The world’s greatest – and saddest – pet memorials

‘He was only a cat,’ reads the headstone. ‘But he was human enough to be a great comfort in hours of loneliness and pain.’ Dewey’s final resting place is the oldest surviving memorial in Pine Ridge Pet Cemetery, Dedham, Massachusetts, and was erected over 100 years ago. The inscription has become famous, and Dewey has a cultish following. It is ‘a public statement about the role a cat played in the life of its human companion…’ writes Paul Koudounaris in his book Faithful Unto Death. ‘Such declarations had been previously reserved for dogs, making Dewey’s gravestone the great ancestor of countless heartfelt memorials to cats.’

Koudounaris has spent much of the last 11 years creating this beautifully illustrated book (subtitled Pet Cemeteries, Animal Graves and Eternal Devotion), travelling all over the world to photograph cemeteries and gravestones, and research the stories behind the emotive little markers, which vary from a scrap of wood on which is written ‘Unknown Cat Killed on Road – layed to rest by people who cared’, to a full-blown marble mausoleum.

In Paris there is a lion named Mine and a goldfish named Gazouille. In Blockley, Gloucestershire, is a grave marking the last resting place of a trout. Even Jonny the Snail warrants a headstone (‘He Lived Life Well’).

There are the celebrities – a beagle called Tippy to whom Elvis sang Hound Dog on stage in Chicago; Terry, who played Toto in The Wizard of Oz, and Mae West’s monkeys. There are the talented: Parry, a dog who could ride a tricycle while holding a pipe in his mouth and whose grave was inscribed ‘Show biz was his life and love’; the hero dogs – Sarge, who took a bullet to the head while pulling a Marine out of the line of fire, for which he was awarded a Purple Heart; and Simon the ship’s cat, who received a Dickin Medal for his role in killing rats and boosting morale, and who became so well-known that he was assigned his own press officer. ‘His behaviour,’ reads his gravestone at Ilford Animal Cemetery, north London, ‘was of the highest order.’

Then there are the faithful. A dog called Bobbie went missing in Indiana in 1923 when he was on holiday with his owners. Unable to find him, they returned to their home in Oregon, on the west coast. Six months later, Bobbie turned up, having made the 3,000-mile journey to find his family. Could this be true? Apparently so – and his heroic feat made him famous and awarded him an elaborate grave in the form of a cottage complete with hedge and white picket fence.

What was it that inspired Koudounaris to devote more than a decade of his life to this project? ‘Do you want the pithy story or the real one?’ he growls over the phone from Las Vegas, where he lives with his three cats. ‘The pithy story is that I’ve written three books about death and one book about domestic cats, and if you take the history of domestic animal and the history of death and overlay them on a venn diagram, then pet cemeteries are right in the middle, so it seemed like a natural move.’

The real story, it turns out, is that when he finished a previous book (about sacred sites and traditions around death), he decided to visit a pet cemetery in LA and take a few photographs. He spent several hours there, and to his great surprise started to cry, tears splashing on to his camera. (He tells me that he looked up to check whether or not it was raining, but I don’t believe this bit.) ‘After three books about death and travelling the world documenting death sites, I thought I was impervious – but what finally broke me was these little animal graves, and the inscriptions people had written on them, and the way they said goodbye to their pets – the heartfelt and honest nature of it all.

‘That told me something – and I went home and started ruminating on the nature of our relationship with animals, how they allow themselves to be moulded into the vision we want them to be, and how they become a piece of us, so when an animal dies it’s like losing something internal that you will never get back. There are stacks of books on how to mourn your pet, but none of them did anything for me – it was all garbage. But in a covert way this book is a guide to mourning – by showing you how other people have loved, lost and mourned.’

As part of his research, he volunteered as a grief counsellor for people who had lost their pets. He had to give it up after a year. ‘It got to the point where it was psychologically debilitating. I quit because I couldn’t take it any more.’

