When a pet passes away, some choose to resurrect it, others choose to let it go
Story 1: Death
Whenever Mingrui thinks of Steamed Bun, it is "like being hit by someone out of the blue", cold, painful and confusing.
Steamed Bun was a small pony-like German Shepherd. Mingrui liked big dogs, she thought they were powerful and dashing. She and her husband have been in the same compound, kindergarten, primary and junior high school together since birth ...... They grew up together all the way. When they got married, they decided to go dinky, citing the added uncertainty of having children in their lives. A relative found them this German Shepherd, whose first name is Steamed Bun and who is more often called "Son" in life.
"When he first came into the house, he was only two months old, and he was so unsure of himself that he wouldn't listen to any greetings. For a while, Mingrui thought he was deaf. It was only when her husband accidentally stepped on Steamed Bun's bowl that he was eating from, and with a clang, Mingrui saw Steamed Bun's ears move in the direction of the bowl, "It's all pretend!"
Feelings didn't build up much for the first half of the month. The first half of the month was not very emotional, but a relative had just lost his dog, so Mingrui thought he would send Steamed Bun over there. On the day of the delivery, Steamed Bun was "expectedly" happy, playing happily with the relative's other two dogs and ignoring Mingrui who was leaving.
Three or four days later, Mingrui went back to his relatives' house and left again, but it was a different story. "The relatives called to say that after we left, the steamed buns didn't recognize anyone and wouldn't let anyone come near them, and they would nip at their teeth if they did." Only then did Mingrui realise that the silly dog had only thought it was going to someone's house for a while before, and only now did she react. She had to pick up the steamed bun and take it home, and this time when she saw Mingrui again, the steamed bun followed as if it was glued to her feet, dead on its feet.
"It was quite surprising that the dog was closer to you than you were to him," Mingrui said, feeling "soft and sour" in her heart. The relationship between the dog and the man finally came to a head and was never the same.
Mingrui felt that, apart from not being able to talk, Steamed Bun was almost a human being. When Mingrui would pretend to be angry and say "I don't want you anymore", Steamed Bun would immediately act pitiful and walk with a limp to make Mingrui laugh. Every time Mingrui rolled over, Steamed Bun would poke his head up and check to make sure there was nothing unusual.
For 12 years, this was the case until one of them grew old.
The first thing that happened to Steamed Bun was the spine, like a herniated disc in humans, and its energy immediately went down a notch. The next thing that happened was that Steamed Bun developed a small pouch under his left eye. Mingrui thought it was a mosquito bag, and once when he was giving Steamed Bun a bath, he casually pressed it and it was hard. What was even more unusual was that the strong bun, who had always been silent when bumped, stammered and dodged this time.
A bad feeling came over him and Mingrui immediately took him to the hospital for an X-ray. The results showed that it was a tumour that had "eroded through the nasal bone". On the way home, Mingrui bawled as he drove, "[Steamed Bun is] 13 years old, can we save it", "but it's already in so much pain", and all sorts of voices came into his head.
Steamed Bun's weakness could no longer be concealed. A few days later in the evening, Mingrui conventionally touched Steamed Bun's body, which was originally warm and a little cold, Mingrui brought Steamed Bun's favorite orange, "Steamed Bun eat orange", no response, brought hawthorn slices, "this is his favorite", also no response.
At five o'clock that afternoon, Mingrui called her sister and husband one by one, asking them to go home and take Steamed Bun to the hospital, followed by a call to the doctor at the vet hospital, begging them to make sure to wait and wait for Steamed Bun to come over before leaving work. Her husband and sister rushed back immediately and carried Steamed Bun to the car, without Mingrui following.
The moment the car door was closed, the already weak Steamed Bun suddenly drew up his upper body and looked at Mingrui outside the car door, "The look in his eyes seemed to be saying, "Mom, why aren't you with me".
Mingrui felt the sky spinning and that was the last time they ever saw each other.
Story Two: The Funeral
Lv Jun instructed across the phone, a female voice on the other side crying up a storm, "Test your nose, feel your eyes, are they responding." The voice on the phone disappeared for a few seconds, "You put it on its back, I'll be right there."
Immediately put on his clothes and drove 30 kilometres, Lv Jun arrived at an old residential building in Shenzhen, the girl on the other end of the phone was standing downstairs, her eyes were red and swollen. Lv Jun put on gloves, put a non-breathing orange cat into a pet box and immediately set off back to the studio. He is a pet mortician, and there is a series of non-stop processes waiting for him.
The first step is to clean the stains and bring the pets back to their tidiest state, then to dry and comb them, take the tiny bodies to a trolley covered in white cloth, sprinkle them with rose petals and herbs and push them to a tree in the corner of the studio.
