Some Pets Live On -- After Death

Sept. 13 -- There's a new option available for pet owners who can't bear to say goodbye when their furry friends pass on: having them freeze-dried.

More and more pet owners — reluctant to bury or cremate their pets, and queasy about traditional taxidermy — are having their four-legged friends preserved by a slow refrigeration process in which all the moisture is removed from their bodies.

Taxidermists say they have seen an increase in requests for pet preservation in recent years, and a few dozen taxidermists around the country have started offering freeze-drying as an option.

Mike McCullough, owner of Mac's Taxidermy in Fort Loudon, Pa., has been freeze-drying pets ever since a friend asked him to preserve his poodle five years ago. But he is still amazed that anyone would want to do it. "I cannot believe that this is happening. I can't believe that people will actually pay me to do this," he said.

For most of the 20 years McCullough has been in business, the bulk of his work was preserving wild animals caught by hunters in the surrounding Appalachian foothills. But he has seen requests for pet preservation flood in, and now most of his time is devoted to freeze-drying dogs, cats and birds for customers all around the country.

Posing Is an Art

McCullough charges $1,000 for a 10-pound animal, plus another $150 or so for each additional pound. Knowing how important the animals are to their owners — "It's a family member, it's not a trophy that they have taken hunting," he says — he asks them to provide photos taken when the pet was alive, as well as extensive pet bios and detailed instructions for how to pose them.

"Recreating a family member is hard, so you have to have a little bit of artistic ability and a little bit of knowledge of anatomy," he said.

After receiving a pet's body, McCullough stuffs it and treats it with chemicals. Then he poses the pet on a wooden board and places it first in a freezer, then in a freeze-dryer at 12 degrees Fahrenheit. After a pump sucks the air out of the freeze-dryer to produce a near-perfect vacuum, the ice in the corpse gradually escapes in the form of water vapor, which is ejected from the chamber.