Pod Insights Freakonomics Radio 142. The Troubled Cremation of Stevie the Cat About this episode 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?
Transcript 7,670 words · 18 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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2:37 Stephen J. Dubner? Hey, podcast listeners. You are about to hear a new episode of Freakonomics Radio called "The Troubled Cremation of Stevie the Cat." I think you'll like it. But before we get to that, maybe you feel like sending us some money?
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4:06 Stephen 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?
4:35 Speaker 01 All right. Well, I can give you the tour of the ground.
4:39 Stephen 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.
4:48 Speaker 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.
5:01 Stephen J. Dubner? The cemetery is a family business. Along with John, there's his brother.
5:06 Speaker 01 I'm David Remkus.
5:07 Stephen J. Dubner? His father. My name is Bill Remkus. And his mom.
5:11 Speaker 02 My name is Nancy Remkus.
5:15 Speaker 01 So I'll take you around to a couple of my favorite epitaphs. There's a Yoda here.
5:22 Stephen J. Dubner? The cemetery has been in the family since 1950, when John Remkus's grandparents bought it.
5:27 Speaker 01 The epitaph says, "May the force be with you, sweet pup." 1978 through 2000. Although, 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.
5:54 Stephen 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.
6:06 Speaker 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."
6:21 Stephen 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?
7:13 Speaker 03 From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.
7:38 Stephen J. Dubner? So John Remkus, who runs a pet crematory outside of Chicago, wrote to say that he suspects his competitors are fraud and that he hired a P.I. to try to prove it. Producer Catherine Wells takes it from here.
7:53 Speaker 02 I met up with John Remkus and his father, Bill, to talk about this investigation. Here's Bill.
7:58 Speaker 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.
8:14 Speaker 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.
8:51 Speaker 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.
9:03 Speaker 02 The cremation machine is a big silver metal block with a little door in front.
9:07 Speaker 01 And when I press the button for the door to come up,
9:14 Speaker 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.
9:34 Speaker 02 When the burn is finished, they'll sweep out the remains, which are mostly bone, grind them up,
9:44 Speaker 02 and pour them in an urn.
9:50 Speaker 01 And...
9:54 Speaker 01 that is about it.
9:59 Speaker 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.
10:38 Speaker 02 It is usually cheaper than a totally private cremation, but there's a problem. 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 Remkus saw that some of his competitors were offering very low prices for some of these services, he got suspicious.
11:04 Speaker 01 Generally, just the ridiculousness kept increasing in the market. It just got sillier and sillier how low the prices would go.
11:16 Speaker 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.
11:46 Speaker 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.
11:56 Speaker 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.
12:31 Speaker 02 So after this material was implanted, the private investigator took the dead animals to several of the competitors with the very low prices. He asked each one of them to do a partitioned cremation, the in-between sort of private option.
12:46 Speaker 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.
12:56 Speaker 02 So far, so good. But when a lab analyzed the cremains for the tracking material, three of the eight samples weren't right.
13:05 Speaker 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.
13:27 Speaker 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.
13:53 Speaker 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.
14:08 Speaker 01 So what we did is we had the investigators procure two stuffed animal cats and--
14:16 Speaker 02 Where do you get a stuffed animal cat, by the way?
14:18 Speaker 01 There was a place online that had realistic stuffed animal cats that were actually manufactured using rabbit fur.
14:27 Speaker 02 They were so soft that you couldn't tell the difference.
14:30 Speaker 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.
14:45 Speaker 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.
15:11 Speaker 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.
15:25 Speaker 02 Okay, so you sent the fake cats through with no bone in them?
15:30 Speaker 01 Yeah.
15:31 Speaker 02 And you got bone back?
15:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, not just, not just some bone, exactly what you would expect for a pet of that weight.
15:39 Speaker 02 So what does that suggest? Complete the circle for me.
15:42 Speaker 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.
16:12 Speaker 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.
16:59 Speaker 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.
17:20 Speaker 02 The Remkuses are still convinced that fraud is out there. Here's John and Bill again.
17:26 Speaker 01 It made me more sad than anything that pet owners are being taken advantage of and they don't even know it.
17:34 Speaker 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.
17:48 Stephen 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." And he said, "I'm not thrilled to hear
18:31 Stephen J. Dubner? 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.
19:12 Stephen 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.
19:27 Speaker 05 Yes, one piece. Oh, my gosh.
19:31 Stephen J. Dubner? And if phony cremation happens with pets, does it happen with people, too?
19:37 Speaker 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.
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22:51 Speaker 03 From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.
23:08 Stephen 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, but today, there are more than 700 pet funeral
23:51 Stephen J. Dubner? homes, crematories, and cemeteries. Here's producer Catherine Wells again.
24:00 Speaker 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.
24:31 Speaker 05 I'm a fur mama, so all of my children have fur coats.
24:34 Speaker 02 Ellis is the head of the Pet Loss Professionals Alliance, and that means she loves pets. She's not alone.
