Eulogy for a Pet: Five Speeches, One for a Child to Read

A eulogy for a pet is short and specific: name them, describe one ordinary thing they did daily, say what the house is like now, and thank them. Two hundred words read aloud is a complete eulogy. Below are five full examples, including a six-sentence one and one written for a child to read.

You are probably not standing in a chapel. You are in a backyard, or a living room, or a clearing at the end of a walk you did together, with three or four people and a collar or a box or nothing at all. There is no order of service and nobody is going to tell you when to start.

Some people feel foolish about this. Giving a speech about an animal, when people have buried parents. Put that down. You lived with this animal for years. They were in the room for most of your ordinary days, and the ordinary days are most of a life.

What follows is five complete eulogies for a pet, in five genuinely different registers, then the practical parts: how long it should run, what to do about the day you chose, and how to turn any of these into your own animal in ten minutes.

Five eulogies for a pet, written out in full

Read any of these as written if that is what you need tonight. Each one stands on its own.

1. For a dog who was just there, every day

Read by the person who drove him to the vet. A retriever, eleven years old, six people in a back garden.

Thank you for coming out here. I know it is a Tuesday and I know it is cold.

His name was Baxter and he was eleven. He arrived at eight weeks old in a cardboard box on the back seat and he chewed through the seatbelt on the way home, which should have told us something.

I want to tell you one thing he did, because it is the thing I keep going back to. Every morning, for eleven years, he waited at the top of the stairs. Not at the bottom, where it would have made sense. At the top. He would hear the kettle, and he would come and sit up there, and wait for one of us to look up. And when you looked up he would stand and do the whole body wag, the one where the back half goes first. Every single morning. Four thousand mornings of a dog being pleased that the day had started.

He was not a clever dog. I am going to be honest at his own funeral. He could not find a ball in open grass. He barked at the bin lorry for a decade and never won once. He ate a whole birthday cake off this table when Maya was seven and then looked at us like we had done it.

But he was there. That is the part I did not understand until this week. He was in the room for everything. He was there when we moved. He was there through my mother's illness, lying against the door of the spare room where she slept. He was there for every bad phone call I have taken in that kitchen, and he always came over, and he never once asked what was wrong.

The house is very loud now. That is the thing nobody warns you about. No clicking on the floorboards, nobody breathing in the corner, nothing waiting at the top of the stairs. I came down yesterday and looked up out of habit.

On Thursday the vet came here, to the house, because he hated the car. He was on his own bed with his head on my leg and the back door was open because he liked the air. It took about a minute. He was not frightened. I want to say that out loud because I needed it to be true and it was.

Baxter, you were a good dog and a useless guard dog and the best part of this family's day for eleven years.

Thank you for waiting at the top of the stairs. We are going to be all right. It is just going to take a while.

2. For a cat who ran the house and knew it

Affectionate, and rude about her. Sixteen years old, read in a living room by her person's brother.

We are here for Mirren, who was sixteen, and who would have hated this.

Let us start with the facts. Mirren was not a nice cat. She was a magnificent cat and a terrible person. She bit the postman. She bit me, repeatedly, for sitting in a chair that she had sat in on some previous and unrelated day. She had a specific noise, somewhere between a growl and a complaint, which meant the food in the bowl was the wrong food, and the wrong food was always the food she had demanded the day before.

She slept on Grandad's chest for the last four years of his life and let him do absolutely anything to her, including the voice he did, and she never bit him once. So she knew. She chose. That was the insult of it. She was perfectly capable of being lovely and she rationed it like a woman with a limited supply.

Things Mirren broke, an incomplete list: two vases, a laptop screen, the blind in the back bedroom, a nativity scene, and my confidence.

Things Mirren brought in through the cat flap, an incomplete list: a live pigeon, half a mouse, an entire slice of somebody else's pizza, and once a glove with a hand still in it, which turned out to be a gardening glove, a fact we established only after a very bad ninety seconds.

She had one place she liked best, which was the top of the fridge, where she could see everyone and nobody could reach her. She spent sixteen years on high ground. I think she understood something about family gatherings that the rest of us are still working out.

And then there was the way she would come and find you. Not when you called. Never when you called. But if you were sad, and sitting still, she would turn up about ten minutes in, and get on you, and stay. She did it to Sarah the night the exam results came. She did it to me in March. She did it to Mum on the first night after Grandad's funeral, and stayed until morning, and Mum told me about it like it had been a visit from a friend, which it was.

