A pet cemetery will help cut down on the 4,000 animal carcasses sent to Wasteserv, according to a project report.
The Rural Development Department applied to build a pet cemetery that would include an incinerator to cremate small animals in February.
The project’s impact report notes that more than 4,000 animal carcasses are sent to Wasteserv, the government’s waste disposal agency, every year and the cemetery would help them “handle this waste”.
Even though burying pets in gardens is illegal and owners have the option of cremating them at the Marsa incinerator, many object to treating their pets as waste, the report says.
In the absence of a pet cemetery, owners were therefore likely to bury their pets in the garden, which gave rise to health and environmental safety issues.
It acknowledges that the loss of a pet could cause stress and the grief felt “is unique”. The ritual of cremation or burial “can be an important part of the healing process and acceptance of the loss of a pet” making it vital that the pet cemetery operations were carried out correctly with dignity.
“People were still not able to recover the ashes from the Marsa abattoir, which might lead them to choose to bury their pets in their backyard,” the report points out.
The cemetery, earmarked for Ta’ Qali, will cover about 1,900 square metres where people will be able to place an urn with their pets’ ashes in free-standing walls.
The project will be run on the basis of a private-public partnership and compartments will be against payment. An incinerator, which usually costs about £10,500, and a burial preparation room will be built in the centre of the cemetery, surrounded by rows of burial walls having 17,000 compartments of about 30cm by 30cm.
People can also choose to cremate their pet and take the remains home.
EU regulations do not allow a cemetery for animal carcasses because dead pets are considered to be animal by-products that must be burnt.
The only way to build a cemetery for animals is to have an incinerator, with the ashes then being buried, unless the country applied for a derogation to bury animals but this would take a long time and burying carcasses required a large area of land.
The site is next to the national park – outside the ring road and opposite the site where hawkers set up their stalls on Sunday – adjacent to the animal hospital.
The incinerator will operate at temperatures above 100˚C to ensure complete combustion and no emission of hazardous gases.