Presidio Pet Cemetery

Lord knows I cried my eyes out for days when I had to euthanize my beloved black cat, Bart, many years ago. So the pain of losing a cherished pet is not lost on me but I was surprised and touched by my visit to the Pet Cemetery in the Presidio recently.

The pet cemetery sits on a slight incline on a plot of ground about 100 feet wide by 200 feet long. The soil is dry and sandy and it is the kind of place where you are always looking out for snakes. Gopher holes frequently collapsed beneath my feet, making me wonder exactly how many animal corpses I was stepping on. Bright pink flower bushes swayed in the wind and tall weeds struck a pose against wooden and stone tombstones. The beating sun, fog, and salt air were expediting the decay of favorite chew toys and stuffed animals leaned haphazardly against their owners’ grave. Plastic red and yellow roses were stuck straight up in the ground like miniature street lights.

Grieving pet owners went to varying levels of trouble to send their felines off into the Great Sandbox or their canines into the Great Dog Run in the Sky. Some of the gravesites are carefully surrounded by tiny 6” high wooden fences, while others appear a little more slap-dash in style. Many of the grave markers are obviously painstakingly hand-written by a child, while other pets are honored with granite grave markers by full grown adults with too much money on their hands (as in the case of this photo above, where this dog must have been something else because she only lived four years to make her mark on the world)

I puzzled over a few grave markers that spoke of animals being loved by certain “captains” or “majors” until I remembered that I was on an army post, and more specifically, the designated place where military men and women buried their favored pets.



My quiet meandering was interrupted by an open air double-decker tour bus pausing in front of the cemetery. I looked over to find dozens of Chinese tourists quietly staring at me. The guide said something into his microphone making everyone burst into laughter. I imagine he said something like “And if you look over here to your left you will see a crazy American woman, grieving the recent death of her favorite chowchilla.”

"If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went." ~Will Rogers