Dinesh Kamath's Editorial 'Cemetery for animals?' that was published in Newsband

Cemetery for animals?

Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) Corporator Netra Shirke has made a demand for pet cemetery. She says that the reason the Navi Mumbai citizens need the pet crematorium is because they want to pay the final respect to their pets by cremating them in same way as the human beings. As of now there is only one pet crematorium and that too in Parel, Mumbai, she adds. Talking of pet cemetery, here are some interesting information.

A pet cemetery is a cemetery for animals. The Hiran Minar near Lahore, Pakistan was built in the early 17th century by the Mughal Emperor Jahangir in honor of his beloved pet deer. Many human cultures buried animal remains. For example, the Ancient Egyptians mummified and buried cats, which they considered deities, and the largest known dog cemetery in the ancient world was discovered at the Ashkelon National Park in Ashkelon, Israel.

London's Hyde Park was the site of an informal pet cemetery between 1881 and 1903, in the gatekeeper's garden. From the first burial of "Cherry" until its official closure in 1903, it received 300 burials with miniature headstones, with a final special burial of the Royal Marines mascot dog "Prince" in 1967.

Cimetière des Chiens in Asnières-sur-Seine in Paris, dating from 1899, is an elaborate, sculpted pet cemetery believed to be one of the first public zoological necropolis in the world.

America's largest and oldest pet cemetery is in Hartsdale, New York. It dates from 1896, when a veterinarian working out of Manhattan offered to let a grieving pet owner bury her dog in his hillside apple orchard. Today, it is the final resting place for more than 70,000 animals. The Hartsdale Pet Cemetery was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2012. Some other famous American pet cemeteries are Aspin Hill Memorial Park in Silver Spring, Maryland, where celebrity animals such as seven of J. Edgar Hoover's dogs, such as his Cairn terrier Spee De Bozo, and internees at the "Medical Rats Memorial" are buried. (General Grant of R.K.O. was rumored to be Petey of the Our Gang and Little Rascals movies, but this is not true);[9] as well as the Pet Memorial Cemetery in Calabasas, CA, where Hopalong Cassidy's horse, Topper, Steven Spielberg's Jack Russell Terrier, and Rudolph Valentino's dog, Kabar, are buried.

At some cemeteries, such as Aspin Hill Memorial Park in Silver Spring, Maryland human and animal remains may be interred alongside each other. In January 2010, West Lindsey District Council gave permission for a site in the village of Stainton by Langworth to inter animal remains alongside human remains as part of a "green burial" site, making it the first place in England where pets could be buried alongside their owners.