She died on Saturday on a towel on the radiator, which is where she wanted to be, with Sarah's hand on her, which is where Sarah wanted to be.

Sixteen years. One cat. Four generations of this family taught to respect boundaries by an animal who weighed nine pounds.

Mirren, the fridge is yours. Nobody is putting anything up there again.

3. Six sentences, for when you will not get through more

If you are going to cry through the whole thing, write this one. Read it slowly. It is complete.

This is for Nell. She was fourteen and she was mine for all of it.

She slept against the back of my knees every night of those fourteen years. That is about five thousand nights. I have not slept properly since Monday and now I know why.

She was a good dog in the plainest sense of the words. She came when she was called, most of the time. She was frightened of the hoover and of nothing else in the world.

She was waiting by the door every afternoon at ten past four. I never once worked out how she knew, because I was never home at the same time twice.

She died on Monday morning, at home, on her own bed, and I was holding her, and it was quiet.

I am not going to get through much more than this, so I am going to stop.

Thank you for coming, and thank you for loving her too. Good girl, Nell. Go on.

4. For a child to read, about a small pet

In a nine year old's own words, about a guinea pig, read in the garden with two adults standing behind her. The short sentences are deliberate.

This is for Pickle. Pickle was my guinea pig and he was four and a half.

Pickle was brown and white and he had one ear that went sideways. Mum says it always did that. He was the biggest one in the shop and I picked him because he was the only one who did not run away when I put my hand in.

Pickle could hear the fridge from the other room. When you opened the fridge he would start shouting. He did a noise that was a squeak and a whistle at the same time and it meant cucumber. He only ever wanted cucumber. He did not care about carrot and he did not care about the expensive pellets. Dad used to say that Pickle had one idea and the idea was cucumber.

Things Pickle liked: cucumber, the tunnel, being under the sofa where he was not allowed, having his head scratched with one finger, and sitting on my lap during television.

Things Pickle did not like: the vacuum, being picked up by anybody who was not me, and Tuesdays, because Tuesday was when his cage got cleaned.

He used to popcorn. That is when a guinea pig jumps straight up in the air for no reason because he is happy. He did it most when I came home from school. I would come in and shout his name and he would do it four or five times in a row and then shout at me for cucumber.

He got ill in the summer and the vet gave us medicine in a little syringe and I did it twice a day for three weeks. He hated it and he forgave me every time, about ten seconds later.

He died on Sunday night. He was in his cage and he was on his towel and he was warm. I said goodbye to him on Sunday afternoon before I went to bed, because Mum said it might be soon, and I am glad that I did that.

I know he was a small animal. My brother said it is only a guinea pig. But he was mine and I looked after him for four and a half years nearly all by myself, and he knew who I was. He only did the happy jumping for me.

We are putting him under the apple tree with a piece of cucumber because I think he would want that.

Goodbye Pickle. You were the best guinea pig in the world and I was good at looking after you, and I am going to miss you shouting at the fridge.

5. For an animal who was there through a whole era of your life

A fifteen year old dog, read at a scattering on a beach. Use this shape when the arithmetic matters: their years cover your years.

Dex was fifteen and a half, which the vet always called remarkable for his size, usually while Dex was eating something off the floor of her clinic.

I got him in 2011, in a flat I could not afford, from a shelter two bus rides away, because I had just turned twenty six and I had decided, in the way that you do at twenty six, that what my life needed was a project.

Here is what Dex was there for.

He was there for that flat, and the next one, and the house. He was there for two jobs I hated and one I loved. He was there for my marriage, which lasted four years, and he was the only thing in that house that neither of us argued about, and when it ended he was the reason I got up on the bad mornings, because a dog does not care that you are sad, a dog needs to go out at seven.

He was there when Dad died. He came to Mum's with me and he lay down in the hallway where the coats are, which was Dad's spot, and he stayed there for four days, and Mum said she did not mind it at all.

He was there through my diagnosis and the year after it, across my feet on the sofa, which I worked out much later was him keeping me in one place.

He walked the same route with me perhaps four thousand times. Up the hill, along the ridge, down past the allotments, home. The last two years we did a shorter version. The last six months we did the first hundred yards and sat on the wall. He still wanted to go. He just wanted to go less far.

What I want to say is this. I did not know, picking out a scruffy dog at twenty six, that he was going to be the witness. Everything that happened to me between twenty six and forty one, he was in the room for it. No person in my life has been present for all of that. He was.

He died on the fourteenth, on his bed by the radiator, with the window open, and I had my hand on his chest and I felt it stop.

