Faithful Unto Death, by Paul Koudounaris (256 pages, Thames & Hudson)
Traveling in rural Ecuador a few years ago, I looked out the car window to see a woman throw the corpse of a dog into a fire in her front yard. It wasn’t an act of cruelty — the dog was clearly dead — but it was still shocking to see an open-air cremation about to take place.
It was likely the best and cheapest option the woman had, faced with a decision that has confronted families ever since we started viewing animals as companions: What do we do with their bodies? In Faithful Unto Death, Paul Koudounaris walks us through the macabre history, making clear that what seems like the obvious answer — bury or cremate them — wasn’t often an option.
In Europe in the 19th century, many people took deceased dogs to rending sites where the bodies were broken down with chemicals, along with dead livestock. Terrible as that sounds, other people opted to throw their deceased animals into rivers. “In Paris, about five thousand dogs a year wound up in the Seine, the tragedy for their owners compounded by the civic cost, with the bodies polluting the river and resulting in 4,000 francs in annual cleanup fees,” Koudounaris writes.
When the rare individual tried to confer dignity on a deceased pet, things could get ugly. In 1855, a woman in Glasgow tried to inter her beloved cat in a cemetery plot she owned; an outraged mob gathered and broke open the cat’s little coffin, and police had to be summoned. It was considered blasphemous to think animals warranted the same burial customs as human beings.
But cremation wasn’t the answer either, as even for humans cremation was not yet widely accepted. So when an English family lost their beloved Maltese in 1881, they pleaded with the gatekeeper at a local park where they used to walk the dog and convinced him to let them bury him in his backyard garden. Word spread, and others began to make the same request. “Slowly his little plot was transformed into something that not only London, but also the entire Western world, had been unaware that it desperately needed.” Eventually there were more than 300 graves, animal corpses stacked on top of each other, in the gatekeeper’s garden, and he kept up the burying until he himself died in 1899.
Around the same time, pet cemeteries began cropping up in other places in Europe. In the United States, the problem of what to do with animal bodies was not so pressing, since there was plenty of undeveloped land, and you could bury anything you wanted on the frontier. Still, by the 1920s the U.S. had more than 600 pet cemeteries, and the U.S. today has more than the rest of the world combined, Koudounaris says — including one that is, bizarrely, only for coon hounds.
Some people are so enamored of their pets that they want to treat them like humans, even after death. Koudounaris tells the story of a mortician who was hired to embalm a dog that had been hit by a carriage (apparently streets were just as dangerous for dogs before cars) and bury him in a mahogany casket with a glass top. And at a mausoleum in New York, a metal box once came open, revealing not human remains but those of a parrot.
Earlier this year the New York Times published a fascinating piece about how a woman came to be buried at one of America’s most famous pet cemeteries, which is in Hartsdale, New York. Hartsdale is among the pet cemeteries that Koudounaris looks at, along with Pine Ridge, in Dedham, Massachusetts, where the fox terrier of South Pole explorer Richard Byrd is buried. The dog’s name was Igloo, appropriately enough, and his gravestone, larger than that of most humans, is shaped like an iceberg. Pine Ridge is also the resting place of three Boston terriers owned by Lizzie Borden.
Some of the most interesting stories in Faithful Unto Death, however, aren’t told in words but through photographs of monuments and epitaphs: “In remembrance of Smut, for 12 years, our much beloved cat”; “Alas! Poor Tiplet”; “Scott, who really smiled when pleased, faithful friend, guard of Anne”; “Witt – Best friend I ever had, died June 1895”; “In memory of a loving pet, Judy, killed by a tractor”; “Bingo, 1934-1950 – Let a little dog into your heart and he will tear it to pieces.”
In fact, anyone who still harbors grief for a long-gone pet may be brought to tears in solidarity with the animals memorialized here. That said, there are also some pictures I would rather not have seen, such as the mummified corpse of a dog that was found stuck inside a tree by loggers. “Stuckie” is now a tourist attraction in Georgia.
Toward the end of the book Koudounaris takes a look at what happens to pets of celebrities and animals that are celebrities in their own right. You’d think the dog that was Toto in The Wizard of Oz would have had one of those glass-topped mahogany caskets, but in fact the cairn terrier was buried at the home of her trainer, which later was razed when the Hollywood Freeway was built. “Cars now speed by above the gravesite, which is trapped under tons of concrete,” Koudounaris writes.
Grumpy Cat, the internet sensation who died in 2019, fared better and has a memorial (with a photo) at Sunland Memorial Park in Sun City, Arizona. (Even in death, Grumpy Cat has 1.4 million followers on X.)
Credit is due to Koudounaris for taking this macabre subject matter and making it engrossing; the only thing perplexing about the book is its presentation: It’s a heavy doorstop of a book, dictionary-like in heft, and maybe not the thing most people would want to display on a coffee table. That said, for people with good arm strength who don’t mind encountering a photo of a dead animal every now and then in a book, it’s a surprisingly compelling read. Kleenex recommended. B —Jennifer Graham
