Our pets are like family and some might even say they're even better than family. They don't have political views, they don't argue with you and they wait by the door every day when you get home.
It's that unconditional love that inspires folks to give them respect and dignity in death.
You have a lot of options -- some you might have never heard of -- when it comes to saying goodbye to your best friend.
Moe Dyer and Andrea Turner love their family, especially the ones with four legs.
"I keep asking for a punch card...on the tenth one you get one free, but they won't," Turner said.
But they don't live forever.
"She was a Border Collie mix," Dyer recalled.
"She was a good girl, she was a good girl. I miss her...miss her a lot," Turner said.
When Jessie passed away, Dyer and Turner called Hart's Petuary.
Milton Heard says the business began in 2001.
"We now know that if someone calls the funeral home and they're crying so hard they can hardly talk, it's almost a 100 percent chance it's going to be a call for Hart's Petuary," he said.
They're primarily a crematorium, but they do offer a unique service.
"The newest hearse we've added to the fleet is a black Buick Enclave," he explained.
"When we were ready, they left [and] they took her, but only when we were ready," Turner recalled.
The hearses look just like the ones for people now, but it wasn't that way 10 years ago.
"Before this people were using pickup trucks and I just thought that was way too impersonal, so we started off with these Chevrolet HHRs," Heard explained. "When we first started, in order for us to have stretchers, we were having to take our adults stretchers to a machine shop and cut up and re-welded to be accommodating for pets. Now, there are off the shelf products of stretchers for the pet industry."
You can keep your pet's ashes in a piece of jewelry or an urn.
"The ones that people use the most are with the photograph with the name of the dog on it," Heard said.
When a pet passes, some folks opt to transport the pet themselves to Pet Haven. They buy a plot and then buy a vault.
There are close to 700 pets interred on the property.
John Butler with Pet Haven says they have an acre and another acre to stretch out onto if they need it.
"We offer traditional burial and we offer where they can have their cremated remains buried here," Butler said.
He says burials run about $1,100 plus the marker, but cost generally isn't a concern to grieving clients.
"A lot of people don't want to bury them in their backyard. A lot of people move around from place to place, so this gives them a final resting place," he said.
As for Dyer and Turner, they opted for an urn for Jessie.
"It's so much better than digging a hole and putting two sticks together," Turner said.
"I think it's just another part of giving back to them what they've given to us and that's unconditional love," said Dyer.
The fee for the hearse from Hart's Petuary to come to your house in Bibb county is $100 dollars. It's a little more for other counties.
We checked in with Dr. Vernard Hodges with Critter Fixers and he added he rarely sees his clients bury pets in their backyards.