“While we leave each other at night, we cry, and then we sleep with the dogs.” In “Nobody Wants to Be Robin”, a song by Cesare Cremonini, there is the perfect photograph of a society that has been experiencing a profound crisis in human relations for twenty years now. Family, sentimental and emotional precariousness is no longer a one-off, but is part of everyday life, coming to influence choices and life plans that from the “forever” of the past are now satisfied with a more realistic “while it lasts”.

To patch up our loneliness and the need we all have to receive unconditional love, avoiding the ‘investment risk’, there are dogs and cats. Especially dogs. According to the latest Istat data, there are around 10 million dogs in Italian homes. A number that has seen constant growth in recent years. Pets are to all intents and purposes members of the family, or life companions, so much so that they receive the same attention and care. And by same we really mean same. The birthday to celebrate with cake and candle, the gourmet restaurant, the strollers, the private clinics with the emergency room, diagnostic tests that can cost up to 400 euros, as in the case of a CT scan – the pregnancy monitoring ultrasound, however, is around 100 -, up to the funeral.

“Wellbeing disease”, commented a user on social media, under a reel in which a man said he had appointed a pet funeral agency for the last farewell to his pug: 450 euros for the cremation and the rainbow-shaped urn to take home, found in a funeral home, on a table full of petals. Comment that sparked the anger of many – many – others who have done the same thing with their dogs. “I 700 euros for my chihuahua Lola. I have the urn and the necklace with the ashes always with me”, we read. The prices are more or less the same, between 500 and 800 euros, also depending on the size of the dog. There are those who keep the ashes at home in an urn, those who keep them in a frame with a photo of the dog, those who prefer to always carry them with them in a pendant.

The funeral of human relationships

There is obviously no religious rite, but the process followed by these pet funeral agencies – which have a very respectable market – allows the dog’s owner to experience a less brutal, more human detachment.

A choice that lends itself to fierce criticism from those who condemn the humanization of animals as a worrying phenomenon. And in some ways it certainly is. Rather than pointing fingers, however, we should reflect – as well as question ourselves – and the reasoning should be done upstream, on what has so radically transformed human relationships, distorting our attachment, to the point of moving it to an animal. Because the dog’s funeral and the urn with the ashes at home tell us a lot about us. Of all of us, excluding Fido.