You can’t put a value on the love you have for a pet. But you sure can put a price on the products and services we spend on them. Americans will spend an estimated $55.5 billion this year on their pets. This spending includes honoring the passing of a beloved furry family member.
Purdy Funeral Service, which operates the Wiggin-Purdy-McCooey-Dion Funeral Home in Dover and Purdy Memorial Chapel in Lee, opened a new facility in Lee in January—Pet Passages by Purdy Funeral Service—specifically geared to pets and their “pet parents.” Co-Owners Stephen and Caroline Purdy invested about $500,000 into their Lee property, which now houses the pet funeral and cremation services.
The Purdys were inspired to expand their offerings after the deaths of their own beloved dogs, Jake and Jesse. “We got them when Stephen and I got married. They were our babies before we had babies,” Caroline says.
The labs died in 2012 at the age of 12. The couple took Jake to the vet to be cremated and were met in the parking lot by a couple of techs. “They took our dog away and we were left in the parking lot,” Stephen says. It took two weeks to receive Jake’s ashes. When Jesse became ill, the couple made the difficult decision to have him put down. A week later his ashes were delivered by UPS. “There was no follow up,” Caroline says of the vet.
That experience inspired them to start the Pets Passages program. “We think it’s natural as funeral services providers to help these pet parents,” Stephen says. “We want to get the ashes back [to them] within a day or two and have a private viewing room.”
Pet Passages by Purdy Funeral Service offers pet cremations and customized memorial services. The facility has a viewing room with an animal bed, offering a private area to say good-bye. There is also an onsite crematory and pet owners can chose to have their pet cremated alone ($250 to $450) or with several pets at the same time, with each pet having its own private segregated section in the cremation unit ($150 to $250). “Before we put any animal in the crematory we take a paw print as certification that the family gets,” Caroline says. “We even have mini-caskets for burial.”
Caroline emphasizes Pet Passages does not freeze any pets. “We have a holding room where we can keep them for a couple of hours,” she says.
Adds Stephen, “We’re on call 24 hours a day for your pet. I had a client come from Keene at 3 p.m. I did the cremation with them here. They wanted to witness it and they drove home with an urn in hand.”
Many vets use out-of-state crematory services so the Purdys are marketing their services to vets in a 30-mile radius. They project the business will generate $100,000 in the first year from pet services and then grow annually.
The Purdys are working to have state regulations established for pet cremation in the state. “If that happens, we hope Pet Passages will set the standard,” Caroline says.
For more information, visit www.petpassages.com or www.purdyfuneralservice.com.
Current Issue - May 2024