A dog owner, Sasha Smajic, 37, spent over £4000 (N1, 872, 480) on giving her late dog, a Staffordshire Bull Terrier named Captain, a fulsome funeral.
Smajic said, Captain, who was eleven years old deserved the same respect as any family member. Captain died on Christmas Day after suffering a cardiac arrest on the operating table, reports Metro UK.
Smajic said she didn’t eat for a week after his death. In total, she spent £4,249 on the funeral, including £225 on a dove release and another £620 on getting his name written in flowers.
The dog owner said, “I don’t think I’ll ever celebrate another Christmas. I don’t think I would ever have the strength to do that. A piece of me has gone.”
Captain’s body was taken from the vets in a horse-drawn carriage to a park where he used to go for walks.
His coffin was then transferred to a hearse for the 40-minute drive to Willow Haven Cemetery in Bedmond, Hertfordshire.
After the funeral, Sasha had a meal of chicken and chips in a pub “as that is what he would have had”.
Sasha, from Acton, said: “Captain deserved a special send off. For some people he was a dog, to me he was my baby – he was everything to me and always will be.”
She added: “I don’t think we should differentiate [between animals and humans].
“If you decide to have a pet then you have decided to have a kid in your family and they should have the same respect as humans.”
A plaque on Captain’s coffin reads: “I love you to the moon and back” – a nod to their song by Savage Garden.
Explaining her choices for the funeral, Sasha said: “I wanted Captain to be taken away from the vets with animals, with his friends, and that’s why I decided on the horses.
“I wanted everything to be white as he was like an angel and demanded white flowers on everything, including the dog statue.
“I planned a route from the vet past my house and to the park where he spent a lot of time as I wanted Captain to say goodbye to everything he knew and to have that last walk with me.”
“When he died I couldn’t talk to anyone and locked myself in my room for seven days, I couldn’t eat.
“I still have this physical pain in my heart, it’s like someone has ripped something out of me and it’s empty in there.”
Initially Sasha struggled to get hold of a funeral director for Captain, but then Southall Funeral Service agreed to make her wishes a reality.
She said: “It meant a lot to me that I received so much love and respect in the way the owner Michael planned everything, I felt like he felt my pain.”
Cemetery owner Maureen Beach read a poem at Captain’s graveside with 11 doves – one for each year of his life – being released at 2pm during the service after he was lowered into the ground.
With The World News
