THURSDAY
K A M L O O P S
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A week of equine agony for Patrol By Andrea Klassen STAFF REPORTER andrea@kamloopsthisweek.com
It’s been a week to forget for the popular Kamloops Mounted Patrol. On Aug. 26, Chico, a 17-year-old bay horse, died. Then, on Monday, Aug. 27, another horse, 10-year-old Bueno, got spooked in Riverside Park and collided with a jogger. Mounted Patrol director Rick Wanless said Bueno, who has been with the patrol for several years, bucked off his rider, ran loose and hit the woman in the side, knocking her down. “She didn’t see it coming,” Wanless said. A doctor who happened to be walking in the park tended to the woman while she waited for the ambulance. She was taken to Royal Inland Hospital for observation. “The member of
patrol that was bucked off is fine. “The horse scraped himself a bit and the lady is bruised and injured a bit, but she’s at home and recovering nicely, I guess,” said Wanless, noting he has spoken with the woman’s partner since the incident. Wanless said it’s not unusual for a horse to buck a rider — it’s happened to him on several occasions — but this is the first time a Mounted Patrol horse has run into a member of the public as a result. “What the public doesn’t always realize is the horse is 1,000 pounds and has the mental capacity of about a two year-old. It’s not too hard to frighten them or spook them,” he said. In this case, the horse became upset when another one of the patrol mounts moved ahead of him.
“It really is unfortunate,” says Paul Wright of unclaimed remains. “And, we thought about that while we were at the grave site [in Merritt]. Here are 42 people that really had nobody left.” Dave Eagles/KTW
tending to what
remains By Andrea Klassen
X See PATROL A2
STAFF REPORTER andrea@kamloopsthisweek.com
T
HERE WERE NO FAMILY members looking on as a minister read the committal service in Merritt’s Pineridge Cemetery on
The Kamloops Mounted Patrol is mourning the loss on Aug. 26 of Chico, a popular 17 year-old bay horse. KTW file photo
Aug. 15. That was the point. For the second time in his career, Paul Wright was overseeing a burial for those left behind — in this case, 42 people whose cremated remains had never been picked up from the Merritt Funeral Chapel. In many cases, the final laying to rest was 40 years in the making. “Only two of them were from our time owning Merritt Funeral Chapel, since
1988,” Wright explains. “All the rest of them were pre-1988, that we inherited.” But, when Wright’s family sold the chapel earlier this year, its new owners didn’t want the decades-old remains passed on to them. “They wanted a clean slate,” he says. Under B.C. law, Wright didn’t have to stage a funeral — nor did the chapel need to hold onto the remains as long as it had. If remains aren’t picked up after a year, the province’s Cremation, Internment and Funeral Service legislation allows a funeral home to throw them out after providing sufficient notice it intends to do so. However, Wright said that option didn’t sit well with him. “I didn’t think that was appropriate,”
he says, noting the remains were originally supposed to go into a common grave in Kamloops’ Hillside Cemetery. That vault already holds the remains of 300 people whose ashes were left at Schoening Funeral Service in Kamloops between 1961, when the Wright family took it over, and 1995. But, before the burial could take place, Wright got a call from a Merritt city councillor, asking that the remains stay local. “I found it a bit ironic that they went unclaimed for 30, 40 years and then, when it did come time to bury them, that they wanted them buried in Merritt,” he says. The city agreed to donate a grave and allow the mass burial and the ceremony proceeded. X See MASS A2
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