Author Paul Koudounaris explores the history of mourning pets in new book Faithful Unto Death

From Faithful Unto Death // Photo by Paul Koudounaris

Out this week from Thames & Hudson, author Paul Koudounaris’ new book, Faithful Unto Death, tells the history of “pet cemeteries, animal graves, and eternal devotion” with emotional heft and an eye for detail. From Mr. Winbridge’s burial of a dog named Cherry at London’s Hyde Park to the dusty desert burial grounds used by RV road-trippers, Koudounaris delves into stories of pets both famous and unknown, yet all beloved by their owners.

When we last spoke with author Koudounaris in November 2020, he’d just released A Cat’s Tale, which used the voice of Koudounaris’ cat, Baba, to tell the history of felines, using amazing photos of his pet in a wide array of historical costumes. He actually started A Cat’s Tale in the midst of working on Faithful Unto Death, which has been nearly 12 years in the making.

As a matter of fact, he tells us, that cat book actually grew out of the pet cemetery book because he learned so many stories about cats as he was going to these cemeteries. He thought to himself at the time, Oh, damn it. The cats are going to need a book too, and that book now is four years old. That’s how long he’s been working on this project, Koudounaris explains.

The Pitch: I feel like Faithful Unto Death combines a lot of your topics into one thing.

Paul Koudounaris: Yeah, if you create the Venn diagram of my life, pet cemeteries are right there in the middle. It’s the obvious crossover. The funny thing is, when my book Memento Mori came out, which was 10 years ago, I had already started on this. There was an interview that I did—and this is 10 years ago—and the radio host said, “So what are you working on next?” and it’s like, “Well, I’m done working on death. I’m not going to work on any of this death stuff anymore. I’m switching to pet cemeteries.”

The lady’s like, “Paul, pet cemeteries are also death,” and I was like, “Oh, yeah,” but it was funny because that was 10 years ago. I had already prophesied that I was working on this book.

Traveling the country and the world to visit all of these places, I have to imagine that there’s a certain emotional heft to this.

You’re right about the emotional heft, because this was a draining project like nothing else has ever been. It’s not just because it took a lot of a lot of time. It was in the research. Every day, I was re-experiencing someone’s emotional loss. I had to live through someone’s emotional loss, the story of their loss, and I had known that loss personally.

All of us who have had pets have experienced that at some point in time, but I needed to truly understand it from other people’s perspectives, so I had signed up as a volunteer grief counselor for people whose animals had passed. I did it exactly one year to the day because I couldn’t do it for more than one year. That is a very difficult job, to sit there and talk to someone and empathize, but I needed to understand it from other people’s perspective, not just from mine.

And so, the emotional heft. My God. Yeah. I mean, there were days when this research literally broke me that I’d had to stop because I’d be crying.

From Faithful Unto Death. // Photo by Paul Koudounaris

I think part of what makes this such an emotionally effective thing is the fact that so many people have experienced the death of a pet.

Yeah, but also, pet cemeteries are very handmade. They are not a regular cemetery. They are not ossuaries. They’re not put together by an organization or a church or something like that. It’s intimate and it’s personal. I’ve been calling it kind of like the outsider art or art brut of mourning. It’s just raw and direct and untrained. There is no rhetorical language that governs how we mourn animals, because there is with humans.

There are things you say, there are things you do, there are steps, there are stages to what you’ll do when your friend’s father has died. It’s not the same with the pet. When an animal dies, everybody is putting their own individual boat and the rope is cut and you’re just unmoored and sent off to do it the best you can, and that’s part of why it’s so effective—because it is so earnest and pure.

I should point out that, while this has this emotional heft, there’s this joy in just the weirdness of it all that is so beautiful and liberating. I hate to use the word “fun,” but this was also, in some ways, a very fun project because I met and I learned so many things, met so many people. There were these bizarre stories.

There’s a picture of a trout grave in this book. There’s this trout from the 19th century. This guy had this trout living in his yard, and the fact that this trout had a grave was kind of legendary in animal grave circles. It was in the old literature from the end of the 19th century. I go to this village and I thought I had figured out which house it must be, but I don’t know, and I knock on this lady’s door, and this lady comes to the door, and she’s like, “Yes, can I help you?”

I was like, “Ma’am, I hate to bother you in your day. Do you happen to know if a trout died here in the 19th century and was buried on this property?” Which is a really weird question to knock on someone’s door and ask. This lady looks at me, and her eyes get kind of big, she’s like, “Yes?”

