Cleaning table, freezer, farewell room, grinder, memorial hall, prayer wall.
This is a pet burial facility called Rainbow Planet. In six months, 400 small animals worked here after the opening of the shop in Beijing's Zhongyang district.
In these little lives, there are dogs who have been misdiagnosed by the hospital for over a month, but who have ended up suffering to an eight-month-old dog who is unable to walk; cats who end up dead and are soft before dying; parrots who suffer from depression and peck their bodies to the ground; and frogs who have lived in the world for more than a year for a short period.
Death is the least new thing here. But the masters who send small animals, in the face of death, are very different.
The old man was so excited to say, "How cute my dog is" when he sent his dog to his family for more than a decade, he suddenly realized that he had left and said nothing.
A young man who doesn't say a word, a young man with red eyes, finishes the process in silence, comes alone, goes alone and never returns.
The tough guy who works at the funeral home, who sees his life and his death, jokes to the staff of Rainbow Planet, and says, "We're on the same team," but in the moment when the dog gets well, he cries.
Wang Young-Ho, the co-founder of Rainbow Planet, spoke to Deep Voices about these things in a very comfortable manner. We sat on the couch in the pet memorial, in a cell on the opposite wall, with urn boxes, small tombstones and toys and snacks that they loved.
"Death is a heavy thing, but it's easy for the owner to talk about pets." Wang Young-ho told him, "Deep, he was a furniture designer who joined the pet funeral industry a year ago. “I thought there would be a lot of negative sentiment after working every day, but that was not the case. It's a place that keeps witnessing warmness."
Rapid economic growth and isolation.
In 2020, the number of urban dogs and cats in the country exceeded 100 million and the size of the consumer market expanded to 206.5 billion yuan. The industry is becoming richer around the pet economy: dry foods, frozen drying, snacks, nutrients; daily supplies, toys, clothing, smart equipment; medical institutions, pet hospitals; and services such as bathing, foster care, training, the arts, etc.
According to data from Kyoto this year, on 1 June, eight hours after opening, Kyoto pets were traded more than they were all over the past year. The number of one-hour transactional users of pets increased by 189 per cent in the day before 18 June, when the turnover of pet businesses increased by 18 times. During 618, the Potchi network, the head office of the pet market and the New York office, published data, reached $234 million in GMV for all pets, with orders weighing over 4.81 million kilograms.
Ultimately, however, all pets will face a common problem — they will leave. What has to be done is to say goodbye to them and to the memories of life associated with them.
The end of the pet economy is burial.
A decent leave.
The remains of pets are handled in several ways: at no cost, randomly abandoned, buried on their own, sent to a dedicated animal body disposal facility in the municipal sector, and cremated in a pet burial facility.
Random abandonment and the way in which the garbage is handled together are ruthless and extremely dangerous. When animals die, failure to treat them harmlessly may result in the survival of bacteria and bacteria attached to the body, endangering the environment, other animals and people ' s lives.
Although the data are not available, self-burial is a choice for many owners who wish to accompany their pets to the ground.
"In the summer of 2018, he didn't want to be so sick in his old days that he chose peace, then buried in a place near his home, with water and grass." According to a dog owner.
"The family read him the Book and buried it." Another pet owner said that her family had been home for six years and had died last week as a result of a car accident, and she was still reluctant to recall the scene.
In fact, the burial of animal bodies is explicitly required, far from schools, public places, residential areas, villages, animal breeding and slaughtering sites, drinking water sources, rivers, etc.; deep burials, incubation; animal bodies and the ground environment after burial should be sprayed with effective disinfectant.
The state-built system for the treatment of animal harmless includes the collection of temporary storage and treatment systems. In Beijing, for example, it was reported that animal corpses that needed to be disposed of harmlessly, including farm farms, slaughtershops, animal isolation sites and pets raised, were cleared and disposed of by sanitation operators after they were delivered or put into collection sites, with the costs covered by public finances and no fees paid by businesses and citizens.
For pet owners, however, this approach, which has no emotional attachment, may be difficult to accept.
Specialized pet burial facilities are emerging in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and Hangzhou, as well as in new cities, such as Rainbow Planet and the Beijing region.
In a pet funeral home such as this one, pets are cleaned up by pets, leaving their owners in the farewell room with pets for final farewells, leaving their pet marks (crunches, claws, etc.) to be commemorated, after which they are placed in freezers and cremated.
This is a highly customized service that changes both the content of the service and the corresponding price depending on the pet ' s condition and the owner ' s needs. For example, commodities such as urn boxes, memorial lockets, urn diamonds and pet specimens are available.
Specialized funeral services are less well known among the pet population than the rest of the pet economy.
“Many clients told us that they had no idea of such a service until the pet left, did not know what to do, asked friends, and only came into contact with the place where he was doing it.” The founder, Li, told “Deep Sound.”
In 2015, his pet dog JoJo died of epilepsy, but could not find a funeral facility that would allow Jojo to leave with dignity. He quit his job and went to pet funerals. At that time, the professional pet rehabilitation industry was largely empty at the national level, with poor facilities in cremating institutions, rough handling and even sit-in prices. He and his colleagues came up with a little bit of a professional standard service process.
“Now, the perception of the profession among some of the population is still very early, considering it to be `ift', `twilight'. Our client base is largely built up by reputation."
In the pet funeral industry, there is also a workshop dedicated to the design of souvenir goods, like Q Planet.
After many years of age with his dog Q, Wu Q will always worry about his departure. Also in 2015, she designed the first pet urns, a lovely wooden house with the pet's name and what the owner wanted to say.
She has a number for each small life, recorded on the Micro-Intelligence Public number, which now stands at 7243. 7243 is a little brown Teddy, "2011.5.20 – 2021.6.16 Thank you for spending your life with us and for loving you forever."