24:42 Speaker 05 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 and the Ys, 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? So the trend
25:25 Speaker 05 of life is going to push the trend of death. And when you honor death, you honor life.
25:31 Speaker 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.
25:40 Speaker 05 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.
25:56 Speaker 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.
26:09 Speaker 05 Everybody sit, Rudy. Sit. Crisco, sit. That's good. Look at my babies. Oh, they're so good. Do you want a treat?
26:29 Speaker 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?
26:52 Speaker 06 Pets are a big market, and that means there's liability.
26:56 Speaker 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.
27:08 Speaker 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.
27:18 Speaker 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.
27:33 Speaker 07 We discovered one concrete vault stuffed or packed.
27:39 Speaker 07 With more human remains.
27:41 Speaker 08 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.
27:53 Speaker 07 We have found some mummified.
27:54 Speaker 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.
28:05 Speaker 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.
28:25 Speaker 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 they happened to be the cheapest. They also found out that nobody was inspecting, nobody was even going to look.
28:45 Speaker 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.
29:02 Speaker 02 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 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.
29:47 Speaker 02 But what if there was one?
29:54 Speaker 09 The Circuit of Department of General Counsel Judge Jeremiah Hill for lighting is now in session. Please proceed to the courtroom.
30:01 Speaker 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?
30:29 Speaker 10 All right, let's begin. Plaintiff, counsel, with your opening statement.
30:35 Speaker 06 Thank you, Your Honor. May please, at court, the actions of the defendants, what you appear today, are horrific and unimaginable.
30:46 Speaker 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.
30:53 Speaker 10 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?
31:01 Speaker 11 I do.
31:02 Speaker 10 Thank you.
31:02 Speaker 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.
31:10 Speaker 10 Tell us about Molly.
31:11 Speaker 11 Molly was my best friend. She was a wonderful companion, and she was very close to my heart.
31:20 Speaker 06 Your Honor, this time, I'd like to introduce the following photos.
31:26 Speaker 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.
31:48 Speaker 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...
32:06 Speaker 11 They weren't hers.
32:09 Speaker 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 upcharge, which it turns out is not uncommon practice. Noff had no idea.
32:24 Speaker 11 I don't have Molly.
32:28 Speaker 11 I'll never have Molly.
32:35 Speaker 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.
32:50 Speaker 10 On the issue of infliction of emotional distress, what do you find?
32:56 Speaker 12 The defendant, Oceanside Crematory, we do find liable and award damages in the amount of $150,000.
33:04 Speaker 10 On the issue of negligence, what do you find?
33:07 Speaker 12 Oceanside Crematory, we do find liable and award of damage of $350,000.
33:14 Speaker 10 And finally, on the issue of punitive damages, what do you find?
33:19 Speaker 12 Oceanside Crematory, we do find liable and award of damage of $3 million in punitive damages against that defendant.
33:34 Speaker 02 This mock jury charged the veterinary clinic with damages, too, for not going out to check on the crematory.
33:53 Speaker 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.
34:20 Speaker 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 it gives them more and more latitude, and their owners, parents, more latitude to recover damages.
34:44 Stephen J. Dubner? That was Catherine Wells reporting for us.
34:51 Speaker 13 Okay, we're here to talk about Stevie, Stevie and Stevie.
34:54 Stephen J. Dubner? Did we name them Stevie the cat? Are they called, they're all called Stevie the cat?
34:57 Speaker 13 Just Stevie.
34:58 Stephen J. Dubner? And this is Susie Lechtenberg. She's the executive producer of Freakonomics Radio. The cats are named after Levitt or after me?
35:05 Speaker 13 Both of you.
35:12 Stephen 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."
35:41 Speaker 14 Yeah, and the head won't look like a head anymore because it's the four, well, I don't know.
35:45 Stephen 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.
35:54 Speaker 13 That's good, that's good.
35:55 Speaker 14 And now we're peeling the rabbit fur.
35:59 Stephen J. Dubner? We stripped the rabbit fur off the cats and stuffed each of them with a few pounds of hamburger meat.
36:05 Speaker 14 So, we had 10, so each 10 to buy by three, so they should...
36:08 Stephen 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.
36:23 Speaker 14 Yeah, that looks real enough.
36:24 Speaker 15 It looks more real than I had it. Must say, when I was applying for this job, this was not in the description.
36:32 Stephen 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.
37:14 Speaker 13 Okay, so can I ask you first, what do you think happened?
37:17 Stephen J. Dubner? What would I predict happened?
37:18 Speaker 13 Yeah.
37:19 Stephen 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.
37:31 Speaker 13 Stuffed in rabbit fur.
37:32 Stephen 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.
38:03 Speaker 13 Well, why don't we just see what happened, then? You ready?
38:07 Stephen 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.
38:19 Stephen J. Dubner? Well, this is promising. I'm getting happier. Can I open? I gotta rip this open? It's a plastic bag?
38:25 Speaker 13 Yeah.
38:27 Stephen 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.
38:47 Stephen 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.
39:11 Stephen 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.
39:56 Stephen J. Dubner? Okay, once again, a tea tin.
