

• 35:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  And we, of course, were telling the fib, right? We're telling them that what we're giving them is a real dead cat. Now, when you get back cremated remains, whether it's a pet or a human, it's composed almost entirely of bone ash. So in this case, we're sending a cat with no bones. So theoretically, we shouldn't get back much ash at all. The fur and the hamburger meat should burn off almost entirely. So we sent off these three cats. Suzie and the other producers handled this part. They kept me in the dark. I had no idea what kind of remains, if any, we got back. A few weeks later, we sat down to talk.

• 35:54Speaker 13

  Okay, so can I ask you first, what do you think happened?

• 35:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  What would I predict happened?

• 35:58Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 35:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so we take three cats. We sent them into three different pet crematoria. And what do I think happened? Oh, three cats whose bodies are made up of hamburger meat.

• 36:11Speaker 13

  Stuffed in rabbit fur.

• 36:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  Stuffed in rabbit fur. I guess what I hope happened is that each of these three institutions called and said, Suzie, I'm sorry to tell you this, but something was strange with Stevie, your cat. And he just burnt to hell and there was nothing left. And we'd love to give you the ashes of your beloved Stevie the cat, but we can't understand why there aren't any. And instead, we'll give you a, maybe a nice plush stuffed animal.

• 36:44Speaker 13

  Well, why don't we just see what happened then? You ready?

• 36:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Please don't be ashes. Please don't be ashes. All right, the fact that there's something here is not good. And I'm gonna open it.

• 37:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well, this is promising. I'm getting happier. Can I open? I gotta rip this open? It's a plastic bag?

• 37:05Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 37:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  Should I not be hap-- should I not be? Oh, no. Oh, bummer. I thought it was, oh, man, it is. This is somebody else's dead pet right here, right? That is not Stevie.

• 37:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  That first box is from a place called Pet Crematory Agency. We paid for a private cremation, $460, which meant that Stevie the Cat should have been alone in the chamber. The second box is from Pet Cremation of New York. Again, a private cremation. This one cost $307. Ooh, this one's heavy.

• 37:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  And right there, the label on, when I opened the box, says "private cremation." And it appears to be another bag of animal bones that do not belong to Stevie the Cat, because Stevie the Cat had no bones. This second bag had way more ash in it, maybe three times as much as the first one. Okay, so that was Stevie 1 and Stevie 2. Stevie number 3 got what's called an individual cremation, meaning he's supposed to be alone in a pan, but that other animals were also in the chamber, in different pans. Now, even so, this one cost more than the others, $505.74. It was from a place called Hartsdale Crematory.

• 38:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, once again, a tea tin.

• 38:39Speaker 16

  Yep.

• 38:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  Beautiful floral print. It's kind of small. There's some paperwork here. And more of the same, more kitty remains. I have to say, these look a little bit... This looks, honestly, this looks like beach sand. There look to be chunks of bone or bone fragment, then ashy stuff, which I guess is other bone.

• 39:03Speaker 16

  Okay.

• 39:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Says Stevie on there. So, I know this isn't my Stevie, because this might be somebody else's Stevie.

• 39:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so let's not assume that these crematories are doing something wrong. Maybe something happened in the burn chamber that would explain why we got back all that bone ash from animals that didn't have any bone. Or maybe the hamburger meat we used had an inordinately large amount of ground bone in it. Not likely, but if you read a paper from the Annals of Diagnostic Pathology called "Fast Food Hamburgers: What Are We Really Eating?", you'll see that bone and lots of other cow parts can end up in ground chuck.

• 39:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  Or maybe not.

• 39:54Speaker 14

  It has interference calls, it has structure. It has a lot of holes in it.

