Owners find relief in giving dead pets a proper send-off

He Jie cleans tombstones of pets which were buried by his funeral company in the Danao mountain near Taiyuan, Shanxi province. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Taiyuan company holds special funeral services for dead animals

When He Jie started raising a Russian Blue cat named Shier, or twelve in Mandarin, he wondered what he should do if the cat died. Then in 2016, an idea occurred to him to do pet funerals.

"I went to Beijing and did my research, then made preparations to start the company," said the 29-yearold, who is now a pet mortician.

He operates a pet funeral service company with a business partner in Taiyuan, the capital city of North China's Shanxi province, and has held funerals for nearly 500 pets since starting the company two years ago.

To give beloved pets a proper send-off, He rented three warehouses and redecorated them to include a funeral parlor and a crematorium. These are located in the Danao mountain in Xinghualing district, about 15 kilometers from downtown Taiyuan.

"Human beings need a sense of ritual, and giving pets proper funerals give owners that sort of sense, and it is also their responsibility," He said.

There were no relevant regulations or policies about pet funerals when He registered the company two years ago, as the local government had no idea how to go about doing it with no precedent to follow.

The pet funeral industry is also almost nonexistent in China, with only three or four organizations registering their businesses as animal carcass disposal sites, according to He. "There were two girls who once did this business in Taiyuan, but have since quit," he said while discussing the current situation of the pet funeral industry.

Despite these initial difficulties in starting his pet funeral business, the biggest difficulty that He currently faces is the misunderstandings that villagers living in the Danao mountain have of his business. They believe that the pet funerals affected local feng shui, a traditional Chinese geomancy, and have asked He to close down his company several times.

"I don't like to think of it too much. I think it is a good thing, so I can throw myself into it," said He, unwilling to let criticisms of the villagers affect his work.