funeral directors

The word ‘progressive’ is overused and overrated

15 April 2013
Charles
14 Comments
Categories: funeral directors, funeral trends, Marketing

Posted by Richard Rawlinson

A follow-up to Charles Cowling’s thirst-quenching piece about the need for independent undertakers to blow their trumpets louder to steal market share from the corporate chains, here. 

It’s my hunch that some indies should stop perceiving themselves as niche, fringe and progressive, and instead project themselves as mainstream.

Why? There’s an abundance of eco-aware, price-conscious, non-religious, internet-savvy folk out there who see all their traits as the norm, unremarkable. They don’t book an atheist or new age civil celebrant to make a political stand against organised religion, but because their choice seems second nature. They don’t order a picnic hamper-style coffin and woodland burial ground as an eco-campaign against gratuitous embalming, but because it’s right for their personal needs. Ditto when they choose a budget funeral director to drive the body to the early-morning crem slot, and then deliver the ashes to the bereaved to do with them what they want, when they want.

People are used enough to variety in the market place not to feel radical when choosing a bespoke indie over a corporate brand. I became aware of this when recently furnishing a weekend escape in Clifton, Bristol. My first port of call was the internet as the Saturday shopping scrum is purgatory after a week in the office. Shopping from home, you can readily find the price and style you want with purchases delivered to your door. Sometimes, an online retailer has gained trust as a familiar high street brand, but other times you discover a hidden gem: I couldn’t resist a portrait made from driftwood by a guy in Cornwall—visitors gasp at its uncanny likeness to yours truly.

IKEA may be a success but there are those who feel nauseous at the inconvenience of shopping in an out-of-town warehouse, having to assemble purchases themselves and ending up with rickety tat. John Lewis succeeds among those content to pay a bit more for quality and service. Then again, I bypassed both when opting for a Georgian bureau, ordered online from an antique dealer as far afield as Yorkshire: the craftsmanship and romance of secret drawers couldn’t be matched by contemporary brands. Antiques also allow you to feel smug about recycling and supporting the little man.

The Cornwall artisan or antique dealer sniffed out online wouldn’t class themselves as ‘progressive’, with its undertones of challenging the status quo. Like Camra real ales, they’re in fact charmingly timeless, nostalgic even.

Despite commercial claims to the contrary, there’s little that’s new and much to be learned from past traditions. Live music at funerals is certainly not progressive. It’s superb that groups of musicians and singers (Malu Swayne’s No Sad Songs and Tim Clark’s Threnody are enriching ceremonies with music, but the concept is, thankfully, as old as the hills. Only it’s been lost in the modern age.

Crematoria were deemed genuinely progressive when they were introduced in the early 20th century. Today’s quest for more meaning and ritual is an acceptance that modernism in fact destroyed much that we cherish. It’s time to wind back the clock.

The Socialist Workers’ Party no doubt thought it was progressive to put on the cover of its newspaper a mock-up of Margaret Thatcher’s gravestone and the words ‘Rejoice’ . In fact they expose themselves as nasty dinosaurs while Maggie goes down in history as the Prime Minister who achieved more true progress than any other in recent times when it came to changing Britain for the better.

It would be progress if independent undertakers were perceived, not as fringe campaigners, but as mainstream companies that have rejected the profit-driven, merchandise-centric practices of the corporates. In grief in particular, people see financial manipulation as a betrayal of trust. The emphasis of any communications that reach out to the public should be on serving the emotional and spiritual needs of funeral planners. The indies should make a commodity out of traditional services and products and establish a new experienced-based value and pricing formula.
 Their strength should be to guide a family through the arrangement process and towards healing.


Customer expectations are low. Market opportunity is high for those who successfully become a part of the healing professions. Maggie would be so proud.

No place like home

11 April 2013
Charles
22 Comments
Categories: funeral directors, Marketing

Now that most funeral directors have a website it’s a good time to review the way they receive visitors on their home page. It’s a darn difficult one to get right and no mistaking. After all, no one wants to buy a funeral. So how do you allay fears, define and differentiate yourself,  inspire warmth and trust? How do you address needs and wishes when you’ve only got a five seconds to hook them?

Here are some draft tips for FDs. I hope you will hone them with your customary no-holds-barred comments – and add some of your own.

