pets

It’s easy to assume that someone who works with death and bereavement every day would develop a numbness and clinical detachment toward the subject, but the same passion, the same pain, that caused Christine Hunsaker to create the Paws, Whiskers & Wags pet crematory in 2005 resonates within her today.

Devastated by the loss of her dog Cassie — and the lack of compassionate death-care available to pet owners — Hunsaker left her career in the human cremation industry to found a pet crematory to help other pet owners make it through the grieving process. That Paws, Whiskers & Wags has experienced double-digit growth each of the five years it’s been in business, in the face of the severe economic downturn, is a testament to how appreciative Atlanta pet owners are to have an opportunity to say good-bye to their animal loved ones in a tender, dignified way.

Amid the change the comes with growing up in a military family, one of the consistencies of Bill Furman’s childhood in Ohio, North Carolina and Texas was the presence of pets, especially a macaw parrot that became a sort of family heirloom.

“I grew up with a macaw that belonged to my grandmother,” Furman recalls. “When my grandmother passed away, my mother took over it, and so I grew up with it all through middle school, high school, and then when I went to school I took the macaw with me. I’ve kind of always had a bird in my house.”

Furman and his partner, Rob Walter, started exploring purchasing a large bird four years ago and Walter quickly became enraptured. Along with getting birds of their own, Furman and Walter have worked with an Atlanta vet to serve as foster parents to half a dozen birds over the last year, nursing them back to health and finding homes or safe environments.

In the summer of 2008, Paris Johnson’s friend urged him to get a puppy from a litter of Boxers, but Johnson didn’t believe he was ready to devote himself to a new pet just six months after burying his companion of 16 years, a dog named Jazz. However, just seeing a picture of the freckled-nose dog that looked like a miniature version of Snoopy changed his mind.

“It was a good transition to a new dog, but it was like a baby, getting up at god-awful hours to get her acclimated to her new surrounding,” Johnson says of his two-year-old Boxer, LuLu. “I had to get used to her yelping in the middle of the night and having to get up at 3 o’clock in the morning so she could pee, and all of that stuff was brand new.”

Johnson considers his dogs his children, and talks about them as such.