For many years, Hamilton Pet Meadow regularly held community events.
Pet Meadow is a pet aftercare facility that has been part of the local community for 26 years. Those who have recently lost a beloved pet often turn to the facility for burial, cremation, memorialization and bereavement services.
There was a time when the facility regularly offered community events, such as pet adoption days, but for the past 10 years, including of course during the Covid-19 pandemic, such events were few and far between.
Evan Corn, who joined as social media and outreach coordinator in September, decided that the time had come for Pet Meadow to begin hosting events again. He contacted SAVE Animal Shelter, in Princeton, to see about setting something up and, on April 20, the two organizations combined to host Adoption Day with SAVE.
“These types of events are inherently challenging—you can’t guarantee that dogs will get adopted, nor can you even guarantee people will show up. But I wanted to put my heart into it. I reached out to SAVE in January and visited them to get a handle on the situation,” Corn says.
SAVE members explained to Corn that overpopulation in animal shelters is a growing issue, especially in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, when many people who were cooped up in their homes turned to pet adoption as a way to cope.
“Many households that were looking for big changes after being stuck indoors for so long are opting to ‘return’ their pets” to shelters, Corn says. “This sort of phenomenon definitely existed before Covid, but I think it became exacerbated when the world sped back up again.”
The event was originally scheduled for April 13, but inclement weather on that date pushed it to the following Saturday. Blue skies and mild temperatures instead of rain ensured that the event was a success.
SAVE representatives brought with them five dogs from their shelter, and plenty of people stopped by to learn more about Hamilton Pet Meadow and to see the dogs.
“While I was frustrated about the marketing efforts I had taken in anticipation of the original date, in hindsight I was so glad we postponed. Saturday (the 20th) was beautiful, and while we may have missed some initial traction, we had plenty of people stop by, and we were even able to place a puppy in a foster-to-adopt program with a family that attended the event,” Corn says.
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While Pet Meadow has been around for just over 25 years, its meadow has been dedicated to pets and their parents for over a century. It began as the Old Pet Cemetery in 1921, and was taken over in 1962 by the Mercer County Society of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
After the MCSPCA closed the facility in 1972, it lay abandoned until 1998, when Debra Bjorling and her family bought the property and restored it as a pet aftercare facility. Bjorling is still Pet Meadow’s president and owner today.
As a deed-restricted pet cemetery, the six-acre facility on Klockner Road was never in danger of redevelopment. However, Bjorling has done much more over the past 26 years than merely maintain the facility.
She has turned it into a place where grieving pet owners can say goodbye to their loved ones in a dignified way, in a comforting environment. Today, Pet Meadow is an IAOPCC-accredited facility, providing cremation, aftercare, keepsake, memorialization and bereavement services. IAOPCC stands for the International Association of Pet Cemeteries and Crematories.
One tradition common to many memorial pet services is a reading of the poem “The Rainbow Bridge,” which can comfort the bereaved with images of their pet crossing a rainbow bridge in the afterlife and waiting to be reunited with their owners.
This year, in preparation for restarting its pet adoption days, Hamilton Pet Meadow painted a 20-year old bridge on the site in rainbow colors, a symbol taken from the poem.
“The bridge was built by hand by our (late) founder Eric Bjorling and longtime Pet Meadow employee John Tedder in 2004,” Corn says. “And on its 20-year anniversary, it deserved some refurbishing. So after some brainstorming, I ended up going in to Kucker Haney Paint Co. on Nottingham Way and requested some pro-bono/sponsored paint to elevate our atmosphere.
“After speaking with Jim and his wife there, they mentioned that they had been a Pet Meadow client a few years prior, and said they’d be happy to help us out.”
In addition to the founding location in Hamilton, Pet Meadow has expanded its business over the years to Carlstadt, in Bergen County, and Houston and Austin, in Texas.
“We’ve grown quite a bit,” Corn says. “We provide services to families across the East Coast, all the way down to Maryland. We’re expanding in the U.S. central region as well, as we start to grow our name in Texas.”
While some pet owners opt for burial in the meadow, many others opt for cremation. For many years, Hamilton Pet Meadow has been one of the few pet crematories in service in the region.
The facility offers other services as well. For instance, people who have lost a pet recently, but who have no body to bury or cremate, can hold memorial services at the facility.
Hamilton Pet Meadow also offers a range of keepsake options, including Everlasting Prints — a cast of a digital scan of a loved one’s paw or nose — as well as memorial jewelry, ornaments and keychains.
One new option currently in the testing phase is “aquamation,” an alternative of cremation that is billed as an option that is better for the environment.
In aquamation, also known as water cremation,” pet remains are liquefied in a mixture of water and alkaline chemicals. As in cremation, the result of the process is bone fragments which are processed into an ashlike substance similar to cremated remains.
“Aquamations use significantly less energy than flame-based cremation,” Corn says. “Because there is no combustion, aquamation produces little to no greenhouse emissions.”
Hamilton Pet Meadow continues to provide some of the only pet aftercare service available in the area. But Corn expects it to host more pet adoption days in the future as well.
“Places like SAVE aren’t animal hotels. They don’t have endless room, endless supplies, or endless food,” Corn says. “As part of the pet community, our mission is clear; help SAVE and other places like them support their pups’ adoption process in any way we can.”
The Hamilton Pet Meadow now has a literal rainbow bridge for pets to cross, as in the poem traditionally read at pet funerals and memorials.,
