Rethinking death

Not death so much, but funerals.

As Junior and I were driving back from Toronto today we had the CBC on the car radio, and the presenter posed the question, "with the polar bears' natural habitat shrinking, should we consider feeding them ourselves?"

Now I know she didn't intend to suggest, or at least I assume she didn't, that we consider feeding ourselves to the bears.

But let's think this through.

I'm willing to bet that there's more than a few folks who would be amenable to having their mortal coil left to nature once their souls go to where ever it is that souls go.

When I kick the bucket, why can't the the Farm Manager just have me laid out in the back woodlot for the black bears and the vultures and the coyotes? In the more northerly climes the job would fall to the polar bears. In Kenya it would be the lions, etc.

When you think about it, this is an eminently reasonable idea. Cemeteries take up a lot of valuable real estate and cost a lot to maintain. Being recycled as bear excrement is far better for the environment.

So Junior points out that this wouldn't work in locales where there are no bears, polar or otherwise, or lions, etc.

The zoo! Popping the cadavers over the fence at the lion enclosure would draw an entirely new clientele to the zoo, and would also save the zoo a bundle on the food budget!

Junior has got pretty good critical thinking chops, and right away he comes up with a reasonable objection; who wants to take their three year old to the zoo to see the polar bears munching on dear old grand-dad?

Simple solution - do the feeding in a "premium zone" from which small children and squeamish types can be excluded. The folks who have been waiting their entire lives to see dear old grand-dad ripped to shreds would happily fork over an extra twenty bucks for the opportunity.

I think this could catch on. Your hard-core back-to-nature types would be all over it. Folks who just want to save the cost of a funeral would go along with it. The bears and the lions would approve.

The big obstacle is going to be the funeral directors lobby.