A new book by author and photographer Paul Koudounaris explores the endearing and enigmatic ways we memorialise our lost animals.
It all began with a visit to a pet cemetery in the suburbs of Los Angeles, US.
Despite spending his entire career studying death, American author and photographer Paul Koudounaris didn’t actually care much for human cemeteries – but the Pet Haven Cemetery and Crematory was different.
“I wound up spending a whole day there. I was just so incredibly touched,” Koudounaris tells Euronews Culture.
“It was like all the rules that normally govern the way we interact with the dead, or the entire rhetoric, had been suspended. Because when it comes to animals, we have this very different relationship with them. People will say whatever they want. The communication was so much more direct and so pure.”
Thus, an 11-year long obsession was born, culminating in ‘Faithful Unto Death – Pet cemeteries, animal graves and eternal devotion’. The book, which was published last month in the UK, explores the varying cultural practices and perceptions around animal death and their memorialisation.
From delicate hand-painted portraits on gravestones to the gobsmacking grandiosity of life-sized statues and historical mausoleums, every page pays tribute to our unique bond with animals, and how such relationships can be expressed in both amusing and heartbreaking ways when beset by grief.
“When a pet dies, it’s a different experience than when a human relation dies,” says Koudounaris. “They become a kind of mirror image of ourselves in a way a human relation never really does. So it’s like a piece of you has died that you’ll never recover.”
The very first urban pet cemetery was founded in 1881 in Hyde Park, London, following the death of a (reportedly very sweet) little Maltese dog named Cherry. His family had become good friends with a local gatekeeper named Mr. Winbridge, who agreed to let them bury Cherry there.
Word quickly got around and suddenly Mr. Winbridge was inundated with pet burial requests. Through sheer generosity, he had unknowingly created a much-needed solution to peoples’ growingly desperate dilemmas over pet disposal.
Although unthinkable now, in Victorian times, most city-dwellers ended up dumping their dead animals in rivers or bins. The only other alternatives were taxidermy (expensive and unsettling to many) or a horrifyingly heartless-sounding process known as rending, where animals would be basted in chemicals and turned to waste.
Burials were seen as staunchly sacred to humans, and cremation wasn’t a viable option to anyone until the late 1800s, leaving no way for pet owners to respectfully honour the relationship or come to terms with their emotional devastation. Instead, grieving a pet’s death was a taboo, shuttered away shamefully.
This was also a time when the very concept of pet keeping was becoming established across Europe. As society wrestled with what this meant, pet cemeteries began to take off quietly across the continent, initially with strict criteria for service animals only.
The most famous, however, is the Cimetière des Chiens et Autres Animaux Domestiques. An exquisite Art Nouveau cemetery that opened in Paris in 1899, it was a way to stop Parisians throwing their dead animals into the Seine, and to inspire greater recognition of animals deserving rights.
In researching the book for over a decade, visiting pet cemeteries and funeral rituals around the world, one of the things that struck Koudounaris most was the breadth of pet grief.
For example, there’s a very old grave in Gloucestershire, England that’s dedicated to a trout, engraved with a verse titled: ‘Memory of the old fish’.
Then there’s Stoney the elephant, a performer at a hotel throughout the 1990s who became the largest ever animal to be buried in a pet cemetery in Las Vegas, US. On the other end of the scale, a fly that office workers bonded with in Maryland, US, was given an official burial in a matchbox.
“I personally can’t understand bonding with a fish, but people can bond with anything. I think that’s part of the beauty of it all, the ability of animals of every species to somehow touch a person’s heart,” says Koudounaris.
While pet grief is far better acknowledged and understood today, a social stigma does still linger in which it can be belittled – and sometimes shamed – in comparison to human death.
This can complicate how we respond to an animal’s death, where we feel we should move on from it more quickly or that it’s “silly” to commemorate them with a ceremony.
“The problem is that when it comes to animals in Western culture, we don’t have a built in process for saying goodbye the way we do with human beings,” says Koudounaris, who also spent a year as a volunteer pet grief counsellor.
“When I was in Thailand, for instance, there’s a Buddhist temple that specialises just in animal funerals. It really stood out to me that there are other cultures where they do have some sense of a mourning ritual to say goodbye to animals. And I think it helps a lot.”
Many of the world’s pet cemeteries remain off grid or abandoned, but Koudounaris found an affection for them all.
“I compare it to the outsider art of mourning, because it’s just normal, everyday people looking for terms to express their grief.”
Some that stood out, however, include a wooded graveyard burrowed in Helsinki, Finland, where hand-painted pet portraits are illuminated by the soft glow of little lanterns.
“There’s another pet cemetery I love down in Juárez, Mexico and it’s just a field of rocks out in the desert with all these hand-painted pictures of dogs and cats,” adds Koudounaris.
Despite the name, pet cemeteries are incredibly human spaces where we catch glimpses of others in a moment of authentic – even playful – vulnerability and self-expression, the kind that only swells in the wake of loss.
They’re a devotion to those that were devoted, permeated with the comforting aura of all the quietly grandiose love stories between species – and a reminder of how such love stories live on through us, shaping us and our worlds.
“What I was hoping for, exterior to the text, was that people could take away how universal this feeling is,” says Koudounaris. “And maybe see, in the way that other people have handled the passing of their pets, an inspiration for themselves in saying goodbye.”
