Can You Move Your Pet's Ashes To A New Urn?

They came home in a box.

Maybe it was plastic with a printed label. Maybe a thin wooden box, a tin, a velvet bag, a cardboard tube. Whatever it was, you didn't pick it. It showed up that way on a day when you weren't in any shape to think about packaging.

Then later you looked at it on the shelf, or in the drawer where you put it because you couldn't decide, and it felt wrong.

If that's where you are, this is for you.

Yes, you can move them

You can. There's no rule against it. Nothing about that container is official. It's a shipping container. The crematory needed something to send your pet home in, and that's what they use for everybody.

People still hesitate, and it's worth saying why. The box starts to feel sacred because of what's in it, so setting it aside feels like disrespect. It isn't. The box isn't your pet. Where they end up is what matters, and picking that is one of the last things you get to do for them.

What's inside

Nobody tells you this part. It's much easier if you know going in.

Inside the outer box, the ashes are almost always in a sealed plastic bag. Clear or white, closed with a twist tie or a heat seal. There's usually a small metal tag with a number on it, attached to the bag or loose in the box. That tag stayed with your pet through the whole process. Some people keep it. Some people can't look at it.

The ashes are pale grey, sometimes close to white. They're coarser than you'd think, more like fine gravel than powder. Heavier too. A big dog can come back at five or six pounds.

That's it. No surprises left.

Keep them in a bag. Don't pour them in loose.

This is the one piece of real advice here, so it goes near the top.

Don't tip loose ashes straight into an urn or a vessel. Most of them aren't airtight, ours included. Lids come off. Things get moved, dusted around, knocked. Loose ash works its way out, and cleaning that up is a moment you don't ever want to have.

Keep them bagged and put the bag inside. The vessel is what you see. The bag is what actually holds them.

Check the opening, not just the size

Every urn listing gives you a capacity in cubic inches. Hardly any tell you how wide the opening is. You need both.

If your pet was small, a cat or a small dog, the original bag usually drops straight through. Set it in, put the lid on, done. That's the whole job.

If your pet was big, it won't fit. A bag holding eighty or ninety cubic inches is wide and floppy and it isn't going through a four inch opening no matter how you fold it. This is where people get stuck, usually while standing at the kitchen counter with the box already open.

On size, the rule is roughly one cubic inch for every pound your pet weighed. Forty pound dog, forty cubic inches. Ninety pound dog, ninety. Most cats are under twenty. Round up.

If the bag won't fit, split it

Easy fix, and it keeps everything together.

Get a second sealable bag. Pour about half the ashes from the original into it. Seal both. You've now got two narrower bags instead of one wide one, and both go through the opening without a fight.

Put both bags in the vessel. Because the original goes in too, whatever dust is still clinging to the inside of it stays with them. Nothing gets brushed out, nothing gets rinsed down a drain, nothing gets thrown away. All of them ends up in the vessel.

Three bags instead of two if you need it. Same idea.

What you'll need

• A clean flat smooth surface
• Sheet of paper underneath (wax paper or baking sheet works well)
• Scissors
• One or two sealable bags
• A funnel, or stiff paper rolled into a cone
• A spoon for the last bit
  
• Dry brush if needed

Do it inside. A draft you'd never notice otherwise is enough to matter.

Gloves if you want them. Some people need that bit of distance, some feel like it makes the whole thing clinical. Either is fine.

How to do it

Pick a time when the house is quiet and you're not due anywhere.

Lay the towel down. Set the vessel somewhere it can't tip. Take the lid off first, before you open anything else, so you're never holding an open bag while looking for somewhere to put it.

Take the bag out of the box. If it fits through the opening, put it in and close the lid. You're finished.

If it doesn't fit, cut the tie rather than untying it, because untied bags slip. Hold the mouth low and close to the funnel and pour slowly into the second bag. Stop when the original looks about half empty. Seal them both, put them both in the vessel, and close the lid.

Use the spoon for whatever won't pour. There's always a bit that won't pour.

Ask someone to sit with you if you want them there. You don't have to do this on your own.

If you can't do it

Then don't, for now.

There's no deadline. Ashes don't degrade. Nothing has to be handled by a certain date, and there's no stage of grief you're running behind on. Plenty of people leave the box exactly where it is for a year or two, and then one ordinary Tuesday they're ready and it takes ten minutes.

If you want it done but can't be the one to do it, ask someone. A partner, a sibling, a friend who loved them too. That isn't failing at it. That's letting someone help you.

And if you scattered them, or buried them, or never got any back, there are still ways to keep them close. We wrote about that separately.

Last thing

The box they came home in was picked by a business, for shipping, on a day that meant nothing to them and everything to you.

The next one is yours to pick. That's the difference.

KAPLA Art makes hand finished stone memorial vessels for pets. Every listing shows the interior size and the opening width, because you need both. If you're looking for somewhere to move them, you can see them here. If you're not, we hope this helped anyway.