QPlanet's motto is “Let's live and die, let's live”. Wu Zheng said, “Everyone is avoiding talking about death, but it's a normal thing. I want to create this comforting, bright, clean feeling."
Old, dead, long and universal. It was the intention of Wang Young-ho, Li and Wu Zhong not only to respect every life, but also to express the hope that each and every master would learn from these feelings of ritualism and better say goodbye.
The price of death.
The increase in the number of pet owners and their capacity to consume, as well as their emotional attachment to pets, have led to a larger market for pet funerals.
As of November 2020, more than 1,200 new businesses (all businesses) had been established in the country, representing an increase of 447 per cent over the total number of enterprises of historical relevance. The percentage of pet owners earning more than $4,000 per month was 77.7 per cent, reaching 30.1 per cent per month.
On the popular comment page, a search for specialized pet burial facilities in Beijing has been carried out, with a per capita consumption of $1802 on the rainbow planet, $995 in favour and $1281 on top of the mountain. If death is a business, can it make money? Is it possible to survive a rehabilitation institution that grows spring after rain?
In the final analysis, the product of the pet burial industry is a service.
It is true that professional services are expensive per unit, but the client base is small and the length of service by individual users is also a fact. Li told “Deep Ring” that, by communicating with his Taiwan colleagues, he had learned that there were more than 100 pet funerals in Taiwan, and that there was a head pet funeral facility in Taipei, with about 500 to 600 a month, but not one fifth of that number at most.
Wang Ying Hao has a similar perception, and although the data has fluctuated, it is about three units per day, or 100 units per month on average. This compares to the amount of pet holdings in the Beijing region, and it can be seen that this method is ultimately chosen to leave the pet owner very few.
They also said that, since its inception, there had not been a significant increase in the number of individual numbers in recent years, either because of the larger number of peers or because the service had never really entered the public eye.
The cost of doing this is not low.
The bulk is rent. The location is subject to several considerations: it cannot be too remote and relatively easy to transport; it is wide enough to give guests enough quiet and private space; and most painfully, the property industry cannot hide the matter. Both the pet and the rainbow planets have experienced relocations, and in the selection of their shop sites, owners have been unable to understand it and have refused to lend them the place.
In terms of equipment, mainly cremators. Prices for cremation equipment vary widely from tens to hundreds of thousands. Low-cost cremators are subject to emissions irregularities and security risks.
Recruitment is also a challenge. There are a number of people interested in the profession of pet funeralists out of a sense of wonder. Indeed, it is “deeply” understood that the current body is understaffed.
The high cost of training new staff, how to handle animal remains, how to take care of the mood of guests, and how to cope with some of the bad scenes require time to develop.
It's also a year-round industry where death doesn't pick a day.
It's common for guests to call at midnight. “One of the guests came over at 3 a.m. to say goodbye to the pets, and then waited for our colleagues in cremation to work during the day. I'll be with the guests, I'll watch the sun rise, and I'll turn around all the time."
This has also led to the suspension of his plans to open a branch and scale. In this service-oriented industry, the mere neglect of a customer ' s needs may lead to a loss of reputation.
At the policy level, the inadequacy of the laws and regulations themselves, “no, no, no” situations, sometimes embarrassing the industry.
How do you price the services and goods of the pet rehabilitation industry, which are actually “emotional consumption”? The high profit margin is the customisation of the urn stones and the production of these services, but there are few clients who really need them. The Agency has also attempted to land on cloning, space burials (spreading animal ashes into outer space) and so on, but mostly, in Li's words, “such guests are not few, they are rare”. Therefore, the costs are amortized on general services. Declining prices are only possible when there are more market customers in general, otherwise institutional survival will be under pressure.
Have a good trip.
When the industry does not have a climate, the problems are always similar.
It is common for peer-to-peer rivalry to report, price wars and pretend to be a client. Moreover, high levels of decentralization now make it difficult for industries to work together, and many links are still missing, such as how to work with pet hospitals, other pet community platforms, communities, etc.
The IT orange estimate shows that the size of the Chinese pet services market in 2020 was approximately $5,427 million. The breakdown of the market includes, inter alia, pet services, pet foster care/training and other services, of which the market for pet services was the highest, with around 34.698 billion market sizes in 2020, about 17.349 billion market sizes for living services, and about 2,168 million market sizes for leisure and recreation, pet funerals and others.
The funeral industry as a whole is small, the education market is slow, and there are social stereotypes. One of these institutions, to continue to do so, can only say, “Be careful”.
Sometimes, in the face of life and death, pets enter a difficult moral choice.
Specifically, like a pet? Li said that there was a rigorous internal auditing mechanism, which allowed animals to live well. There are also customers who bring well-healthed pets and ask for peace, but animals who do not meet the requirements of peace “don't pay the customer any amount”.
On one occasion, the guest brought a sick bulldog to the rainbow planet, knowing that it had little hope of healing and considering giving it peace. The master was reluctant to let it suffer. Before deciding on peace, the guests met another couple who had just given away the depressed parrot and saw the bulldog. Destiny is that their bulldogs were similar before, but eventually cured. Minutes of conversation gave encouragement and hope to the masters, who decided to continue their treatment, and bulldogs who ended up avoiding their happy fate.
The change of attitudes and customs is never overnight. The pet consumer market is hot, and the quiet pet funeral home is not enough. There are many things people in the industry want to do, to make a commemorative exhibition for the leaving pets, to make books to commemorate their lives in the world, to create a community for the lost owners...
"We put the ashes in the cathedral, and there's a lot of other kids around. It's nice, and when it's nice, he can tan in it." The 15-year-old dog left, and the owner sent it away, and he wrote on the popular comment page.