Pets as we know them are an invention of the 19th century, ‘a product of the great social shift which saw people flock to the big cities in the wake of the Industrial Revolution…’ he writes. ‘There was an evolution in their relationship… as the cramped quarters of the modern metropolis drew people and animals closer than they had ever been.’ People bonded with animals in a new way. Nowadays pet ownership has evolved into a huge industry, one that generates around $100 billion a year in the US alone.

Koudounaris did not do his research online, preferring instead to visit libraries, archives and major research institutions to consult the Readers’ Guides to Periodic Literature (a pre-Google index of articles published in magazines and journals) picking out stories about dogs and cats that interested him.

My favourite story in the book is that of a charismatic little dog called Nightlife, ‘a simple mutt who was so beloved that his funeral turned into one of the most extraordinary ever recorded for an animal,’ writes Koudounaris. Owned by a bartender in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1952, Nightlife lived up to his name - he ‘lit up the scene wherever he went’ and had free run of the city, ‘stopping at restaurants and taverns to delight all he met and hitching a ride with taxi drivers who knew where to drop him off when he wanted to return home’. He met a sad end – run over while crossing the road – and a local funeral parlour hosted a wake for him.

‘He lay in a child’s coffin lined with white satin,’ writes Koudounaris, and 2,000 people came to pay their respects; the following day a procession headed towards Clara Glen Pet Cemetery. Sixteen Cadillacs led the way, followed by hundreds of mourners. ‘It was a distinctly segregated area and Nightlife’s owner and most of his friends were black. Eventually the police arrived on the scene. The police were white yet they had not come to stop the procession but rather, with sirens blaring, to lead the little dog the rest of the way to his eternal home. An entire city had effectively united in memory of a dog.’

There are an estimated 700 pet cemeteries in the USA, the first established in 1896. The first pet cemetery in the UK was inadvertently created in Hyde Park in London in the early 1880s when the gatekeeper, Mr Windbridge, allowed a family with whom he’d become friendly to bury their dog, Cherry, in the park. The idea caught on. It is now closed but it is estimated that 1,000 dogs and cats have been interred here.

Koudounaris’s favourite pet cemetery is in Finland. ‘The tradition there is hand-painted portraits on wooden grave plaques,’ he says, ‘so it has a personal feeling and there are a lot of little offerings and trinkets left on the graves – and the setting is idyllic, surrounded by woodland, with fairy lights and tea lights, little lanterns with candles. The whole place is unimaginably beautiful.’

Koudounaris grew up in southern California. His father’s family was Greek but he grew up in Egypt (‘Remember how Alexander the Great went to Egypt, took a lot of people there, founded a giant city, and then dropped dead, basically stranding everyone there? That was us,’ he says), and moved to America to study engineering. ‘At an early age I became obsessed with the two things that would recur in my life, animals and death. By the time I was in second grade I was already withdrawing because I thought a lot about mortality. It’s a difficult topic for a child.’

His first cat, Fritter, was found in a dumpster. ‘I loved that cat,’ he says. ‘That cat loved me. If there was anything served at dinner that I didn’t like I pretended to eat it, palmed it like a magician, and held it under the table so Fritter could eat it for me. Eventually my mother decided that Fritter could no longer live in the house – she was tired of vacuuming the cat’s fur. So she declared Fritter an outdoor cat. Nothing has ever hurt me like the sight of that cat staring in from the window, begging to be let in. Except at night, when I could sometimes sneak her into my room and hide her under the covers. I believe that my mother putting that cat out destroyed our relationship. It was never the same again, I never trusted my parents afterward. I effectively chose the cat over my parents.’

It’s hard to know how seriously to take Koudounaris but his book is a work of art. And now he needs a holiday, so he’s off to Indonesia to photograph some mummies.

Faithful Unto Death: Pet Cemeteries, Animal Graves and Eternal Devotion (£25, Thames & Hudson) is out now