Burying your pet with dignity, respect and love

Young students may well have come up with a solution to pet burial. Jonathan deBurca Butler takes a look at Peffins, which has been nominated at this year’s Student Enterprise Awards.

FOR most families and individuals the loss of a pet can mean as much anguish and pain as the death of a family member. Pet owners often feel they should repay years of unquestioning loyalty and companionship with the right kind of send-off, and quite often they are prepared to pay for it.

Pet cemeteries are an option but often they are expensive, with plots costing in the region of €500, while the island’s only crematorium for pets is in Belfast.

Legally speaking pets can be buried on private land as long as the grave is far from water and is placed at least 1.25 metres from the surface. In some local authorities you need to seek permission before getting the go-ahead.

While Dogs Trust Ireland suggest burying your pet in a “towel or maybe his favourite blanket” many owners would like to do more to show their respects.

A nomination at this year’s Student Enterprise Awards, which took place in Croke Park, may well have come up with a solution. Peffins was established in October 2013 by students from St Columba’s secondary school, Stranolar, Co Donegal.

“One evening I was chatting to a close family friend whose pet had died a couple of weeks before,” says the company’s 16-year-old managing director Conor McBride. “They were looking around our local area here for something to bury their dog in and there was nothing.”

Conor and his four colleagues, Carl Dunnion, Shaun Sweeney, Darren Bonner and Oisin O’Brien, conducted market research on 500 pet owners in the area and discovered that 70% would be interested in buying coffins, or ‘peffins’, for their pets should they become available.

With the help of their teacher and mentor Catherine Cooke Harkin, the group put their research into action and started to build the coffins in the school as part of their woodwork class. Ms Harkin has been teaching enterprise for 18 years and has turned out quite a number of successful entrepreneurs in her time at St Columba’s.

“I certainly thought it was a head-turning idea,” she says.

“I knew people were going to look at it anyway. It wasn’t really being done here, though there is one man in Donegal who uses cardboard, I think.

“But as the boys will tell you that’s not very good if you’ve got a big labrador to bury.

“I thought the idea was very hands on, so it was a perfect project for the class.

“They had to research it, they had to make it, market it and the idea was always going to create a bit of attention for them anyway.”

The wooden coffins are made using medium-density fibre-board (MDF) and the interior is padded with recycled materials which can include newspaper or cardboard. Peffins offer an extra small — for gerbils — small, medium and large coffins for pets and their aim is to help you “say goodbye to your pet with respect and love”.

Large coffins for big and medium-sized dogs cost €40, which Conor says gives the company a mark-up of between 20% and 25%.

When I suggest that they could charge a lot more, I’m quickly reminded that grief is no place for greedy capitalism — admirable stuff.

If pet owners wish they can contact the company who will customise the pet coffin to the needs of the grieving parties.

“You can contact us on our Facebook page and you can send us details of what size you need, if you want it painted, or if you want it personalised in any way,” says Conor.

“We make plaques too and we’ll scan it onto a sheet of gold paper and attach it to the plaque with any inscription that you want on it.”

Sales of the coffins have been relatively slow to begin with, but interest is growing with pet shops in places such as Sligo, Tyrone and Donegal beginning to stock them on a sale or return basis.

“We were on Ray D’Arcy’s show and we’ve been on BBC Radio Foyle twice, so it’s getting us good publicity.”

For now Peffins will occupy its five owners over the coming summer months when they hope to take over some workshops belonging to teachers and friends.

Conor says they “hope to set up a website and sell them more widely from there”.

With a growing market for pet insurance, counselling, and funeral services, the company looks well set to take advantage.