Go easy on the ancestors

It’s cool to show your roots but they don’t actually make you any better than lots of first-generation businesses. Make genealogy relevant — and for goodness’ sake make sense. Avoid:

As a 5th generation independent family run concern, our success depends on your satisfaction.

Don’t make a bad thing worse

The last thing they want to hear is this: 

When you suffer bereavement, a funeral for a member of your family is the most difficult day of your life.

Park the cars

Funeral shoppers are looking for nice people, not people with nice cars. To most of them, all hearses look the same. 

Hide your status anxiety

Leading a funeral procession is a role you play. The first person they want to see in a photo is the real you.  Lighten up on the black and the fancy clobber — you don’t need to big yourself up. 

We like this photo   

But we concede that these two look terrific              

Cut the flowery twaddle

Don’t alienate yourself by talking like a bygone age. Write as people speak now.

As professional and compassionate funeral directors, we are conscious of the responsibility, trust and confidence bestowed upon us.

On initial contact we will ask for preliminary details, whereupon if the deceased has died at home, in hospital or in a private buy liquid tadalafil online nursing home we will advise the conveyance of the deceased to our private chapel.

We incorporate the profound values of honesty, trust and professionalism, offering an exclusive service for families and their loved ones.

Kill your jargon

Hygienic treatment and attendances to the deceased are considered to be very important by our company.

Do away with ‘disbursements’ and ‘floral tributes’. While you’re about it, try and avoid ‘caring’ and ‘dignified’, too, if you can. They’re a bit worn.

Talk to your reader, not about yourself

It is a rare privilege to be a funeral director, to stand in a sensitive position at a crucial time in the midst of your family

Proud to be an independant?

Then get your text professionally proofread.

If you can’t get the spelling, grammar and punctuation right on your own website, what does that say about your ability to arrange a funeral?

No one can be cremated untill the caurse of death is definitely known. There are two cremation certificates (forms B&C). Each must be signed by two different doctor’s.

PS it’s –dent.

Normal people know nothing about industry politics

If you want to diss the big beasts, make an intelligible case.

Continuity and a personal caring service are things that tend to be overlooked within larger conglomerates.

Talk price, talk up value

There’s no point in being a funeral director if you cannot define the value of a funeral. What good’s it going to do them?

Put their best interests first

Show your readers you’re on their side. Advise them to shop around, get at least three quotes and go with the FD they click with best. Invite them to ring you for a no-strings chat if they want. Make yourself likeable. 

All examples above from real websites.

And the GFG award (provisional) for the website which fires off most key messages quickest in the most palatable form is awarded to our sternest critic, Kingfisher Funeral Services of St Neot’s. 

Andy2

If small is beautiful, look lovely

4 April 2013
Charles
13 Comments
Categories: Co-operative Funeralcare, Dignity, funeral directors, independent funeral directors

There isn’t a single successful business in Britain that doesn’t seek to grow through mergers and acquisitions. Consolidation, they call it. It’s a factor of competitive capitalism. Or greed, if you prefer. Whichever. The bigger you are, the more efficiently you can trade. Efficiency enables you to bring your prices down, blow off competitors — and hey Tesco.  As Roberto Mancini, manager of Manchester City FC, would say, “Ees normal”.

So far so bad for Britain’s independent undertakers. Your days are surely numbered. Consolidation is under way. There’s no future for plankton in an ocean ruled by whales.

If you don’t believe it, consider the fate of our brewers. In 1900 there were 1,324 distinct beweries in England. By 1975 there were 141. Ees normal.

The technological development that made this possible was the invention of keg beers, which are sterilised and lifeless. They have a much longer life than living cask beers. They do not need to be kept so carefully, they can be transported for longer distances and they’re cheaper when they get there. Under the influence of advertising, consumers in the ’70s were easily persuaded to enjoy just a limited number of national brands. The little breweries could not afford to advertise. Older (elderly) readers of this blog will recall with misty eyes the halcyon days of Watney’s Red Barrel and Double Diamond, the Co-op and Dignity of their time.

The development which is making it possible today for the big players in the deathcare market to burn off the independents is, of course, the pay-now-die-later funeral plan whereby you stitch up tomorrow’s market share today. The adoption of embalming from America has arguably been a useful technology, too.

So what happened to Watney’s Red Barrel and Double Diamond, younger readers may ask. And where can I get some?

Well, just when the big brewers thought the field was theirs, something interesting happened. The Campaign for Real Ale (Camra) happened, the tables were turned and, sorry younger readers, the victorious keg beers were poured down the drains of history.

