Dog Tidbits

Photo by Svadifari / Sean via Flickr

Today human-style pet burials are becoming more and more common as we increasingly think of our four-footed companions as members of our families. So much so that currently there are over five hundred pet cemeteries across the country. And more and more pet crematories and pet funeral homes are opening up for business every year well. (The owner of one pet crematory that opened recently near Chattanooga told me that he handled over four hundred clients in a single month.)

Additional services pet crematories and pet funeral homes offer include such things as:

• Coffins
• Markers
• Memorials
• Fur clippings
• Death announcements
• Thank-you cards
• Paw prints
• Chapel services

Until recently, most people believed that the practice of burying pets human-style began during the Victorian period in the last half of the 19th century. Extravagant tales abound. The man who buried his dog in a satin-lined coffin to the accompaniment of a doxology — after the dog had lain in state. Or the woman who buried her dog in a casket with two locks and carried the keys on her for the rest of her life. Some people took mourning photos of their deceased dogs as well while other carried locks of their dog’s hair.

A recent archaeological discovery at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, however, pushes the date of human-style pet burials back a hundred years or so — to somewhere between the late 17th and the mid-18th centuries — after two graves were discovered. The graves were unmarked and contained small fragments of bones.

According to James Jones, who’s the director of the College of William and Mary’s Center for Archaeological Research, the researchers originally believed the graves contained human remains because the remains “were buried like people.” The graves’ east-west orientation supported the belief as well because in the Colonial period graves were aligned in an east-west direction.

Lab analysis on the bone fragments, however, indicated that the graves contained the remains of two dogs. These graves represent the only known examples of pet burials found in the Colonial period. (However, just because only two were found doesn’t mean there aren’t any more 17th- or 18th-century dog or cat graves waiting to be discovered.)

We don’t know anything about the dogs in the grave or why they were given human-style burials. And we don’t know whether or not their caretakers considered them as part of the family.

What we do know now, though, is that human-style pet burials in the U.S. might have began sometime between the late 17th century and the mid-18th century.

You can read the entire article on the William & Mary blog.

Tags: dog funerals, pet grief, pet loss