A Place for the Animal Dead: Pets, Pet Cemeteries and Animal Ethics in Late Victorian Britain

Abstract

The recent 'animal turn' in geography has contributed to a critical examination of the inseparable geographies of human and non-human animals, and has a clear ethical dimension. This paper is intended to explore these same ethical issues through a consideration of the historical geography of petkeeping as this relates to the death and commemoration of favourite household animals. The emergence of the pet cemetery, towards the end of the 19th century, is a signi cant step in itself, but this was only one element in a radical reappraisal of the place of non-human animals in human sensibility and spirituality. For some bereaved pet-owners, the old question of the immortality of animal souls was retrieved and transformed, and sustained by a raft of unorthodox theological and spiritual speculation. The signi cance of this late Victorian and Edwardian response to non-human animals is assessed and treated as a problem of ethics, as a counterweight to the dominant anthropocentrism of past times and ours.

Critical Pet Studies?

“…It would also be attentive to how pet‐love's recent emergence has paralleled the growth of post‐industrial service and consumption sectors under largely neoliberal regimes of accumulation, pets figuring as both commodities themselves and as sites of intensely commodified investment tied to global inequalities. In geography all such concerns could be situated in the nascent “new animal geographies” subfield that heretofore has dealt largely with theorizing animal‐human relations in non‐pet contexts (see Wolch and Emel 1998, Phio and Wilton 2000; but see Howell 2002 and 2000, Fox 2006).…”

Cremation Services upon the Death of a Companion Animal: Views of Service Providers and Service Users

“…Morales (1997), writing from the United States, indicates that there, unlike in Australia, animals can be buried with full religious ceremony and can even be buried with their caretakers. Howell (2002), writing from the United Kingdom, also underscores cultural differences, observing that "Pet cemeteries continue to proliferate in Europe and North America, [and] pet funerals provide both elaborate ritual and profitable business" (p. 20). In contrast, Brown (2006), writing from New South Wales, in Australia, discusses the dearth of literature in Australia and elsewhere on ways in which theologians of all faiths can offer pastoral counseling and grief counseling and provide a funeral service for bereaved caretakers of companion animals.…”

“…There are accounts of humans and dogs buried together, for example, in the late Paleolithic period (Hirschman, 1994). In a historical paper on pet cemeteries, Howell (2002) notes that the pet cemetery emerged in Britain toward the end of the 19th century, with the first one established around 1880. In the United States, the first such cemetery dates from 1896.…”

“…Nevertheless, dogs were not allowed burial on consecrated ground and thus could not be interred with their human companions. The majority of people wishing to place their companion animal in a cemetery in Victorian Britain were women, middle-class, and often subscribers to feminist, spiritualist, and/or antivivisectionist views (Howell, 2002).…”

Ashes to asses: an archaeological perspective on death and donkeys

“…Yet while non-human agency has been studied for contemporary commemorative practice and the mourning and commemoration of pets has been considered as a social and emotional phenomenon (Davies, 2002: 182-195;Howell, 2002;Shell, 1986), the role of material culture in linking together animals and humans in mortuary commemoration has received little detailed attention (an exception being for pet commemoration in Japan, see Chalfen, 2003).…”