ON CORPSES, MAINLY ANIMAL

by Emma Bielecki

The Franco-Bulgarian psychoanalyst and (here I beg your indulgence, anticipating rolling eyes) critical theorist, Julia Kristeva, describes the corpse as the paradigmatic abject object: ‘The corpse (or cadaver: cadere, to fall), that which has irremediably come a cropper, is cesspool, and death; it upsets even more violently the one who confronts it as fragile and fallacious chance. […] The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection.’ I have seen two dead bodies in my life, but never cesspool and death, never a corpse in Kristeva’s sense. The first was in a hospice, already laid out for viewing. (It was apparently assumed that we would all want to view the body; we did not all want to view the body.) The second in a hospital, still warm the last time I kissed… here the sentence comes a cropper: of the two pronouns available to me, it and him, neither seems appropriate. But both bodies were in any case tended to by professionals, safely cocooned in the embrace of science and, if not God, at least the NHS.  

Two dead bodies, therefore, never a corpse. But of course in saying that I realise it is not true. I have seen corpses, just not human ones. I have seen dozens, scores of dead animals in the process of dissolution – temerarious foxes, unlucky hedgehogs, Jackson Pollocked pigeons. When I was a child encounters with carrion elicited a clear confusion of disgust, fear and fascination, an emotional compound which belongs to my childhood as much as the sting of Savlon sprayed on a scraped knee and the taste of Battenberg. It’s a compound I have never experienced as an adult. I’ve mastered a choreography of avoidance – the quick turn of the head, saccade of the eyeballs, sudden hop to the side – to keep the corpse at the periphery. And should the physical gestures fail there is now an unbreachable psychological barrier, whereas a child, even a prim little girl in a smocked dress, is still a feral thing, close to the quick of being, and to the dead.

Two categories of corpse then, in a reassuring taxonomy: human / animal; sacred / profane; cemetery / landfill. Under European pollution protection and control laws all pet cemeteries are landfill sites; since 2007, following lobbying on the part of pet cemetery owners, they have been exempt from the landfill tax. Pets disrupt the taxonomy. Never having had a pet myself, the question of animal burial only presented itself to me a few years ago, when I saw what may or may not have been a dead dog. (Here again the language comes a cropper. Dead dog: the alliteration and the spondee combine to make the locution comically blunt, but I can think of no alternative that is not comically precious.) It was high summer in Leicester Square, when the town belongs to tourists. I don’t remember what took me to Leicester Square, but I do remember seeing a homeless man sitting by the entrance to the Tube, his dog – a staffie perhaps? A bull terrier of some sort – stretched out beside him, head in his lap, eyes closed. The man was stroking the dog’s flank. For some reason the gesture caught my eye. I walked past, uneasy with an unfamiliar kind of unease and trying to work out why. The dog’s flank had been, I began to think, preternaturally still: I could not recall seeing any rise and fall. The more I thought about it the more convinced I became that the dog had died, to the general indifference of the company. 

What worried me was the practical aspect: how does one dispose of a dead dog? On one of the hottest days of the year this was a pressing concern and options seemed limited: a bundle left outside a vet’s or heaved over the side of a bridge. The latter is illegal under section 60 of the Metropolitan Police Act of 1839, which criminalizes the act of throwing or causing to fall into any sewer, pipe, or drain, or into any well, stream, or watercourse, pond, or reservoir for water, any carrion, fish, offal or rubbish. The vet’s it is then. People whose dogs die at home have more options.  They can call their veterinarian and arrange a cremation, or, according to the Purina pet food website, call ‘another service, such as a company that can assist with dead dog disposal’. What are the other companies one might call on at such as a time? In Errol Morris’s documentary Gates of Heaven, it is a rendering plant that competes with a pet cemetery for the custom of the bereaved. 

