Digging a grave for the dog

Sorry for your loss.

It always amuses me in TV and film when a single man digs a grave which is 3 ft deep in an hour ...

A friend of mine used that long spade like tool for diging out dirt when fence posts are put in, can;t remmeber the name but it has a scissor action you raise it up in the air and let gravity force itself down into the gravel then lift the whole thing out like two long desert spoons in a knickerbokerglory.

well that's what you get as I've been watching masterchef rather than DIY SOS.

I once had to dig a grave for a large goat. Due to work commitments I had to do it after dark by temp floodlight.

Whilst STWNFI was away for a few days :-)

Mike

I considered doing that 13 years ago when the best little dog in the whole world died. But a garden is supposed to be a happy place. I could never have been happy sitting in my garden knowing that She is under the soil and that *I* gave the vet permission to put her to sleep.

I dug a grave for a pigeon last year I went down half a meter, into the stony clay. A couple of days later something had dug it up.

It always surprises me that they will dig up a pigeon when I bury it but won't just take it away when I just leave it out.

It needs to be anaerobically "ripened" ...

I think he was a builder.

We actually skipped that step, fortunately.

We took the little dog to the vet, looking obviously extremely poorly. The vet did much the same as a plumber does, involving sucking in breath through the teeth, and said the dog wasn't in pain, and we could take her home and bring her in for X-rays this morning. We elected the latter course, but the dog decided she had had enough.

On Fri, 12 May 2017 16:27:11 +0100, Muddymike wrote:

Reminds me of an incident at the nursery garden where a schoolmate and myself worked during the school holidays and as well as plants the couple who owned it kept a few animals which were more of a hobby and almost pets rather than for commercial gain. We were met by the wife on one Monday after a scorching July weekend and the heat was already building up for it to be a blistering workday so we hoped that the list of tasks included some watering, instead she tearfully told us we would have to bury her Billy goat, my mate and I were both from farms so dead animals and their disposal was not new to us , she then informed us where he was. Poor sod had escaped to the disused Farmyard next door and fallen into an abandoned sheep dip full of festering old water and sheep s*it where he had drowned in an almost upside down position trapped by his horns which had caught under some debris that had found its way into the dip trough. Having been there for two days in the heat and foul water he was fairly ripe and bloated fortunately a tractor with a loader was available to do the actual lifting but the stink from the effluent that poured off and out even made us farmboys retch. Burying him was harder than we anticipated as his legs were stiff and the hole had to be dug deeper than if he had still been flexible and what with the heat and the miasma from the corpse the excavation was hurried and only just deep enough, in he went upside down and quickly covered. A couple of days later the lack of depth became apparent as some soil settlement caused four hooves to appear above ground. It was just a pity that the owners young daughter who had been told that the goat was on "Holiday" found them first.

G.Harman

Not had to bury anything bigger than a 6 month old cat, but that was slightly more difficult than planned. She went to the vets to be spayed and died under the anaesthetic. I'd have had the vet dispose of her, but she was our eldest child's cat (he was six) and we thought that he'd better see her, say goodbye and have a burial. We presumed that the vet would have curled her up and that we could bury her in a shoebox that we happened to have, but the vet hadn't thought ahead and we got her back after rigor-mortis had set in and she was as long and rigid as a French baguette! Multiple shoeboxes taped together were required and a much longer hole - heavy clay soil too.

Could be worse I suppose, some people have pet ponies!

SteveW

Time for an impromptu postcard 'from Australia'?

Owain

Use a post hole borer and pop her in vertically?

Owain

Excellent thought.

SteveW