• 39:58Speaker 13

  I visited Nick Petracco at his forensic lab at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. He teaches chemistry and forensic science there. Petracco used to be a cop. He started his career at the NYPD in 1968. Then he finished his chemistry degree and went on to work at the police lab as a detective. He retired in 1990 and now he runs a forensic science consulting firm. His specialty is trace evidence. He and a colleague named John Refner, who's also a professor of forensic science at John Jay, agreed to analyze the remains for us. We looked at the ashes under a microscope.

• 40:30Speaker 15

  Pull some chunks out that are in the top of the Petri dish you might want to look at. Oh, yeah, that's it. That's a beautiful... That's his bone.

• 40:48Speaker 14

  That's a crystalline structure. There we take a look, too. This is a little bit of Stevie One. Looks like bone to me. Bone fragment.

• 41:00Speaker 15

  This is not residue from what you sent them.

• 41:05Speaker 13

  So that was their initial reaction, looking at the ash under the microscope. But they hadn't done their full forensic analysis yet. So they couldn't say for sure that the remains that we got back were indeed bone. But before we get to what they found, I learned that Nick Petracco is a dog lover. He's had three beagles, Jake, Ralph, and Butch.

• 41:25Speaker 14

  Butch I got as a puppy from one of my professors here when I was coming to college here. And he lived for 15 years. He had a good life. I cry about him all the time, but he had a good life. He had a big belly like me. He ate good.

• 41:42Speaker 13

  So that's why it was a little bit agonizing when he saw this.

• 41:45Speaker 14

  Hartsdale. This is where I sent my Ralph Hartsdale.

• 41:50Speaker 15

  Oh, no.

• 41:51Speaker 14

  I sent it through my vet. But I know it was Hartsdale.

• 41:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  This is before he looks at the remains from Hartsdale?

• 42:01Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 42:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, God, I don't know if I can take hearing this.

• 42:04Speaker 13

  Yeah. So clearly, this guy did not want what's in the Hartsdale package to end up...

• 42:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Plainly.

• 42:11Speaker 13

  He did not want us to get duped.

• 42:17Speaker 13

  After I left John Jay, it took Petracco about a week to do a full forensic workup and tell us exactly what was in our cremains. I called to see what he found out.

• 42:24Speaker 17

  We found that in each of the three sets of materials from the crematoriums, each set of materials had primarily bone fragments in it, and they were burned bone fragments. I verified the elemental composition by finding calcium and phosphorus, which is typically what bone is made out of, calcium phosphate.

• 42:51Speaker 13

  How much bone are we talking about?

• 42:52Speaker 17

  Well, the vast majority of the material was bone debris.

• 42:55Speaker 13

  Wow.

• 42:56Speaker 17

  In each case.

• 42:57Speaker 13

  Wow.

• 43:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, so Suzy, according to these forensic experts, the three bags of pet cremains that we got back were made up almost entirely of bone, which doesn't seem to make sense, since we sent each of them a boneless cat. In two of the three cases, we paid for a private cremation, so we don't know where this bone ash came from. And even in the third case, the individual cremation, we were still supposed to get back only the remains of our pet, right?

• 43:33Speaker 13

  I think we have to assume that these crematories gave us back a scoop of ashes from some other cremated animal.

• 43:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, because in our case, there shouldn't have been any cremains, or at least only a tiny bit. But based on what we've learned today, if I had a real pet to send in for cremation, I would not be all that confident that the remains that I'd be getting back are definitely from my pet.

• 43:57Speaker 13

  I think that's right. Here's Nick Petracco again.

• 43:59Speaker 17

  They're basically not doing what they say they do. I don't know if that's crime, but it's certainly not morally right, because a lot of these pets are very dear to the people that are paying these fees to have it done properly.

• 44:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  So apparently, we got back some ashes from other people's pets. This may just mean that some crematories don't do the right thing when they cremate a fake cat. We called the three New York crematories that we tested, asked them for a response. None of them would go on tape. One crematory, Pet Cremation of New York, declined to comment on the record. The second one, Pet Crematory Agency, did send us something in writing. They noted that the form we signed when we gave them Stevie said we were giving them a cat, and that they needed further proof that the Stevie we sent wasn't a cat.

