When I was a young man, a first year vet student in fact I once spent a summer in Paris.
The person I stayed with had no inclination to act like ” a kind of stupid tourist ” so I was left alone to wander the city and see the sights. This I was able to do by buying a kind of season ticket for the metro and with a guide book in hand I wandered the city for some two months, I still almost forty years later have some little knowledge of the city and this visit formed the foundation of my limited command of the French language which is still with me today although I rarely get a chance to use it. Now am learning another more ancient and unwritten language to converse with the people I encounter on a day to day basis in my new adopted country.
.Be that as it may, what did I find in my excursions in Paris which was animal related and of interest to readers of VetBlog? Well what I found which interested me greatly was the imposing monument to Barry the famous mountain rescue St. Bernard which is in Paris’s Cemetery of Dogs and other animals. Le Cimetière des chiens d’Asnières-sur-Seine, is thought to be the world’s oldest public pet cemetery. According to the plaque on his monument “Il sauva la vie à 40 personnes. Il fut tué par le 41ème” (“He saved the lives of 40 persons. He was killed by the 41st”.) The French claim is that Barry was killed in 1814 by an escaped prisoner who thought Barry was some kind of extra large wolf. As with all such stories such as the tale of Grey Friar’s bobby there is some dispute as to the actual truth of the events, this version is disputed by the Bern Natural History Museum. According to the museum, Barry was retired from mountain rescue in 1812 and brought by a monk to Bern. To my mind rather creepily when Barry died of natural causes in 1814 he was stuffed by a taxidermist and placed on display in the Museum the following year.
Though a much smaller grave than Barry’s another famous grave at the Paris pet cemetery is that of Rin Tin Tin, who starred in several Hollywood films of the 1920s. Although he spent most of his life in the U.S. and died in Hollywood, he had been found in France originally, so was returned to Paris to be laid to rest.
As a sometime pilot myself what I personally found most poignant was the graves of the much loved dogs which were pets and mascots of the British pilots who fought in the first world war, they seem to have been buried with full military honours. The poignancy lies in the fact that the odds are that the young carefree pilots of that era were more than likely to join their pets in that great officer’s mess up in the sky a short time afterwards.
This, although off the beaten track is an interesting place to visit if you have time on your hands and are an animal lover when you are in Paris. By the way it is not just for dogs, but also cats, a racehorse, a lion, a monkey, and domestic animals such as rabbits, hamsters, mice, birds, and fish have it as their last resting place as well. When you make your visit you will not only see dead animals but my recollection is of dozens of sleek well fed stray cats sunning themselves on the gravestones on a fine bright sunlit Paris afternoon.
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