39:59 Speaker 02 Yep.
39:59 Stephen 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.
40:23 Speaker 02 Okay.
40:24 Stephen J. Dubner? Says Stevie on there. So, I know this isn't my Stevie, because this might be somebody else's Stevie.
40:33 Stephen 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.
41:09 Stephen J. Dubner? Or maybe not.
41:14 Speaker 14 It has interference cause, it has structure. There's a lot of holes in it.
41:18 Speaker 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.
41:49 Speaker 15 Some chunks out 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.
42:08 Speaker 14 That's a crystalline structure. Yeah, we take a look too. This is a little bit of Stevie One. Looks like bone to me. Bone fragment.
42:21 Speaker 15 This is not residue from what you sent them.
42:26 Speaker 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.
42:45 Speaker 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. And I cry about him all the time, but he had a good life. He had a big belly like me. He ate good.
43:01 Speaker 13 So that's why it was a little bit agonizing when he saw this.
43:05 Speaker 14 Hartsdale. This is where I sent my Ralph Hartsdale.
43:10 Stephen J. Dubner? Oh no.
43:11 Speaker 14 I sent him through my vet. But I know it was Hartsdale.
43:18 Stephen J. Dubner? This is before he looks at the remains from Hartsdale?
43:21 Speaker 13 Yeah.
43:22 Stephen J. Dubner? Oh god, I don't know if I can take hearing this.
43:24 Speaker 13 Yeah. So clearly, this guy did not want what's in the Hartsdale package to end up...
43:30 Stephen J. Dubner? Planely.
43:31 Speaker 13 He did not want us to get duped.
43:36 Speaker 13 After I left John Jay, it took Petrakko 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.
43:44 Speaker 16 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.
44:10 Speaker 13 How much bone are we talking about?
44:12 Speaker 16 Well, the vast majority of the material is bone debris.
44:15 Speaker 13 Wow.
44:16 Speaker 16 In each case.
44:17 Speaker 13 Wow.
44:26 Stephen 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?
44:53 Speaker 13 I think we have to assume that these crematories gave us back a scoop of ashes from some other cremated animal.
44:58 Stephen 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.
45:16 Speaker 13 I think that's right. Here's Nick Petrakko again.
45:19 Speaker 16 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.
45:50 Stephen 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.
46:33 Stephen 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.
47:17 Stephen 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.
47:46 Stephen 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.
48:20 Stephen J. Dubner? Okay, here we go.
48:24 Stephen J. Dubner? So long, Stevie, or whoever you are.
48:46 Stephen J. Dubner? Hey, podcast listeners. Hope you enjoyed this episode. I also hope you will consider supporting the Freakonomics Radio podcast by going to our website and making a donation. We love giving away this podcast for free, but it does cost money to make. Just look at this pet cremation episode. We sent Catherine Wells to Florida to cover the mock trial at the International Cemetery Cremation and Funeral Association Conference. That cost a little bit more than $1,000. We also did that taping at the pet cemetery outside of Chicago. Then we had to buy those very realistic fake cats covered in real rabbit fur, $184.70. Then there was the hamburger meat to stuff the cats, plus some rubber gloves
49:26 Stephen J. Dubner? and garbage bags. That's another $48.98. The pet cremation itself at three crematories set us back $1,274.40.
49:37 Stephen J. Dubner? But the real costs are what it takes to turn out a weekly podcast and a public radio show. We have a staff of great producers and engineers on salary. They even get health insurance. We pay for the music we use so that the artists who make it get paid, at least a little bit. We also need to cover the costs of streaming our podcasts. Now, the good news is that a lot of you listen to this podcast. We do more than 3 million downloads a month. But here's the bad news. The more downloads, the more we pay in streaming costs. So last year, we paid about $36,000. This year, we hope to pay even more. So, long story short, if you are so inclined, please go to Freakonomics.com, make a donation.
50:22 Stephen J. Dubner? Thank you very much, and we will talk to you next week.
50:29 Speaker 03 Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC and Dubner Productions. Our staff includes David Herman, Greg Rosalsky, Borey Lamb, Susie Lechtenberg, and Chris Bannon, with help from Catherine Wells. Special thanks to Bill Healy, Ivan Zimmerman, and Jana 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.
51:10 Stephen J. Dubner? Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Ozempic. Innovation happens through rethinking what's possible. And when it comes to GLP-1s, Ozempic pill does just that. Learn more about Ozempic semaglutide tablets, 4 and 9 mg, by calling 1-833-OZEMPIC or visit Ozempic.com to view the medication guide and ask your doctor what's possible with FDA-approved Ozempic pill.
51:40 Stephen J. Dubner? Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by US Bank Smartly Checking and Savings. You know, US Bank Smartly Checking and Savings are bank accounts that work harder for you. You get better savings rates, fee waivers, and rewards from day one, so you spend less time worrying about money and more on what matters. Sign up for US Bank Smartly Checking and Savings today at usbank.com/smartly. Member FDIC. Copyright 2026 US Bank.
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