Camra’s campaign stimulated an appetite for well-made beers and choice. It appealed also to romantic values — and the great British pub is nothing if not steeped in nostalgia. In the words of James Watt, managing director of craft brewers BrewDog, “People want something better, something ethical, and something made by passionate people … I think there is growing disillusionment with products which are generic and mass-produced.”

He’s right, of course.  The total number of breweries in England is back up from 141 to around 700 and rising. Which is why Camra is credited as the most successful single-issue consumer campaign of all time. In economists’ jargon, economies of scale have been trumped by economies of scope (choice). The big brewers can’t compete with the micro-breweries, most of which brew a variety of ales, because the production of small batches of cask beers does not fit profitably into scale production operations.

Camra, you may think, restored beer to its Golden Age. You’d be wrong. One of the reasons why keg beers were able to gain such traction was because most small brewers back in the day made ale that was cloudy, sour and full of sediment. Pretty horrible stuff, much of it. Today’s micro-brewers are of a far higher calibre than their forebears. The Golden Age of ale is, in fact, now. Camra didn’t turn the clock back, it wound it forward.

Is it possible that Britain’s independent undertakers might buck economic orthodoxy in the same way as the micro-brewers and chase off the purveyors of keg funerals?

They have a lot going for them. Like the micro-brewers, and unlike makers of, say, artisan cheese, they can compete on price with the consolidated undertakers. Better still, so incompetent and greedy are the consolidated undertakers that indie undertakers are universally cheaper. It’s absurd! The big players could fight back by starting a price war — but the likelihood of their doing so seems small. The micro-brewers are able to compete because of Gordon Brown’s 2002 Progressive Beer Duty (alternatively known as Small Brewers Relief), a 50 per cent reduction in beer duty for those breweries producing less than 5,000 hectolitres of beer. Indie undertakers need no such leg-up.

A great many of today’s indies are as good as it gets and much better than the generality of smalltime undertakers of the past. They have a lot in common with our micro-brewers: they’re intelligent, savvy and skilful — a new breed. They are characterful, individualistic and very much their own people, a welcome contrast with the corporates who tend towards bland homogeneity in spite of some excellent staff at branch level.

Because indies are passionate business owners, they are prepared to work incredibly hard. They offer a service which is of and for their community. They offer a quality of personal service which is everything a funeral shopper could want. Personal service does not fit profitably into scale production operations. 

It is unlikely that a Camref (the Campaign for Real Funerals) could achieve for undertaking what Camra has achieved so rapidly for beer, the thirst for the latter being the stronger. What’s more, most funeral shoppers have no idea that there are such brilliant indies out there.

So it would be good, perhaps, to see our best indies walk with more of a strut, make more noise about what they do and take the fight to the keggists. A well-kept beer is good for drinkers; a well-kept secret is no use to funeral shoppers. 

ED’S NOTE: Real ales are brewed for all occasions and come with all manner of characterful names. They include: Tactical Nuclear Penguin, Bitter Bully, Posh Pooch, Festive Totty, Gonzo Porter, Ragged Bitch, Crop Circle, Summer Lightning, Bishop’s Farewell, Truffler Dry, Bad Elf, Torpedo Extra IPA, Naked Ladies, Storm King, Hop Wallop and Bonkers Conkers.

So far as we know, no maker of real/craft beer brews one specially for funeral wakes. There’s a big market here. If you can’t brew one, can you at least suggest a good name?

Ask not what you can do for the bereaved; ask what the bereaved can do for themselves

28 March 2013
Charles
25 Comments
Categories: funeral customs, funeral directors, Grief, Processions

SCENE – A village wedding. Church bells. Assorted villagers have assembled at the lych gate waiting for a glimpse of the bride. They are joined by a TOURIST who happily happens to speak perfect English.

VILLAGER: There she is! Just coming round the corner now.  Ooh, it’s a Rolls!

TOURIST: Who’s that walking in front of it? That person in the Tudor costume and the three-cornered hat and, what’s that, a mace?

VILLAGER: That’s the wedding organiser.

TOURIST: Why is she walking in front of the car?

VILLAGER: It’s the way it’s done in this country. The wedding organiser walks in front of the car.  

TOURIST: But why?

VILLAGER: Oh, ah… tradition. Yes, it’s always been done that way. It’s the way we do it.

