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What is it about the human race, that we’re hardwired to have more sympathy for animals than for our fellow man? As a random example, the second episode of HBO’s Game of Thrones climaxes (spoiler alert) with one of the human characters being forced to kill a direwolf, which looks like a very cuddly Siberian husky. While the act isn’t shown explicitly, we know what’s happened and are meant to feel as bad as the character doing the deed does. After the episode aired, there were headlines on sites such as EW.com about the viewer outrage that a fictional human character had to kill a fictional animal. When said article also mentions that one of the actors on Game of Thrones adopted the dog who “died,” I find it hard to feel too bad. But we’ve seen this happen across pop culture for decades.

Not everyone has pets, but those who do have equally unique and universal stories about their dogs, cats, and the like. When we watch something in pop culture where an animal has a sticky fate, a fate that might be typical for humans in action or horror movies, we become more empathetic because we’re imagining it happening to our own pets. Of course, some people don’t have pets. Some of you probably don’t have pets, and you, most likely, think that some pet owners are absolutely crazy. Who would dress up a dog for any occasion, right? There are, of course, levels of pet owners. Some of us don’t dress up their pets, but some do it on a daily basis. Some of us like tiny animals, and some of us like bigger ones. You may not have a pet, but you love something as passionately as I love my cats. What’s more, you may think I’m crazy for being a cat person, but I might think the same of you and your passion.

Before my wife and I owned cats, we’d visit her parents’ house. Her parents, like she and I, are cat people. They’ve owned many over about 40 years, which means that many of them have passed on. My in-laws decided to go the route of cremating these cats’ remains and keeping the urns in their house as a remembrance. I remember that, when I first saw this, I couldn’t believe how strange and creepy it felt. Why would you want to keep an urn of your cat’s remains (or of any pet’s remains) in your house? I’m still not too sure about the whole process, but as I type this sentence, I’m looking at an urn, with our cat’s remains. Losing a pet is a surprisingly intense experience, if only because you don’t realize until the moment when you’re faced with never having this animal in your life again that you cared for it as you would for a child.

Some people don’t cremate their pets; some bury their animals in a pet cemetery. I’ve never been to a pet cemetery, but seeing one on film in the 1978 documentary Gates of Heaven is both moving and somewhat distancing. Having an urn may be equally odd, but there’s something about a personalized gravestone that makes the whole affair seem weirdly unemotional and rigid. Gates of Heaven, the documentary that vaunted its director and editor, Errol Morris, to a level of fame within the genre, is more interested in how the pets residing in one cemetery in California made the trek to another in Napa Valley, and the people who created each cemetery from the ground up. Yet there’s something fascinating and compelling about the men who ran each cemetery. The first, run by Floyd McClure, was an idealistic failure from the beginning, as he was tied up in bad loans and debt from square one.

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