Rover’s final resting place
When will Ukrainian pets have their cemeteries?
In every public garden or park you can come across small graves with makeshift crosses and tablets reading “Rest in peace, Fluffy. Your loving owners” or simply “Fido, 1990-2005.” Mothers complain that this unfortunate sight brings tears to their children’s eyes and makes them sad, while local district administrations say that such graves are unsanitary and clash with the city’s architectural ensemble. Janitors and former owners of dead pets are constantly at war. Street cleaners demolish graves, while grieving owners rebuild them over and over again. They want a decent burial for their four-legged friends. Meanwhile, virtually no city in Ukraine has an official cemetery for pets. The Day tried to find ways to resolve this problem.
Kharkiv has the first and only official cemetery in Ukraine. In the years since it opened countless animals, mostly cats and dogs, have been buried there. This has become a quite profitable business for purveyors of funeral goods and services. Many owners want to bury their beloved pets with due ceremony and even observance of Christian traditions.
Residents of other Ukrainian cities are not so lucky. The decision to create pet cemeteries is up to municipal administrations. So far burial sites for pets have been allocated in Lviv and Kyiv. However, these plots of land have not been developed since 2003. That year the Kyiv city administration allocated a plot for a pet cemetery a short distance from Thermal Power Plant 6 in the residential suburb of Troyeshchyna, The Day learned from the Kyiv Center for Animal Identification. “Some investors wanted to build a cremation complex and columbarium for our small brothers,” says Olena Mykhalchenkova, who heads a department at the Kyiv Center for Animal Identification. “But the administration did not respond in any way and the project folded.” Animal rights activists initiated the creation of a cemetery in Lviv in 2004, but since then no progress has been made in this matter. Olha Labunska, a leading expert at the Kyiv City Administration, told The Day that the database of regulations and directives of the municipal administration does not contain a directive to create a pet cemetery. At the same time, the administration of Kyiv’s Desniansky district has cited instructions received from Kyiv Mayor Oleksandr Omelchenko and confirmed that a plot of land has been allocated for the cemetery.
However, this does not stop pet funeral service bureaus from operating. “We can do individual cremations and return the ashes of your pet in an urn,” The Day’s correspondent was told at a pet funeral service bureau in Kyiv. “Or we can do a general cremation, after which all the remains are disposed of. You will not even have to deliver your dead pet anywhere. Our veterinarians will come any day and any time and will take care of everything.” The animals’ ashes are buried in the graves of family members, in the gardens of cottages, in the neighborhood yard, or public park.
“Most often dead pets are buried in illegal makeshift cemeteries,” says Olena Serheyeva, press secretary of the Canine Training Association of Ukraine. The most popular site for burials in the capital is the Rusanivka pet cemetery. The municipal authorities have not demolished it, but have not recognized it officially either.” Today the pet cemetery in Rusanivka is not very different from a human cemetery. It is a vast, unfenced territory dotted with tombstones, monuments to dogs and cats, and crosses with the birth and death dates of their four-legged friends. Rusanivka is not the best place for a cemetery in terms of hygiene and sanitation. Decomposing remains mix with ground waters and drain into the Dnipro, which is a stone’s throw from Rusanivka. Then water with corpse bacteria evaporates and the wind spreads them. “The problem of pet cemeteries has been discussed for nearly 10 years,” says Serheyeva. “Nobody listens to the initiatives and requests of pet lovers. The Rusanivka cemetery is the result of this hopeless situation.” Several months ago the district administration put up warning signs, requesting owners to rebury their pets’ remains elsewhere, because this makeshift cemetery will be bulldozed. This is the only comment The Day received from the Dniprovsky district administration, whose officials are not very eager to discuss pet cemeteries.
