Carol Mundy, of Cornwall, England already has her cemetery plot picked out. She wants to be buried beside her husband Robert, and Dylan, the couple’s 17 year old golden retriever.
At Hartsdale Pet Cemetery, in New York, some 700 people have been buried with their pets, though the practice is now under scrutiny. In the sixth and seventh centuries, Anglo-Saxon warriors were often buried with their horses.
Nearby will be Merlin, their Irish thoroughbred, an abused dog the couple rescued from Romania. Merlin’s plot cost about $1,000, Dylan’s cost nearly $5,000. “I don’t see why he shouldn’t have the same resting place as me,” said Mundy. “Nothing makes me more angry than people saying ‘it is only a dog’. Some think you’re screwy but they need to realize what a difference animals can make to people’s lives.”
Burying people with their pets has become more common in England and also America, although in the US the practice has recently come under scrutiny. Just this past June, the New York Division of Cemeteries issued an order to animal cemeteries to stop the practice of burying human ashes with animal remains. The ruling infuriated customers of the Hartsdale Pet Cemetery, the nation’s oldest pet cemetery, located in the suburbs north of New York City, where several people had already prearranged to have their ashes interred alongside their pets. “Suddenly I’m not at peace anymore,” said one woman, who planned to be buried with her two dogs, BJ I and BJ II. “You want to be with the people you are closest with, your true loved ones…the only loved ones I have in my life right now are my pets.”
Hartsdale Cemetery officials estimate some 700 people have been buried with their pets in the cemetery. A total of 75,000 animals are buried there, mostly cats and dogs. Despite the new order against pet/human burials the cemetery’s owner says he plans to continue them . “My uncle wants to be buried beside his wife and what he considered to be his children and I’m not letting anyone stand in the way,” said a lawyer representing the cemetery. “His love for those dogs was just as real and just as strong as any parent’s for any child.”
The first pet/human burial at Hartsdale was in 1925, when a woman had her ashes sprinkled over her dog’s grave. The inscription on a tombstone for one Edward Way, who died in 1976, reads: “Miss Bibi Way, 1959-1973 – Here we sleep forever, I and my beloved Bibi, my loving companion for fourteen years, together in life, together in death.” Cemetery records indicate Bibi was a cat. One Arthur Link, who died in 1995, is buried beside his wife and their 16 cats; Aspen, Fritzie, Ginger, Gidget, Muffin, Bambi, Cricket, Snoopy, Gina, Patches, Foxy, Buttons, Dudley, Omar, Khayyam and Valentino.
PET DEATH LEGAL ISSUES
Wealthy New Yorkers are not the trendsetters here. Anglo-Saxon warriors were often buried with their horses. Graves with both human and horse remains dating from mostly the sixth and seventh centuries have been found in Scandinavia, Germany and Britain. Sutton Hoo, a British site excavated in 1991 is famous for its ship burial, which contained a host of precious artifacts now at the British Museum, such as a metalwork dress fitted with gold and gems and silver plates from the Eastern Roman Empire. Equally impressive are a group of 20 earthen mounds.
Inside Mound 3 are the ashes of a man and a horse, in a wooden trough together with a Frankish iron-headed throwing-axe, the lid of a bronze ewer, part of a miniature carved plaque with the winged Goddess Victory and fragments of decorated bone. Under Mound 4 are the cremated remains of a man and a woman, together with a horse and what is likely a dog. Mound 7 contains cremations in bronze bowls, gaming-pieces, an iron bucket, a sword-belt fitting and a drinking vessel, together with the remains of horse, cattle, red deer, sheep and pig.
Even earlier pet/human burials can be found amongst the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, who were often buried alongside mummified cats, monkeys and birds. Cats were embalmed and adorned with papier-mâché masks then placed in a mummy case or bronze coffin and buried with mummified mice and pots of milk for the afterlife. In 1888, a farmer in the Egyptian town of Beni Hasan accidentally discovered a massive cat tomb. Inside were the remains of thousands of felines, dating from 1,000 to 2,000 B.C. Most of the remains were shipped to a plant in Manchester, England, where they were turned into fertilizer.