In the UK, pet owners can also bury their dog – or cat or hamster, but not horse – in their garden, or more specifically in the garden of the house in which their pet was living at the time of its death, without permission and without having to worry about the groundwater protection regulations. Such practices are part of a long tradition. Alexander the Great, who regarded the world as his back garden, buried his horse where he fell, killed in action on the banks of the Hydaspes (in modern-day Punjab), and founded a city, Alexandria Bucephalus, on the site. Lord Byron buried Boatswain, his Newfoundland, in the park of Newstead Abbey. The epitaph he composed for the monument provided an opportunity for a venting of Romantic spleen:

Oh man! thou feeble tenant of an hour,Debased by slavery, or corrupt by power -Who knows thee well, must quit thee with disgust,Degraded mass of animated dust!Thy love is lust, thy friendship all a cheat,Thy tongue hypocrisy, thy heart deceit!By nature vile, ennobled but by name,Each kindred brute might bid thee blush for shame.Ye, who behold perchance this simple urn,Pass on - it honours none you wish to mourn.To mark a friend’s remains these stones arise;I never knew but one - and here he lies.

Eminent Victorian Henry Cole (whose bland designation as ‘official’ in the Dictionary of National Biography conceals a multitude of accomplishments, not least the invention of the Christmas card) buried his dogs, Tycho and Jimmy, in the garden of the Victoria & Albert Museum where, in his capacity as its first director, he lived. Two commemorative plaques are visible in the Madejski courtyard. (His diaries mention a third dog, Pickles: final resting place unknown.)  

You can also bury your pet in a pet cemetery. The best known in London is in Hyde Park, late Victorian and no longer freely accessible to the public, although a staple of ‘Secret London’ guidebooks which present it as kooky or quirky or twee. The Royal Parks sometimes organize walking tours; it is advertised as ‘a quiet corner of Hyde Park [which] is a touching reminder of the special relationship that can exist between animals and humans’. Piety is not, however, the only emotional experience the tour promises the visitor: ‘The walk takes in Tyburn – where thousands of people were executed over the centuries – plus Speakers’ Corner, Reformer’s Tree and other gloomy stories that bring to life Hyde Park’s dark heritage’. It is not entirely obvious, at least to me, why a pet cemetery should necessarily be ranged in the same category as the spot where, for centuries, traitors were hanged, drawn and quartered. Maybe the frisson is in the juxtaposition of the two: the care lavished on animals and the cruelty visited on men. In any case the story of the pet cemetery appears as part of a bygone age. Not so bygone as all that, perhaps; present-day animal mourning rites remain close to Victorian practices. Cremation jewellery (pendants, bracelets, lockets and rings); plaster-cast paw prints; hand-blown glassware infused with ashes; keepsakes made with fur clippings – a Google search reveals a whole panoply of objects available for purchase, redolent of the age of bombazine and antimacassars. In general a peculiarly Dickensian admixture of the macabre and sentimental perfuses animal mourning practices. 

This odd unsteady compound arises because animal mourning rituals are at the confluence of two ambiguities: how we think about pets, and how we think about death. It is a commonplace that modern society finds it difficult to accommodate death, and that modern society’s failure to accommodate death is, in a general sense, a bad thing. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, of five stages fame, entitled one of her books Living with Death and Dying, a title which is half indicative, half optative. That the Kübler-Ross model, which began as the five stages of dying, reached popular consciousness in the form of the five stages of grief, itself points to the very marginalisation of death against which its inventor cautioned. We seem to have lost touch with the dead – touch being the operative word. Images of death, as of everything, proliferate. But few of us will ever perform the last offices. We no longer bring out our dead. Wakes used to be pre-burial vigils where mourners passed the night around the open coffin; nowadays the term is used, nonsensically, to refer to post-burial gatherings. People are less likely now to die at home than in what one imagines their managers might refer to as facilities. The Office for National Statistics tells us that in 2016, 46.9% of deaths occurred in hospitals, 21.8% in residential or care homes, 5.7% in hospices, and less 23.5% at home. (What of the 2.1% unaccounted for, the placeless – in increasing numbers homeless – dead?) This is why death professionals such as hospice staff encourage relatives to view the body; why social workers resolutely refuse to use expressions like passed away, bluntly insisting on dead; why parents who have suffered a late-term miscarriage are encouraged to hold their child. 