I was like, “I’m writing this book about pet cemeteries and such and such,” and this voice calls out from the other room, “Who’s at the door there?” “Someone’s here about the trout’s graves.” “Oh, I think you should let them in.”

From Faithful Unto Death // Photo by Paul Koudounaris

What’s so intriguing about the book and what makes it such a compelling read is it’s not just modern things, nor is it just historical things, but there are several instances of detective work on your own. There’s history of poetry and it looks at it from every angle.

I think there’s a reason that it took so long because it had to take so long. I think the project itself had its own mind. It’s like, “No, you’re not done yet. You can’t be done yet, ’cause you haven’t found the thing and I’ll let you know when you’re done.” A great example is that thing with Rin Tin Tin, ’cause I really didn’t think he was in that grave. I know enough about death studies and I’ve worked in that world to know you can’t just mail a dead dog to France without any record of it.

But it was only towards the very end, after searching and searching for years, I finally found a record of that other dog having been buried in that grave by the same name. The project almost had its own will and it wouldn’t let me go until every last question was finally answered.

You acknowledge in Faithful Unto Death the dark side of some of this in that some of these things acknowledge how animals have been treated.

That’s important though, because the point I make in the introduction, I think, is vitally important for us as a culture to understand that pets as we know them are new. Even this idea that they should have a death with dignity is new. It’s very, very new. It comes in the 19th century and it’s part of this entire movement for animal rights. It’s an animal suffrage and this whole idea that we have this emotional bond. When I started working on this book, people were like, “Are you going to visit the ancient pet cemetery in Jordan or Iraq or something?” and I was like, “No, because those aren’t pet cemeteries. Some of those were beloved animals, but a lot of those, in fact, it turns out if you go and you look—because people have x-rayed a lot of the Egyptian burials and the so-called Egyptian pet cemeteries—those animals were clearly sacrificed.

It doesn’t mean that the Egyptians didn’t love their animals and couldn’t love them the same way we do, but it’s an entire different culture. For a long time, we’ve been making these ethnographic projections on these cultures: “Oh, he had a dog buried next to him. It just goes to show that a dog’s been man’s best friend for 12,000 years.” It’s like, “Well, that dog may have actually been sacrificed. That may have been a hunting dog that was sacrificed to go with them.”

From Faithful Unto Death // Photo by Paul Koudounaris

Has the research you’ve done and the experiences you’ve had writing this book led you to reconsider what may happen when you next experience this?

Which will be soon, unfortunately. I have a cat who is hanging in there, but she’s become incontinent, she’s getting senile, and it’ll be soon. She will be buried in one of the desert pet cemeteries. I live in Las Vegas right now. I have easy access to all parts of the Mojave Desert, and those pet cemeteries are so precious to me because everything is handmade. It’s a free burial ground with everything handmade, tended by the people who bury the pets themselves and, to me, those are just the most touching places. Those are the ones that are the most filled with love.

To answer your question—Has it changed anything? Actually, no, because if you flip all the way to the very end of the book, there’s one last little picture and that is one of my cat’s graves and she was buried out in one of those desert pet cemeteries, too.

My brother has four and a half acres north of town here and because he has such a large amount of property, that is where everyone buries their pet. That particular corner of the yard you can see from his back deck has gotten so full.

That’s how it started. I mean, that really takes us back to the beginnings. It started with these impromptu, ad hoc burials, ’cause there was no official place, you know? It started out in country estates where people could do what they wanted with their property, with no judgment and without peeping eyes.

The thing that is truly revolutionary is the advent of the urban pet cemeteries. The first one that starts in London in 1881. That’s what was truly revolutionary because that that was really a confrontation. It was really a confrontation between people who loved animals and the people who just didn’t get it, and the people who just didn’t get it had been mocking them all along.

In Victorian England, you had got to be very stiff upper lip. If you had a guy who was running down the street crying because his brother died, even that would be considered too much. It’s like, “Oh, well, Nigel’s really lost it, hasn’t he?” To do that about a dog? Forget it. To do that about a pet, that really was a confrontation to put it in front of people’s faces.

Paul Koudounaris’ Faithful Unto Death is out now from Thames & Hudson.

Read The Pitch‘s exclusive story, cut from from the book, about the story of a dog from Chanute named Laddie.