A leap of faith, a drunken eBay purchase and a corporate takeover - the death industry for pets in Canberra has had a bump or two.
Back in the day, the average Australian backyard would have a dog or two buried under a tree, or maybe a cat, a bird, a couple of guinea pigs.
Nowadays, it's more common for households to have a miniature urn or box filled with ashes, on a shelf or the back of a cupboard, gathering its own dust.
And pets are big business, in death, as well as life.
The sadness in their eyes
In fact, in the past two decades, a micro-industry has been building around dead pets and what to do with them.
This includes various cremation services, viewing ceremonies, specialised urns and even jewellery incorporating the ashes of your dead pet.
For Karen Viggers, the pathos of pet ownership is a given. The best-selling novelist has also been a vet for more than three decades, and says putting animals to sleep is part of life.
But we're more open to grieving than we used to be. Counselling is on hand. You may feasibly ask for a day off work to recover.
"I don't love doing euthanasias, but I approach it with a great sense of gravity and sincerity," she says.
"I know how difficult it is to go through that, to make it peaceful and to be there to console people and to confirm or affirm that they've made the right decision."
Still, she had a tough time recently having to let go of her own 14-year-old Maltese shih tzu. Toffee, the 4-kg "ball of fluff" had bladder cancer, and was suffering.
But the decision wasn't easy.
"I had to accept and to look in her eyes - people will often recognise the sadness in their eyes, the quality isn't there anymore. It was clear when she really did need to go," she says.
"That was a terribly difficult decision, and I cried as much as anybody."
Back when Viggers was a newly graduated vet in the 1980s, it's highly likely she and the family would have buried poor Toffee in the backyard and moved on with their lives.
Nowadays, such a thing is technically forbidden; ACT City Services have a number of options for disposing of pets, and specify that special permission is needed for burial options.
Viggers, meanwhile, occasionally finds herself talking to Toffee, in a small box on her desk.
Urns and plaques
Like many newfangled industries, this one began relatively slowly, at least in Canberra.
Tony Burke and his wife, Marilyn, were browsing the weekend papers back in 1996 when they came across an ad for a franchise being set up in the capital. Pets at Peace offered a cremation service for pets, with a crematorium two-and-a-half hours up the Federal Highway at Narellan.
"My wife could see that it would be something of interest to people who she knew were pet lovers," Burke says.
So he went from being a public servant to running Pets at Peace more or less seven days a week.
At first, business was slow.
"Starting from a zero base, there was a period of acceptance, I suppose, because it was a new thing, just as it was for people," he says.
Pets at Peace offers a door-to-door service. "That is, if your pet passes away, either at home or at the vet, we call to your house or the vet to collect your pet and we bring your pet's ashes home to you," he says. This takes eight to 10 days.
He continues to do the drive to Narellan, "because I know that each pet that is cremated in that facility is individually cremated. When I bring you home your Fido's ashes, that's what you get. There aren't any multiple cremations in our facilities."
He was the only operator in Canberra for a good 15 years, until Paw Bearers came onto the scene.
Louise Foldi - a longtime pet lover - had long felt there needed to be a service in Canberra that didn't involve driving deceased pets for hours to NSW and back each week.
"We needed something else ... I don't want my pet going on a wild country trip. I want to know where it is," she says.
"So I bought a crematorium, which involved drinking way too much scotch."
She'd prefer not to elaborate. Suffice to say that a drunken perusal of eBay one evening resulted in her purchasing a crematorium. From America. For $250,000.
"Oops!" she says. "It is a lot of money. Then I had to get it from America to here."
After an administrative tussle with the ACT government, she set up the machine in Queanbeyan - still over the border - and opened Paw Bearers in 2011.
She collects people's deceased pets herself, keeps them at home in a cool room and takes them to her crematorium once a week.
"I don't do them one by one, but they are separated and there is no movement," she says.
"I'm the only one that cremates. And I put them in and I take them out ... That way I know 100 per cent what you're getting back."
She often stays for a cuppa, and also returns your pet in a tasteful teak box engraved with the pet's name. "I don't like plaques and things stuck on - they look tacky."
Both she and the Burkes have overseen the cremations of a surprisingly diverse range of pets, from cats, dogs, rabbits and mice, to ferrets, bearded dragons, snakes, alpacas and turtles. There have also been miniature ponies and the odd foal. A horse can be done, but no one wants to talk about how they eventually get into the machine.
"For shits and giggles, I cremated a friend's Siamese fighting fish," Foldi says.
"There's nothing left when you put 2000 degrees on a Siamese fighting fish."
And while business is generally steady, it's not especially lucrative, with prices ranging from $75 for small animals, to $400 for the largest ones.
