Written by Megan Crutchley
Aside from the Stephen King novel Pet Cemetery, pet cemeteries are spaces in which pet lovers choose to commemorate and bury their animal companions. Though certain arguments put forward that one they are symptomatic of modern society and reflect the way some people seek comfort in animals rather than in fellow humans, societies have been burying animals since the Egyptians. This, however, does not necessarily mean that each society did so for the same reasons: Egyptian mummified cats were more of a religious practice than the Victorian practice of sentimental value. It is still worth noting that we are not the first people to treat an animal’s body with the same reverence as a human’s. There are records of animal burials in Roman society too; however, there seems to be a complete abstinence from the practice in medieval times, only being revived in the Victorian period. It is in the last one hundred and fifty or so years which I will focus on here, and how changes in society’s attitudes and religion led to the creation of these pet cemeteries.
Keeping pets in the way that we understand only began in the late-eighteenth century to early-nineteenth century. It was into the Victorian era that people began to commemorate the death of their pets via epitaphs in newspapers and, although a lot of these were satirical, they reflect a discourse around pets possessing souls and how that would fit into a religious framework. It was in the Victorian period that the dog really found its feet as a staple pet in the average household. They were valued for their fidelity and seemed to reflect the values that Victorian families were striving for. The popularity of dogs is reflected in artwork of the time like in Edwards Landseer’s Shepherd’s Last Mourner and Gustave Mosler’s The Lost Playmate. This also explains the popularity of stories such as Greyfriars Bobby in Edinburgh, again embodying the qualities of loyalty and companionship which Victorians valued so highly.
The first pet cemetery in the UK was opened in 1881. Before this, wealthy pet owners would erect monuments dedicated to their deceased pets in their own private gardens. It was with the passing of a dog called Cherry that the gatekeeper at Hyde Park was asked if he would allow the owners to bury their beloved dog in the garden of the gatekeeper lodge. This form of commemoration proved to be very popular and by 1902 the gravesite had reached its full capacity, with over 300 graves. It was not opened for profit but as a gesture from the groundskeeper to the grieving owners of pets. Due to the popularity of the cemetery at Hyde Park, more opened across the country. It is important to remember that this was still a privilege that many dogs did not receive, it is interesting to reflect on what the treatment of these dogs reflects about Victorian society.
There was a shift in the way that people envisioned heaven to be. In Victorian society, heaven was believed to be a lot closer to life on earth, with the ideal structure in heaven being the family. Pets had gradually solidified their place within this family throughout the period and by the end of the nineteenth century, it was hoped by many pet owners that dogs would be granted the same privilege of an afterlife as humans. This meant people began to conceptualise pet death in the same way as human death—a sort of long sleep that one would eventually wake up from—hence, why they treated the event of death in much the same way too. However, pets were still not viewed as being on the same intellectual level as humans, they were given separate cemeteries for their burials. This also reflects the liminal space which pets occupy in human lives, especially dogs, seen by Victorians as being a halfway house between the domesticity and wildness, they are also often seen in doorways of houses, half in and half out. It is this perception of dogs which led to the belief that your pet would be the first person to meet you in death – a companion for the in-between of heaven and earth.
Despite the space of a pet cemetery being filled by shrines and the actual bodies of the deceased pets, the stones left by grieving owners lend themselves to the realisation that these spaces are not for pets. In comparison to human graveyards, the inscriptions differ greatly. Often the gravestones of the deceased in this period would have passages from the Bible, written from the perspective of the deceased person as if they were speaking. This is not seen on pet gravestones, which usually contain inscriptions detailing the relationship the pet had to the owner, as well as the owner’s name alongside the pets. In later gravestones, there is even the labelling of the owners as ‘mummy’ or ‘daddy’, demonstrating how the animal’s importance was dependent on the owners’ feelings and relationship with them. Kathleen Kete goes so far as to explain how dogs presented an escape for women during this time period, away from a masculine and dehumanised world. This would explain why most of the dogs buried in Hyde Park have stones dedicated by women.
Pet cemeteries during this period reflect not only the lives of deceased pets but a changing attitude in Victorian societies towards religion, animals and a changing industrial world. Although in modern societies it would be more likely to make posts online about a deceased beloved pet, the Victorians had no such outlet for their sentimentality. They present an interesting phenomena for which to study the way animal-human relationships are reflected in space.
Bibliography
Tourigny E. ‘Do all dogs go to heaven? Tracking human-animal relationships through the archaeological survey of pet cemeteries’. Antiquity. 2020;94(378):1614-1629. doi:10.15184/aqy.2020.191
Philip Howell (2002) ‘A Place for the Animal Dead: Pets, Pet Cemeteries and Animal Ethics in Late Victorian Britain, Ethics, Place & Environment’, 5:1, 5-22, DOI: 10.1080/13668790220146401
Hilda Kean. ‘Human and animal space in historic ‘pet’ cemeteries in London, New York and Paris’, in Animal Death, edited Jay Johnston and Professor Fiona Probyn-Rapsey. 2020. Sydney University Press, Sydney. P. 21-42
Gustav Henry Moler, ‘The Lost Playmate’, 1902.
Edwin Landeer, ‘Shepherds Last Mourner’, 1837.
Featured Image Credit: Hyde Park Pet Cemetery, 1913date QS:P571,+ – -00T00:00:00Z/9 1913, 1913date QS:P571,+ – -00T00:00:00Z/9 1913, Columbus Metropolitan Library, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hyde_Park_pet_cemetery_-_DPLA_-_17caa69c5d86d9a3a1b83b8b850b3302.jpg.
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