Pet deaths in this context are ambivalent. On the one hand the widespread use of euthanasia evidences a degree of rationalisation still fiercely contested in the realm of the human. On the other hand, the death of a pet is a more private matter than the death of a person. Whatever else a human death may be, it is always a bureaucratic event, and bureaucracy is a reliable anodyne. But the state does not concern itself with pet deaths. Emotionally overwhelming for many, they nonetheless have to be worked through in the margins of their daily lives. As a result, animal mourning practices are less standardized than human ones. In St Pancras and Islington Pet Cemetery, one of the headstones is engraved with an epitaph to a certain Brisco: ‘You was the purest thing in my life’. You hear the London accent there, with the verb unmarked for person; human headstones more generally speak RP. There is a DIY quality involved in pet burials, which is doubtless what accounts for the creepiness of pet cemeteries relative to human ones. In a human cemetery the rows of heavy headstones, granite or marble, with granite or marble kerbs, the burial vaults and mausoleums – all convey the idea that the dead are securely consigned to the earth, weighed down too heavily to allow for the possibility of escape, encased in individual coffins to prevent seepage and ooze and a promiscuous mingling of fluids. In contrast, the shallow graves of pets with their diminutive headstones and no kerbs, or at best flimsy wooden pickets to demarcate the plot, are much less successful in occulting the knowledge that something is decaying just beneath the surface. Conversely, back-garden burials for pets seem appropriate, whereas for humans they seem gruesome. A secluded spot, a hand-dug grave, a body in a winding sheet – if the body is animal-shaped this is touching; if the body is human-shaped, it belongs in a Bundy biopic. Companion animals after all are symbols and stewards of domesticity, our household gods, and private, family rituals seem best suited to mark their passing. Eccentricity is licensed in animal funeral rites, viewed with suspicion in human ones. 

The most obvious difference between what is generally deemed acceptable when it comes to dead animals as against dead humans is in the realm of taxidermy. At university I knew someone who planned to have his beloved childhood dog stuffed and mounted on wheels post mortem (nowadays he could opt to have the carcass freeze-dried, a technique marketed as providing a more life-like appearance). That sort of thing would, pace Norman Bates, be an unusual way to treat the body of a beloved human. Extreme embalming, a technique that enables corpses to be posed in tableaux at their funerals – playing videogames, riding a motorcycle, enjoying a mojito – differs in that the bodies are not taken home afterwards and propped up in the sitting-room. It is essentially a twist on a traditional wake; there is no promise of permanence as there is in taxidermy. Permanence is, on the other hand, central to the practice of preserving the bodies of political leaders, displayed for the veneration of a grateful nation, or that of exhibiting the exhumed remains of saints. In both cases, secular and religious, the corpse, its decomposition arrested, symbolises an escape from the order of time, either as a result of the end of history or the promise of life everlasting. The taxidermy specimen also promises life everlasting; it is a fetish to ward off death. Perhaps this is why many commercial taxidermists refuse pet commissions – the work is unusually complex and the customer can never be satisfied. Paradoxically of course, if the stuffed and mounted pet can fulfil its role as immortality fetish, whereas the stuffed and mounted human is at best grotesque and at worst a scandal, it is only because of the basic assumption that animals lack something humans possess, conventionally referred to as a soul.  

I never had a pet growing up. I am told this is why I have the allergies that mean I have never had a pet since; had I grown up around animals apparently I would have developed some sort of tolerance. It is one of the benefits, people say, of having a pet as a child. The other benefit, people say, is that it teaches children about mortality, that all things have their season, as if this might later enable them better to tolerate grief. But on the contrary, maybe the function of pets is to provide an illusion of immortality. In her book Topsy: the Story of a Golden-Haired Chow, Princess Marie Bonaparte – Freud’s patient and later herself an eminent psychoanalyst, co-founder of the Société psychoanalytique de Paris – writes that in her dog’s eyes she must be not only omnipotent but also eternal, his alpha and omega. To have a pet is to be able to see yourself as a god. A companion animal, almost certain to pre-decease you, is an obstacle between you and death, a screen that can temporarily conceal the reality of human mortality. Dogs were first domesticated to guard livestock, and many dogs are still employed to keep their humans safe. But this protective function is not just physical, but psychological, keeping our minds safe from importunate thoughts.  Certainly on a hot day in Leicester Square I was happy to be able to worry about the dog, and not about its owner.