TOURIST: But a wedding is not about the wedding organiser –

VILLAGER: Oh, look at that dress! Doesn’t she look lovely! And look, there’s the bride!

_______________________________

 

The Great British Tradition whereby a funeral director walks in front of, or ‘pages’, a hearse is a well-loved custom stretching back to the heraldic funeral processions of the middle ages. Well, not really. Actually, they didn’t have funeral directors then, it was the Head of the College of Arms who would walk in front of the cortege. No, ah, paging is a lot more recent. There are several schools of thought about where it originated… and little chance of a consensus. Nowadays, it’s a ‘mark of respect’, that’s what it is. Will that do?

It is undeniably a good look.

Yes it is, and I think it is capable of adaptation. If funeral directors were to suggest to families that one or more of them might like to undertake this role instead, I wonder what the uptake would be.

What would be the point?

In a word, empowerment.

Why is it important to empower bereaved people at a funeral?

So that they can go home feeling proud of themselves. If a funeral is to be a valuable event, they need to feel proud they did their bit.

Would this not take away from the status of the funeral director?

Wrong question. Would it add value to the funeral? Yes, I think so. No one ever went wrong who sought to empower the bereaved. The trick is to find them things to do that they’re comfortable with.

But the job of a funeral director is to take all possible burdens from their families.

I respectfully disagree. The job of a funeral director is to organise an event where bereaved people can do good grief work. They can’t do that if they’re spectators. I repeat: they need to go home feeling they played their part in giving the person who died a good send-off. So, I say: ask not what you can do for the bereaved; ask what the bereaved can do for themselves.

Well, I don’t know that I’d want to be a funeral director if you took paging away from me.

Look, I may be wrong, I acknowledge that. But right now I do absolutely believe that you guys have got to stop obsessing about the price of funerals and start looking for ways to add value to them. You can do that in ways that cost nothing. This may be one. 

Remains to be seen

18 March 2013
Charles
6 Comments
Categories: Art and death, Attitudes to dead bodies, Continuing consciousness, Embalming, funeral directors

So, a bad week, then, for dead heads of state. Hugo Chavez can’t after all be embalmed ‘like Lenin’. By the time the experts got there it was too late for the disembowelling and the deep marinade which would have made him, in death, the centre of a cult and an object of pilgrimage – as writer Edward Lucas has it:

‘at the centrepiece of a phoney religion where dead dictators brood over their subjects even in death. So long as they are unburied, their ideas still live.’

Meanwhile, here in the UK, the tug-of-war over the bones of Richard III has been lent intensity by the declared intention of the top chaps at Leicester to rebury him under a simple slab at the east end of the cathedral. Not good enough for a king, complain critics. “A king should not be buried under the floor,” said John Ashdown-Hill, leader of genealogical research for the Richard III Society. “He should have a tomb rather than being put back under the ground where he’s just been dug up.”

All of which focuses the mind on the significance we attach to dead bodies, the things we do to them and the reasons why we do them.

Different societies, different faiths do things differently. Some hurry their dead underground, the sooner that they might wake up in Paradise. Others, for a variety of reasons, proceed more slowly. Thanks to bureaucratic obstacles it can take up to three weeks to arrange a cremation in this country which, for the corpse, means a lot of time spent in fridges and cold rooms growing waxier and waxier.

Many undertakers reckon this to be no bad thing. ‘It’s okay, take your time,’ they say to bereaved people. So they can get their heads around it, they mean, and plan the sort of sendoff they need. And there’s a lot to be said for this. Most people don’t start thinking about this stuff til they absolutely have to.

Spending time with the dead body is reckoned also to be therapeutic. And this is why some undertakers are fans of embalming. It produces an emotionally valuable memory picture – a dead person at ease with their fate. It is the technological, artificial Good Death.

For reasons ranging from its invasiveness to the way it is reckoned to distance bereaved people from reality, embalming has its enemies among ‘ordinary’ people and also among the inhabitants of Funeralworld itself. The absolute sincerity of those at both poles of the argument is undoubtable.

Here is undertaker Caitlin Doughty:

“An embalmed body, … it is not an actual dead body in a way. It’s a strange wax effigy that the dead body has become. You’re not really seeing a dead person—you’re seeing an idea of a dead person, a metaphor for a dead person.”

