In this week’s podcast episode, I visited the Paris pet cemetery with Amber Minogue. You can listen to the episode by hitting play, below, or wherever you find podcasts.
It was a calm and stunning little cemetery out by the Seine in the northern Paris suburb of Asnieres and I’d encourage you to visit, if you can find the time. And while it may be technically called the “cemetery of dogs” in French (Cimetière des Chiens), there’s a whole host of buried pets out there, as you’ll see below. There was even a sheep called Faust and a celebrity dog called Rin Tin Tin, but their graves didn’t make it to the top ten.
A short YouTube video we made in the cemetery
The cemetery itself is grand and lovely, even the art nouveau entrance is a spectacle. I took lots more pics and videos of the cemetery, I’ll add them to Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube in the coming days – hope you’re following!
Unfortunately, we never found the lion or the shark graves, but it’s always worth saving something for the next visit, non?
The ten most unusual graves I found
- Kiki the Monkey, the only monkey in a cemetery of mostly cats and dogs. I can’t find anything about Kiki’s life or death, but the grave reads: “Sleep, my dear, you were the light of my life”.
2. Kinshasa the intelligent cat. We talked about this at length in the podcast 🙂 In the photo series on the tombstone, she can be seen drinking with her “hand”. She was “as intelligent as an evolved primate”, it says
3. The influencer bee. I suspect this was a publicity stunt, but the golden bee stood out! The grave has an Instagram account, if you want to be swept up by the potential stunt, which is about how pesticides kill bees.
4. Ezequielle the tortoise. At first I thought this was just a toy tortoise on a dog’s grave, but the tombstone had a closeup photo of a tortoise mugshot. She lived for 11 years.
Note: There were actually a lot of toy animals on the graves. At first I thought these frogs and squirrels represented the animals buried, but then I saw a giraffe and realized these were more likely to be the favourite toys of the animals.
5. Barry the Saint Bernard. This one is unusual in that it’s much grander than all the others. Barry was a mountain rescue dog and saved the lives of 40 people. A small girl can be seen clinging to his neck.
6. The solitary bird. I looked at all the graves with photos and only saw one bird. Here she is, RIP Rosalinde.
7. The horses. If you go to the north side of the graveyard, there’s a whole extra bit with a couple of horses. I can’t even imagine how big a horse coffin would be… RIP Masserau.
8. The deer. This was the only deer I saw in the cemetery.
9. The bulging-eyed little dog. No idea what’s going on here, but a truly bizarre statue.
10. Bunga the rabbit. Bunga was the only rabbit we saw at the cemetery, and her tombstone was one of the many in English!
That’s it! If you want a much deeper visit, listen to our podcast episode which is embedded below.
If you want the ten-page “scroll” with ALL the extra information on the cemetery, become a Patreon member. And it’s the perfect time – tomorrow (Tuesday) I’m doing a member’s only Walk Show video at the magnificent Vaux le Vicomte chateau. Just me and the owner, strolling the chateau grounds. Wanna watch? Become the newest member here!