This tree was deliberately set up by Jun Lui. Scandinavian fairy tales believe that when a pet dies, its soul will follow a rainbow bridge to a fragrant meadow. The pets play and live there, waiting for their owners to come to this meadow years later, and then go to heaven together, never to be separated again. Because of space constraints, the studio could not set up a meadow, so Lu Jun used this tree instead, hoping that owners could say goodbye to their pets here.
"There is a time for everything, a time for everything; a time to live, a time to die; a time to cry, a time to laugh ...... Thank you for ever coming." Lu Jun mouthed a prayer from the Bible.
The girl looked down and stroked the orange cat, the feel of the fur already dry, and without a word, she couldn't stop stroking it, as if she never wanted to let go.
Fifty minutes later, the three-kilogram orange cat was reduced to a dozen grams of ashes.
The history of pets enjoying the same funeral rites as humans dates back 14,000 years. Researchers found that a small dog was buried around Bonn, Germany, at that time, lying with a man and a woman like a family member. Back then people would even destroy the graves of their ancestors so that the recently departed pets could be buried.
Today, not only dogs, but also cats, hamsters, lizards ...... some pets would even be treated better than many people at funerals. In Shanghai, pets can have a custom-made coffin and be carried in a hearse by several white-shirted and white-gloved butlers; in Guangzhou, pets can be covered with an "enlightened" cloth with scriptures written on it, and if the price is raised enough, monks can be invited to come directly to the funeral.
The cremation fee at Lv Jun's studio is RMB 590, the carriage fee is RMB 100 and the cleaning fee is between RMB 80-200 depending on the size of the animal, making the overall cost roughly the same as the monthly expenses of owning a pet.
Preparing a pet funeral shop is not too complicated, with a few hundred thousand dollars invested and two or three people equipped. The trouble lies in the qualifications. Existing funeral regulations are only for people, while the disposal of animal carcasses is subject to air pollution, hazardous waste and odorous pollutant emission norms, more like the disposal of rubbish.
Stuck in the middle, pet funerals have no corresponding management department and no laws or regulations to identify them. Lv Jun has run back and forth between the Civil Affairs Bureau and the Ministry of Environmental Protection to find out how pet funerals should be qualified and licensed, all to no avail. In the end, he was only able to register as a pet service company when he filed with the Trade and Industry Bureau.
Two years ago, the Department of Epidemiology and the Market Supervision Authority came together and asked Lv Jun to close the company immediately, citing the lack of qualifications and the possibility of spreading the New Coronavirus. "Animal remains may have bacteria, and during the epidemic, the whole area will be punished in case something goes wrong." The staff said to Lv Jun.
The sobbing orange cat mistress cried out her grief to her best friend across the mobile phone screen. Lv Jun is used to it. He has received same-sex couples who couldn't let go of their pets until they were cremated; he has also received rich people who talk about not wanting to let go of their pets, but actually don't care about them at all and let their bodies rot and stink; there are also staff who have accompanied many pets on their last journey and then sent their own pets away here by hand.
I remember once receiving an older man, in his fifties, carrying a "flashy" LV bag and bringing a golden fur to the cremation. From the moment he entered, he had a bad attitude and did not cooperate with any process.
After the cremation was over, Lu Jun stole a glance at the uncle, who was sitting upright, trembling with cross flesh and in tears.
After getting the ashes, customers can choose to take them home or leave them to the merchants. If the owner wants, the merchants can also provide jewellery made from the ashes, diamonds, or make the pet into a taxidermy. One girl who runs a cattery jerked a handful of hair from each of the shop's 30 or so cats, added her own little poke of hair and made a 2-carat man-made diamond. "It's like having their souls sealed."
Story 3: Genetic preservation
Some people choose to preserve their pet's genes while they are still alive if they want to take it a step further and keep it.
This is the previous step in pet cloning. There are several organisations worldwide that offer pet cloning services, and for owners who are unsure, they will recommend preserving genes first. They claim that these genes can be preserved forever and are ready for cloning - if the owner intends to 'extend' the life of the pet in this way.
To Lady Luck decided to buy this "regret pill". Her separation anxiety came early, when Crackle was three years old and she began to worry about her life without him. When Jing decided to leave Beijing to start her own business in Hangzhou, she bought the lion-like cat from a Russian online friend.
"He started the business with me, and I made a baby with him."
After finding the phone number of a pet cloning facility online and negotiating a price to set a time, she went to the facility's surgery. It's a small room, similar to a pet hospital operating room. Crackle was nestled in her arms, quiet and soft.