But Doughty is no fan of direct cremation, either, which she sees as the legacy of the (very English) derision heaped by Jessica Mitford on the Great American Funeral:

“My main problem [with Jessica Mitford] is that she really brought on the direct cremation revolution. It is a valuable service. It is a less expensive service. It’s another way of saying, ‘Take the body away. … Don’t let it rot at all. Turn it to ash. … I don’t want to think about any of the processes that the body would actually go through in a natural way.'”

Doughty believes that the contemplation of an unembalmed dead body is important:

“The ecstasy of decay is … kind of like the idea of the sublime, in the sense that if you are really engaging with your mortality … it opens you up to a broader emotional spectrum than you normally have.”

We find these sentiments echoed by many thinking undertakers in this country. To observe the changes that take place in a dead person over a period of days enables the bereaved to comprehend what has happened and accept that it’s time, in the end, to let the dead person go.

The contemplation of the corpse also, to use the words of Jonathan Taylor, enables bereaved people to reconcile themselves to the new reality: that he or she is now an it; that whatever spirit or life force the corpse once embodied has gone. Elvis has left the building.

But even the let’s-get-real school of undertaking baulks at presenting the corpse as it really, actually is: gape-jawed, staring-eyed, aghast. These undertakers are prettifiers, too. Television mirrors this denial of reality. On a death porn programme like Silent Witness we are invited to gloat over hideous injuries… but all those mutilated corpses have perfectly closed mouths and eyes. Real, gape-jawed death is, it seems, an unbearable reality, a squirm too far.

How most living people feel dead people should be cared for, or not, and to what purpose, is mostly subjective, based in local cultural and/or faith norms. They tend not to ask why; they just go with what they feel to be, or are told is, right. And that may be perfectly okay. There’s no rational route through this.

What people understand about death is unlikely to stand still as they experience the deaths of friends and become aware of their own one-way journey as evidenced by irrevocable signs of ageing – except in the case of extreme deniers.

And for all of us it just got more complicated.

In the US, Sam Parnia, who has worked with Peter Fenwick to research continuing consciousness, or life after death, has been pioneering a technique for reviving the dead by cooling them in order to reverse the cellular processes that take place after death.

In this way, he was able to revive a woman who had been technically dead for up to 16 hours.

Parnia says:

In view of the rapidly evolving progress in the field of resuscitation science and the ever-expanding gray-zone period after death, I believe it is important to include what we would refer to as human consciousness, psyche or soul in future definitions and considerations regarding death. It would also perhaps be wise to concentrate some of our future research efforts on understanding the state of human consciousness after death has started, since the evidence currently suggests that it is not lost immediately after death but continues to exist for at least some time afterward.

In other words, if our mind continues to exist after death, how long does it exist for? And why?

This may give our contemplation of the dead a whole new lease of life.

Another no-frills funeral service

28 January 2013
Charles
32 Comments
Categories: funeral cost, funeral directors

There was a big splash in Saturday’s Daily Mail about a budget funeral newcomer to Funeralworld, Cremdirect. Set up in June 2012, Cremdirect has already performed 70 funerals at an all-in fixed price of £1750 and serves Manchester, Buxton and Macclesfield and environs. 

We called up the founder, Mark Roebuck, and put to him the sorts of questions anyone would want to know the answers to.

Mark, your background is the motor trade. What experience have you got of undertaking? Mark replied that he has a little, and he employs three staff with around 100 years’ experience between them.

We asked Mark about his mortuary. It’s in a unit at Compstall Mill on the outskirts of Stockport, next to a country park. There’s a good and proper refrigeration unit – no coldroom and racking. There’s even a small chapel of rest for those who change their mind and decide they want to visit – though the website makes clear that Cremdirect  does not offer ‘viewing facilities’.  He encourages families who want to visit to do so at the hospital mortuary, where Cremdirect can leave bodies until a day or so before the funeral.

Clients can make arrangements either in the office at Compstall or, as usually happens, at their homes. 

We asked Mark about his price and wondered if it might not be a bit on the high side by comparison with similar providers (eg Powell and Family Direct at £1497 and Richard Fearnley at £1397.) He puts it down to the cremation fee in his area – around £600. Another factor may be his refusal to use foil coffins. He’ll only use veneer. He doesn’t want his funerals to look cheap. He even has a Daimler hearse, so he’s clearly a bit of a funeral romantic.