We are scattering him here because this is the beach he went mad on, every single time, for fifteen years, as though he had never seen water before.

Dex. Thank you for being there for the whole thing. You can go in the water now.

Good boy.

How long should a eulogy for a pet be?

One to two minutes, which is 140 to 280 words. A pet eulogy is a short spoken tribute, read aloud by the person who knew the animal best to whoever is standing there, and it runs shorter than a eulogy at a funeral because there is no service around it holding the time. Example three above is 170 words and nothing is missing from it. The longer examples here run about three and a half minutes, which is the upper end for four people in a garden. If several of you are speaking, ask everyone to stay under ninety seconds. The short eulogy examples page has the same arithmetic by the minute.

What to do about the day you chose

Say it plainly and say it once, near the end: where they were, who was touching them, and that it was quick. It is the hardest line to write, because most pets do not simply die. Somebody books the appointment. You are speaking about an animal whose last day you picked, and that sits underneath every sentence.

What helps is not a defence of the decision. It is a description of the room. "He was on his own bed with his head on my leg and the back door was open because he liked the air." Nobody hearing that needs telling you did the right thing. Do not apologise, do not explain the medical reasoning, and do not leave the day out, because leaving it out is what makes people cry in the wrong place.

Reading it out loud when you are the one crying

Expect to break down at the specific detail, not the sad part. People get through "she died on Monday" and lose it at "the fridge is yours," because the ordinary line is where the animal actually lives. Mark your page: a slash where you will need to stop, and STOP in capitals beside the line you already know will get you. Then hold the pause. Four seconds of silence in a garden is nothing. Give one other person a copy so they can pick up at your mark if you cannot finish. The page on delivering a eulogy without crying covers the rest, and all of it applies here.

How to make one of these yours in ten minutes

Five swaps, in order. Keep your own words even where they are clumsier than the ones on the page.

1. The name, the age, how they arrived. First two sentences. The shelter, the shop, the box, the friend who could not keep them.
2. The one daily thing. Not their best moment. The thing they did every single day, in the same spot, that you never noticed until this week.
3. Two lines of honest complaint. What they destroyed, what frightened them, what they never learned. This is what stops it sounding like a greetings card.
4. What they were there for. One hard stretch of your life they sat through. This is the paragraph that lands, and the one you will want to skip.
5. The room, then a line straight to them. Where they died and who was touching them, then one sentence spoken to the animal by name. Good girl. The fridge is yours. You can go in the water.

If you have the swaps in your head and the page is still empty, the eulogy writer asks you those same five questions and hands back a full draft to cut up, and you can read it before paying anything. If it is only the first sentence stopping you, how to start a eulogy has twelve openings you can lift.

Questions people ask about pet eulogies

What are some good funeral speeches for pets?

The good ones are short, name one ordinary daily habit, admit one flaw, and finish by speaking directly to the animal. The five above are complete in that shape: a steady dog, a difficult cat, a six-sentence version, a child's guinea pig, and a fifteen year companionship. Avoid anything built out of quotes alone. One specific memory beats twenty borrowed lines.

What is the best eulogy for a dog?

The most specific one. Not the most moving words, the most particular ones: the route you walked, the thing they stole, the noise they made at the door. A stranger hearing it should be able to pick your dog out of ten others. Three sentences on what your dog did each morning land harder than three paragraphs about loyalty.

How do you say final goodbye to a pet?

Speak to them by name in the last line, out loud. "Good girl, Nell. Go on." "Dex, you can go in the water." Saying it to the animal rather than about them is what makes a goodbye feel finished. Most people pair it with something physical: the collar into a drawer, a cucumber under the apple tree, the ashes on a favourite beach.

What is a good verse to remember the loss of a pet dog?

If you want one, keep it to two lines and put it at the very end, after your own words, never at the start. "How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard" is the most used one for a reason. But a verse is not a eulogy, and a page of quotes with no story in it is the commonest mistake here. Earn the verse first.

What is a heartfelt farewell message I can write to a dog who died?

Four sentences: who they were to you, one thing only they did, what the house is like now, and thank you. For example: "You were my dog for fourteen years. You slept against the back of my knees every single night. The bed is far too big now. Thank you, good girl." That works in a card, read in a garden, or posted under a photograph.

Whatever you read on the day will be enough, because the people standing there loved the same animal and they already know. Write down the thing they did every morning. Say their name at the end.

And if you want something on the page before tonight, you can start a draft here and see it free before deciding anything.