The doctor found a spot on Crackle's inner thigh and, using a small forceps scalpel, quickly removed a piece of skin. The kitten didn't know what was happening and "didn't even scream". Its skin tissue floats in a test tube with a pale red culture solution, like a cloud of dust.
In the corner of the operating theatre are three liquefied gas tank-like containers of pressurised liquid nitrogen at -186°C, holding 1,000 animal cells waiting to be 'cultured'. When the time comes, these cells will be revived and brought to life again.
The 19,000 package for ten years (there are also packages for one, three and five years) was chosen, giving her a long period of time to consider whether to clone.
A month later, a certificate of genetic preservation arrived by courier, listing the total number of frozen cells available for crackling cloning.
Jinglu did not open the package, "the regret pill had been bought and the heart had been put down."
Story four: cloning
Mr and Mrs Li squatted, looking eagerly at the little puppies separated behind the fence, "Baby who am I?" they were asking. The puppies didn't respond well and Mrs Lee naturally reached her hand into the glass gap and the puppy moved closer, sticking out its tongue a little.
They were in a pet cloning facility called Hino Valley and in front of them was a clone of their pet dog, Li Shuyuan. Li Shuyuan is a mixed breed dog that Lee's girlfriend fell in love with at first sight when they met on the street in 2001. They bought him and gave him a personal name. The girlfriend then became Mrs Li and the family moved from Beijing to overseas, back again and had children ...... Li Shuyuan was with the family until it died of breast cancer in 2018.
Scientists categorised the act of having a pet into four levels: basic (having water and food and being looked after), standard (having someone to play with every day), enrichment (having their own toys and being able to access any area of the home at will) and luxury (special birthday parties, pet entertainment videos and being taken to events just for pets). The study found that owners' dependence on their pets correlated with which level of care they provided.
By this standard, Li Shu Yuan lives far beyond luxury. She went off dog food at an early age, would eat fine lamb and seafood, followed her owner around the seaside, desert and grassland, and saw almost every famous landscape on the planet. He was the first member of the family, so much so that any children born to Lee later could only be referred to as younger brothers.
So when Li Shuyuan left, Li felt a huge hole dug into his heart that desperately needed to be filled - he wanted to clone Li Shuyuan.
Half an hour later, the handover ceremony began. Little Sook-won was taken out of the enclosure by the staff and handed over to Mr Lee to be photographed.
In the photo, little Sook-won's eyes, the way her mouth opened and closed, the way her eyes rose upwards like Cleopatra's, were exactly the same as when Mrs Lee took the photo of young Sook-won Lee.
It had also been a long time since she had held this weight of Li Shuyuan, a Li Shuyuan she could hold with one hand and gently.
Cloning a pet is not as difficult as one might think. But the demand has always been niche. There are currently only three companies in China offering a similar service, and worldwide, only a handful of companies in South Korea and the US publicly claim to offer it.
Hino Valley will promote cloning, but the discounted price for a cloned cat still costs 100,000. Dogs, on the other hand, are rarely promoted and they have recently launched a service to clone famous stallions, which at first glance shows the height of the threshold.
Cloning does not mean 100% restoration; genetic information is not only present in the nucleus but also in the mitochondria outside the nucleus. When cloning, the latter will come from a donor egg cell, so some traits of the cloned pet may not be different from the original.
Hino Valley explains the real cloning process: the surrogate dogs come from Beagles using the internationally accepted standard laboratory dog. A Beagle is selected when it has mature physical characteristics and happens to be in oestrus. The technician flushes a mature egg from her oviduct, enucleates it in vitro, transplants it into the nucleus of the clone itself, activates it in vitro and then transfers the embryo back into the oviduct of the surrogate dog.
To increase the success rate of the clone, 30 mature oocytes are usually taken from multiple Beagles and transferred into the uterus of each of the three surrogate dogs. If the surrogate dog does not miscarry and no internal absorption of the embryo occurs, she will give birth to the cloned dog in about 60 days. The newly born clones will be observed in the institution's incubator for two months before being handed over to their owners.
The surrogate dogs, on the other hand, will return to the base to recuperate and, when conditions are suitable, they will continue to perform their duties as laboratory animals. Heino Valley emphasises that the animal welfare of the surrogates is guaranteed throughout the process and at one point offered to adopt a surrogate dog. However, this event was eventually suspended because of specific handling regulations for laboratory animals.
"The fate of dogs is different, but so is the fate of people," says Lee, "that's the way nature rules."
But he had his own dilemma with the cloned Li Suyuan, of which there were two.
Coming to an end
Lv Jun's funeral shop has opened a branch and has been redecorated. He has added a new "Chinese" farewell area. With scripture quilts, oil lamps and a scripture copying table ...... his business continues to carry the love or regret of owners for their pets.
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