The road to Bubbling Well Pet Memorial Park in Napa, California, follows a range of twists and turns up a rocky, sparsely vegetated hillside. Eventually, a row of trees shading a series of sweeping glens appears, along with a pair of imposing gates.
At first glance, Bubbling Well—which was immortalized in the 1978 Errol Morris film Gates of Heaven and features a burbling fountain to back up the name—looks like an ordinary cemetery, but a closer look reveals the graves are actually for cats, dogs, the occasional rabbit, and a few other species.I came to Bubbling Well to explore the wide, and growing, world of pet death care. According to the American Veterinary Medical Association, some 30 percent of U.S. households have cats, and 36 percent have dogs—that adds up to a lot of animal remains every year. Pet guardians may spend time thinking about where their pets go when they die on a more metaphysical level, but the question of what happens to the remains of Fido and Fluffy at the end of their lives is one that’s been vexing humans for millennia.
“Disposition,” as the industry euphemistically describes what to do with the body, has evolved into a large industry that will bury or cremate your pet, sell you a headstone or urn, and even outfit your animal with a lavish casket. For some grieving pet owners, the combined costs can climb into the thousands—though for most, still below the $7,000 to $10,000 median human funeral cost. But while the options were once limited to burial in a backyard or abandonment at the vet’s for disposal, pet owners now can access a spectrum of services that rivals—and sometimes exceeds—those available to humans.
Burial is certainly the most traditional of options, one that has a long history in the human-animal relationship. The oldest known pet burial is a 14,000-year-old grave in Bonn-Overkassel in Germany that contains the remains of two humans and a domesticated dog. But growing urbanization has made backyard burials more unusual, especially with many people moving house frequently and not wanting to leave the late Lassie behind.
The response: pet cemeteries. In the United States, Hartsdale Pet Cemetery, the oldest pet cemetery in the country, has been home to variety of deceased animals, including a lion cub, since 1896. But purchasing a plot for your pet in one of nearly 700 pet cemeteries across the United States is just the beginning.
Perusing pet headstones at Bubbling Well reveals that some families spend thousands of dollars on elaborate laser-etched headstones, while others opt for simple handmade markers. Many of those headstones are bedecked in flowers, and the remains underneath may be shrouded in plastic or fabric, or encased in wood, metal, or biodegradable caskets. Embalming, while a popular option for human funerals, is…
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