A final resting place for pets

ABERDEEN — Hansa, Woodland Park Zoo's beloved elephant, shares a final resting place with an unknown number of dogs, cats and other creatures behind one of the state's busiest animal crematoriums.

Petland Cemetery is a mortuary and crematorium for animals large and small, a place where pet owners, zoos and animal shelters send deceased animals for cremation and interment. Petland's four large incinerators can cremate numerous animals at once or handle large creatures, even an elephant.

The 6 ½-year-old Asian elephant was cremated there after her death June 8, and her remains were buried in an unmarked mass grave behind Petland Cemetery in a residential neighborhood in Aberdeen.

While Hansa was the largest animal the facility has cremated, Petland owner David Bielski said hundreds of thousands of dogs and cats, as well as sea life and even a giraffe, have ended their journeys at Petland.

"It's interesting to be working with the larger animals," Bielski said. "But everybody is the same. [When a beloved animal dies] they have an emotional loss. Whether it's a elephant or a horse, it's the same."

When Petland began, it primarily served as a pet cemetery for Southwest Washington and disposed of the remains of animals that died at local animal shelters. Though the facility handles cremations for Woodland Park Zoo and Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium, Bielski said, the majority of its work comes from veterinary clinics across the state.

It took Bielski, two of his employees and a forklift to handle the cremation of the 600-pound elephant. After the nearly 12 hours of work, Hansa's remains were mixed with those of household pets also cremated Saturday at Petland Cemetery and buried in a wooded area nearby. Zoo officials declined to keep the elephant's remains.

Bielski's father, Hans, was the second-generation owner of Fern Hill Cemetery when he started Petland on cemetery property in 1973. Dave Bielski had been working for the family business only five months when Petland was founded, but he quickly took on the pet cemetery as his own project.

Bielski lovingly tended to the shady half-acre dedicated for pet burial plots and even started burying his own pets there. Business, at first, wasn't steady, just a regular group of Aberdeen residents who sought a final resting place for pets.

"It was a way to provide a service to the local community for the local pets," Bielski said.

But about 20 years ago, Bielski noted a definite change in the attitudes of pet owners. With cremations of humans on the rise, Bielski saw the trend spreading to pets.

Pet cremation is big business across the United States, according to the International Association of Pet Cemeteries, which represents 254 of the nearly 800 pet cemeteries and crematories in the nation.

"When this industry first started it was mostly just [pet] cemeteries," said Brenda Drown, who runs the northern New York-based association with her husband. "Right now 94 percent of our membership has cemeteries and crematories. It's getting to be a large industry."

Drown said pet owners opt for cremation because of the relatively low cost and it allows them to keep the ashes as a remembrance.

"Twenty years ago the option was either go into the backyard and bury the animal or the veterinarian would more or less take care of things, which would be rendering," said Corey Gaffney, general manager of Tacoma Mausoleum & Mortuary, which started doing pet cremations in January 2006.

Bielski now provides cremation services to more than 150 veterinary clinics, including a swath of Western Washington from Port Angeles to Vancouver. His drivers also pick up remains from animal-control shelters in Aberdeen, Hoquiam, Puyallup and Pierce and Thurston counties, as well as Columbia County, Ore.

Each night, Petland employee Emil Bergeson places more than 3,000 pounds of animal remains into Petland's four retorts, or incinerators, which are heated at temperatures ranging from 1,800 to 2,100 degrees. The facility also does individual cremations.

When the Montesano man returns at 6 a.m. all that remains are bone fragments. The fragments are ground into a dull gray powder, then packaged up in plastic bags to be sent back to pet owners.

Unclaimed remains, like Hansa's, are mixed into large drums with other pets and buried in a landfill behind Fern Hill Cemetery.

Owners can have some or all of the remains packed into marble urns, wood boxes, into yard stones or even into heavy silver pendants.

A basic cremation — just the remains packaged into a plastic bag — could cost a pet owner anywhere from $65 for a 10-pound cat to $200 for a dog over 150 pounds. Cremation of a larger animal, like a horse, could cost more than $1,000. Burials could run more than $1,000. Of the more than 50,000 cremations that Petland did last year, only about 3,000 owners wanted their pets returned in an urn, box or other container, Bielski said.

The majority of Petland's cremations are of pets whose owners don't want to keep the remains, Bielski said. The unclaimed remains are buried in unmarked graves behind Fern Hill Cemetery, which is next to Petland.

"Dogs and cats aren't just pets, they're family," Bielski said. "I tell all my drivers that to treat the pets [remains] they drive as they would treat their own son or daughter."

Jennifer Sullivan: 206-464-8294 or jensullivan@seattletimes.com