Work on New Pet Cemetery to Begin

After more than a year of working in several portable buildings and comforting grieving clients in cramped quarters, the staff members and board of directors at the Los Angeles Pet Memorial Park are looking forward to breaking ground on a new facility Sunday.

“That’s the understatement of the year,” said park manager Sandra Dunaway, when asked Friday if she was pleased.

The day-to-day operations of the pet cemetery have been scattered in different mobile buildings since a fire caused by an electrical short destroyed the original wood facilities in September 1995.

The 68-year-old park’s owners--the nonprofit SOPHIE corporation--had been trying to replace the buildings since 1986, when it bought the business from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

“All of those years, we had been trying to raise funds for new buildings, and after the fire we raised even more funds,” Dunaway said. “That was put together with the insurance money, and we’re finally able to get a new building on the property, after 10 years.”

Dunaway said Bob Barker and a number of other celebrities have buried pets in the cemetery. And pets who were celebrities in their own right were laid to rest here in the foothills of Calabasas, including Pete, the mutt from “Our Gang.”

Directors estimate that more than 30,000 pets have been buried or cremated at the cemetery.