The history of pet cemeteries: from Roman Egypt to Hyde Park

A pet cemetery is a burial ground where people bury animals they lived with and cared for. This page follows the history of these places, from a cat and dog cemetery at a Roman-era port in Egypt to three that opened within 20 years of each other in London, New York and Paris. It explains who started each one, what the graves hold, and which of them you can still see. For the other ways families have remembered their pets, start with the main guide to pet memorial portraits.

Pets, offerings and other animal graves

Animal graves are old, and many of them had nothing to do with pets. Live Science says ancient Egyptians are known for mummifying large numbers of animals to honour the gods, and some of those animals were killed for that purpose. The researchers at Berenike, as Live Science and Guinness World Records report, pointed to other signs before calling their site a pet cemetery: animals that were fed and cared for in life, graves dug with care, and no sign that the animals were killed on purpose.

Ashkelon: many dogs, no clear answer

A large group of ancient dog graves shows how hard the question can be. A 2017 article in the Journal for Semitics, published by the University of South Africa, says more than 1,200 dog remains had been found at Ashkelon, on the coast of what is now Israel, by the end of the digs that ran from 1989 to 1992. They date from the Persian period, when the Persian Empire ruled the city.

The excavation leader, Lawrence Stager of Harvard University, linked the dogs to a healing cult that he thought they belonged to. The article points out that no such healing centre has been found, and it offers a different explanation. Guinness World Records also mentions Ashkelon and says that the dogs' role in life and the reason for their burial are still unclear. Guinness gives the title of oldest known pet cemetery to a site in Egypt instead.

Berenike: a pet cemetery in Roman Egypt

Guinness World Records lists the oldest known pet cemetery at Berenike, a ruined seaport on Egypt's Red Sea coast. It dates from the 1st or 2nd century AD. A team of Polish archaeologists began the excavation in 2011, and Marta Osypińska and Piotr Osypiński of the Polish Academy of Sciences published their first findings on 7 September 2018, with an update on 25 January 2021.

Live Science reports the count: of the 585 animals excavated, 536 were cats, 32 were dogs and 15 were monkeys, with one fox and one falcon. None was mummified. Osypińska told Live Science that many of the animals were old, sick or deformed and must have been fed and looked after by someone. They were placed as if asleep, sometimes wrapped in a blanket or covered with pieces of pottery. One large dog was wrapped in a mat of palm leaves, with two halves of a large clay jar laid over its body.

Guinness says some animals were buried with objects that show they were household pets, including decorated collars and a dried cow's tail that was probably a toy for the cat buried with it. It also says there was no sign of religious ritual. Osypińska's own conclusion, as Live Science quotes it, was that the animals were "just pets".

Hyde Park, London, 1881

Modern pet cemeteries began in the 19th century. According to Newcastle University, the first public pet cemetery in the United Kingdom was set up in 1881, when the owner of a recently dead dog called Cherry asked the gatekeeper of Hyde Park if the dog could be buried there. Cherry was buried in the gatekeeper's own garden behind Victoria Lodge, and over the next few decades hundreds of other dogs followed.

The Royal Parks, the charity that looks after the site today, adds the details. Cherry was a Maltese terrier who belonged to Mr and Mrs J. Barned of Cambridge Square, and the family wanted the dog buried in the spot it had loved in life. The gatekeeper, Mr Winbridge, made his garden into a cemetery. The Royal Parks says more than 1,000 dogs and cats are buried there under small marble headstones, and that burials stopped in the early 1900s once the garden was full and Mr Winbridge had moved on.

Our page on how the Victorians remembered their pets looks at the families who used the cemetery, and our page on writing a pet dedication looks at the words on its stones.

Hartsdale, New York, 1896

In the United States the story starts in an orchard. Voice of America reports that pet burials at Hartsdale, north of New York City, began in 1896, when the veterinarian Samuel Johnson let a woman bury her dog on his land among his apple trees. The oldest headstone, from 1898, remembers a dog named Blague.

Hartsdale is the oldest pet cemetery in the United States that is still in use. Voice of America says more than 70,000 animals have been buried on its two hectares. Most are cats and dogs, but the grounds also hold reptiles, mice, birds, monkeys, a horse, and a lion cub buried in 1912. A war dog memorial, set up in 1923 to honour dogs that served in the First World War, stands at the top of a hill. Between 250 and 300 burials take place each year, and the cremated remains of hundreds of people have been buried beside their pets.

Asnières-sur-Seine, near Paris, 1899

In France, a law made the first pet cemetery possible. The town of Asnières-sur-Seine explains that until the late 19th century, the bodies of pets in Paris were often thrown away with household waste or into the river Seine. A law of 21 June 1898 allowed domestic animals to be buried in a pit as far as possible from homes, under at least one metre of earth.

The lawyer Georges Harmois and the journalist Marguerite Durand used the new law. They founded a company for a cemetery for dogs and other domestic animals on 2 May 1899, bought half of an island in the Seine, and opened the cemetery to the public at the end of that summer. The architect Eugène Petit designed its gate. The grounds were divided into four sections: dogs, cats, birds and other animals.

The town lists some of the famous graves. A monument to Barry, a dog that belonged to the monks of the Great Saint Bernard hospice in the early 19th century, has faced the entrance since 1900. A monument to police dogs dates from 1912. Rintintin, the dog hero of a television series, is buried there, and so are pets of Camille Saint-Saëns. In 1958 a stray dog died at the gates, and the managers buried it with a monument as the 40,000th animal in the cemetery. The Île-de-France region says more than 90,000 animals have been buried there since it opened.

Three cemeteries compared

What the gravestones record

Pet cemeteries keep a written record of how people felt about their animals. According to Newcastle University, the archaeologist Dr Eric Tourigny recorded more than 1,000 animal headstones at four British pet cemeteries, from their founding in the 1880s through to the 1980s. The four were the Hyde Park cemetery, the People's Dispensary for Sick Animals cemetery in Ilford, and Jesmond Dene and Northumberland Park in Newcastle. He published the study in the journal Antiquity.

The study found that Victorian stones more often called pets companions or friends, and that later stones treated them as family members. Pet cemeteries of this kind spread across Britain after Hyde Park, Newcastle University says.

A private grave for a single animal came earlier. In 1808 the poet Lord Byron built a monument to his Newfoundland dog, Boatswain, in the garden at Newstead Abbey. The Works of Lord Byron prints its inscription, which records that the dog was born at Newfoundland in May 1803 and died at Newstead Abbey on 18 November 1808.

Protecting the old cemeteries

Some of these cemeteries are now protected as part of their countries' history. Voice of America reports that Hartsdale was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2012. The Asnières cemetery came close to closing: its board decided in 1986 to shut it in September 1987. The town says local people and grave owners organized to save it. On 29 June 1987 the site was registered for its "picturesque, artistic, historical and legendary" interest, and the town bought the land in May 1989 and took over its management on 1 February 1997. The Île-de-France region gave it its regional heritage label on 17 November 2023.

The Hyde Park cemetery is cared for by The Royal Parks charity, which says it can be visited as part of one of its guided tours of the park.

From cemetery to home

A family today can keep a pet's memory at home, with ashes, a collar, photos or a portrait on the wall. The old cemeteries show that the wish behind these things is centuries old: a named place, a few words and a way to see the animal again. A portrait made from a favourite photo is one modern way to do that. The gallery shows finished royal portraits of dogs and cats, and our page on choosing a photo for a memorial portrait explains how to pick the picture.