"I'm not driving a BMW," says Burke.
Foldi, for her part, maintains she doesn't do it for the money.
"We're in it to get Fluffy back home as quickly and happily as we can," she says.
"We're a little family business. We're not a big corporation."
Big Funeral
Everything was going fine with the two companies until the proverbial Big Funeral came on the scene. Edenhills is part of the pet branch of InvoCare, the company that runs nearly 300 of the country's funeral homes, including Tobin Brothers, White Lady and Simplicity Funerals.
The brand came to Canberra four years ago and quickly struck agreements with the majority of the 80-odd registered veterinary practices in the territory. These vets now have Edenhills brochures on hand for clients, and either refer them to the service or deal with the service direct on the client's behalf, paying wholesale for the service with an additional fee on top.
Edenhills offer a "viewing" service - the chance to see your pet in peaceful surroundings one last time at a facility in the industrial suburb of Beard - before transporting the pets off to the main facility in Albury.
Ashes are returned in the preferred vessel, chosen from a catalogue; it's as smooth and untraumatic as possible. And yes, they have a horse cremation service.
But clients need an unusual depth of knowledge if they want to make their way to the other, smaller, family-run services available.
On the face of it, it all seems fairly, well, corporate - the idea of a large national brand just muscling their way in to a small jurisdiction and taking over.
Not surprisingly, Edenhills' national relationship manager Rachelle Wilson takes a different view.
"What we do is we raise awareness with clients," she says.
"Because what is really important, and what we say to people, very similar to the human market as well, is that until you need us, you don't think about it."
And so clients - bereaved or soon-to-be-bereaved pet owners - are now inundated with options. Private cremation in an individual chamber, individual cremation with other pets but divided off to keep the ashes separate. Private cremation with the option of dispersal, where the ashes are scattered at the company's various properties. Memorial items for home burials, which are, incidentally, permitted for larger pets in the ACT (you can leave them at the tip with prior notice, while smaller pets can be placed in the compost).
All three business - Pets At Peace, Paw Bearers and Edenhills - maintain that the most important thing is for clients to be 100 per cent certain that they will receive their own pet's ashes at the end of the process.
Wilson even shares a macabre anecdote to prove her point, involving a cockatiel that had ingested the diamond from its owner's engagement ring. Once dead and cremated, staff were able to sift through the bird's ashes, retrieve the diamond and return it to its grateful - and, of course, grieving - owner.
Clean and green
But no one, really, has a more unique claim on the market than Paws To Remember. The territory's only bio-cremation - or water cremation - service is run by Cathy, who preferred not to divulge her last name.
She set up Paws To Remember in 2019 - just before COVID - having read up for years about the process.
"I researched for a good two years, and absolutely loved the idea, because it's a gentle, gentle process," she says.
"I've never been a big fan of fire, but there wasn't an alternative that I knew about. So then eventually I contacted the machine manufacturer in America."
The machine, when she bought it, cost the same as "half a house".
Put simply, the animals are placed in a solution of warm water and alkali salts, and heated up so that the flesh and hair eventually breaks down, "back to nature's basic elements", a process that takes several hours. The resulting bones are then dried out, and transformed into a fine dust.
"You don't get a jar of water," Cathy says, but she will return the ash to you in a velvet bag (or a vessel of your choice).
The process involves zero carbon emissions, is pathogen-free and smells "like a washing machine" and, best of all, almost always preserves the pet's microchip. How's that for peace of mind, if you were in any doubt?
Line in the sand
It's not surprising that most people involved in this industry are already pet-crazy to begin with. The Burkes breed dachshunds - "we've got it down to six" - while Foldi has basenjis. Cathy is mad about her American staffy and chihuahua, who get along surprisingly well. And Wilson cheerfully admits to allowing her King Charles cavalier Bindi Sue to sleep on pillow between her and her husband each night.
So when did all this change, from the backyard dog that would probably end up buried there, to the $1000 vet bills and massive life-to-death industry? No one's really sure, except that Australia has simply become more diverse, in our living arrangements and our relationships.
Our attachment to our pets has led to specialised counselling - often the result of referrals from the vets themselves - for when they die and we can't cope. And until then, there are dog parks and animal-friendly cafes, airlines allowing pets in the cabins, and wedding celebrants offering pet funeral services. Incidentally, this last one doesn't seem to have caught on yet; Wilson reveals that she is one of only two registered pet funeral celebrants in Australia, but has yet to be called on for her services, even though Edenhills does offer funerals.
Perhaps there is a line to be drawn somewhere. For now, we're still trying to navigate where to draw then line in our pets' heartbreakingly finite lives.
"Our pets are here to teach us a lesson, and when we've learned that lesson, they leave us," Foldi says.
