I'm Alan Knowlton and I'd like to welcome you to Pet Undertakers Ltd. I sincerely appreciate that this may not be an easy time for you and your family.

If I may, I would like to give you a bit of an insight into how and perhaps more importantly, why I created the service.

Being a lifelong pet owner I have had the unfortunate experience of losing several long serving pets through either old age or compassionate release by my local veterinary surgeon.

Whilst this in itself is an inevitable experience, it's what occurs immediately after their passing that left me with an overwhelming feeling that 'there must be a better way!'

My family recently lost our much loved dog Skipper and following euthanasia, our vet asked me what I wanted to do with his remains. I had three options, take him home for personal burial, communal (mass) cremation, or individual cremation with the ashes returned. I liked the sound of the third option and asked my vet what the procedure was for this. I was told that skipper would be sealed in a bag and kept in the surgery freezer until the next 'mass' collection which was over a week away. Skipper would then be taken to their facility 150 miles away and placed on an individual, numbered tray and put in a cremation chamber with several other animals.

I was left feeling very uncomfortable about this process and after further investigation discovered that this was indeed the industry 'standard' procedure. I'm not saying this is the wrong way and I'm sure many people will be happy with this. It's very much a personal choice and providing an additional choice is what I aimed for.

I immediately got to work on my ideas of what I considered to be a more dignified and personal service and Pet Undertakers was born. My ethic is to keep the business small to ensure a personal and flexible service.

I was happy with how I wanted the operational side of the business to run, and have a small team of people that advise and assist with marketing and web development. To my surprise many of my friends and family have exprienced similar when suffering the loss of a long serving pet.

The business got a further boost when my daughter Tanya came on-board and she now runs the office and takes care of all the administration tasks on a day to day basis.

It was still a bit of a leap into the unknown, but the feedback we got from our clients right from the first service was enough to know that we were providing a much needed option in the market.