Mark has been greeted warmly and supportively by the undertaking community in Manchester and has found local suppliers delighted to serve him. Or not, as the case may be.

Tomorrow, he’s on the Jeremy Vine show on R2. He sounded a bit apprehensive. This is a lot of publicity for a wee startup that’s not doing much different from a number of other firms serving the fuss-free market. Mark hasn’t courted any of this publicity; it just seems to have happened to him in the random way the media works. 

Seeing is disbelieving

23 January 2013
Charles
No comments
Categories: funeral directors

An Indiana funeral director said he was fired for refusing to use random body parts to create fake cadavers for three his funeral home lost.

David Eckert said his employer, Alpha Funeral Service of Indianapolis, routinely loaned cadavers to Indiana University’s School of Medicine, Courthouse News Service reported.

When three cadavers went missing, Eckert said he was ordered to “get this handled and taken care of” it by his boss, owner Anthony Edwards.

More here

You only get one chance to get it wrong

22 January 2013
Charles
12 Comments
Categories: funeral, funeral directors

A few years ago I worked with a very nice woman on her second husband’s funeral. Naturally, we talked about all sorts of things. She recalled the day of her first husband’s funeral. The hearse was due to go direct to the crematorium and she left home in good time so as to be sure of meeting it there. She set great store by punctuality. 

On the way she noticed, ahead of her, what looked very like a broken-down hearse on the side of the road. It was indeed a broken down hearse on the side of the road and in it were the mortal remains of her husband. She stopped and endured a vast outpouring of apology from the red-faced funeral director. How was she to know that this was one of the worst possible things that can happen to a funeral director, the stuff of nightmares, of crazed, gibbering terror at the darkest, loneliest hour of the night? 

In any case, she saw it differently. She thought it terrifically funny. All through their marriage one of her stock retorts to him had been “You’ll be late for your own blinking funeral!” And here he was, late for his own blinking funeral. Perfect. 

You only get one chance to get it right, they say. But here was a disaster which made the day. 

I have witnessed a few disasters at funerals and I can’t think of many that didn’t make the day. Bereaved people have a happy way of recasting a disaster as the hilarious intervention of the the person who’s died – a posthumous last raspberry. 

A faultless funeral must always be the beau ideal of a funeral director. But faultlessness at all costs can turn a funeral into a parade ground. And seamless can easily = soulless. There must always be room for whoopsiness. 

What’s your funeral whoopsie story? 

I never met a raven I didn’t like

16 January 2013
Charles
8 Comments
Categories: funeral directors, natural burial

Dr. Berndt Heinrich, 72, emeritus biology professor at the University of Vermont, spends much of his time in a cabin in the woods with no electricity or running water, studying animals. His latest book, “Life Everlasting: The Animal Way of Death”, is about how animals die and how they recycle each other:

It’s not so much about death as life. The carcass provides a huge amount of concentrated food for the animals who are recyclers.

I first started thinking about it when a former student, Bill, wrote saying he was terminally ill and what would I think about his having a “sky burial” on my property in Maine? He wanted to leave his body to the ravens. Bill did not want to be cremated or buried in a sealed box. He wanted to be recycled and have his body provide food for other creatures.

Does that name Bill ring any distant bells? No? It ought to. Bill Jordan? Still not with it? Okay, you give in. You first read about him here, on this blog, in May 2011, when he broached his (some would say eccentric) desire that his remains ‘return to the living molecular plasma that the surface of the earth nurtures and maintains. Consequently, I am almost obsessed with having my corpse laid out upon the surface, to fulfill the needs of the natural world. I am attaching a short musing on the subject.‘ Do go back and read it; it’s one of the best things we have ever published.

Dr Heinrich addresses the bad reputation enjoyed by scavenger species, vultures and ravens particularly. He says ‘It’s because of their association with death — they are blamed for it. Ravens get blamed a lot for killing a lot of things when, in fact, they mostly eat the dead and the nearly dead. It’s an illogical association that comes from a lack of understanding of what these animals do. Consider what would happen in the ocean if nothing ate the dead fish. Eventually, the ocean would be up to the top with dead fish. If there were no recyclers, nature would stop.’ He adds: ‘Ravens are very appealing. I’ve never met a raven I didn’t like.’

There’s an insight here into the public perception of undertakers. 

Interesting isn’t it that of all species, humans go out of their way to avoid being recycled in this way? 

Read more about Dr Heinrich in the New York Times here.