• 45:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  The third crematory, Hartsdale, also sent us a written statement, 16 pages long. They emphatically denied any allegation that there was the improper handling of pet remains. They say that Hartsdale, quote, "adheres to strictly monitored and enforced procedures and safeguards throughout the cremation process to ensure the respectful treatment of pet remains from intake through return," end quote. Hartsdale says the contents of our bag were placed in an individual stainless steel tray, put in the crematory furnace, and upon completion of the cremation process, the cremains, quote, "consisting solely of the skeletal remains of Stevie were removed and processed by pulverizing the bones," end quote.

• 45:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  They also included a copy of a form signed by an employee saying that the ashes are Stevie's ashes, and said this employee takes personal responsibility for the cremation. Hartsdale later sent us an addendum to its original statement, saying that "active co-mingling of cremated remains will occur when you perform a cremation with more than one pet in the chamber." They attached a newsletter from the Pet Loss Professionals Alliance supporting this.

• 46:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  You can read the full statements from Pet Crematory Agency in Hartsdale on our website, Freakonomics.com. We've also shared our findings with the New York State Attorney General's Office. If we learn that they do conduct an investigation, we'll be sure to let you know. In the meantime, we wound up with three piles of pet cremains. And even though they're not from our pets, they probably belong to someone. So we thought we'd take the ashes outdoors and give them a proper send-off.

• 47:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, here we go.

• 47:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  So long, Stevie, or whoever you are.

• 47:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey, podcast listeners. I hope you enjoyed this reprieze of our episode about Stevie the Cat. Next week, a brand-new episode, in which we ask a question that I'm sure has kept you up at night. With music being played in just about every public space possible these days, why do you rarely hear music in the one place that really needs it: the public restroom?

• 47:47Speaker 18

  Oh, it's disgusting. But honestly, I really try to avoid restrooms where there are lots of men doing fireworks, you know?

• 47:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  And one more thing before we let you go. We need your help for a future episode. We recently put out a two-parter on education reform, and now we want to hear from you on this topic. So here's the question: If you had to pick out one thing to change about the education system where you live, what would it be and why? Now, we want you to record your answer on your phone and email us the file at [email protected]. Tell us your name, where you live, what you do, maybe you're a student, parent, teacher, school administrator, taxpayer, whatever. So again, send your audio file to [email protected]. Tell us your name, where you live, what you do, and answer the following question: If you had to pick one thing to change about the education system where you live, what

• 48:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  would it be and why? And soon, that will be the next episode you hear on Freakonomics Radio.

• 48:53Speaker 03

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC and Dubner Productions. Our staff includes David Herman, Greg Rosalsky, Caroline English, Susie Lechtenberg, and Chris Bannon, with help from Catherine Wells and Borey Lam. Special thanks to Bill Healy, Ivan Zimmerman, and Jenna Freed. If you want more Freakonomics Radio, you can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or go to Freakonomics.com, where you'll find lots of radio, a blog, the books, and more.

• 49:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by EverPure. Is the value of AI not living up to the promise? The problem is probably your data, not your AI models. When it's scattered across different systems, getting your data AI-ready is a challenge. You keep your AI waiting, and everything slows down. EverPure unifies your data, so you can see it, understand it, and control it all from one simple place, and get it AI-ready fast. Unlock the true value of your AI at everpuredata.com.

• 50:08Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 50:38Speaker 19

  Hey, listeners, I'm Ash. And I'm Elena. And we are so excited to have joined the SiriusXM family.

• 50:47Speaker 05

  And you know what? If you want to keep hearing new episodes of Morbid ad free, subscribe to Sirius XM Podcast Plus on Apple Podcasts or visit SiriusXM.com/podcastsplus to listen with Spotify or another app of your choice. Let's go.

• 51:07Speaker 20

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