Would you buy a house if the owners had buried their pets in the garden?

[baddayattheoffice]

So, you've found a house you love, you've exchanged contracts and during a visit to measure the windows the owners drop it into the conversation that they had buried their deceased pets in the garden. Would this put you off buying the house, and if it put you off to the extent that you no longer wanted to buy it, (for example you wanted to dig out for an extension) what would you do?

Wouldn’t bother me at all! As a pp said, wouldn’t bother a builder either.

If they'd buried their grandmother in the garden I would back out of the sale but a pet - no.

We told our builder if they found a squashy cotton bag buried in the garden , it isn't full of stolen money and put it back!

We have a cat and 6 guinea-pigs ( with another one waiting to go to earth when DH digs a grave ) in ours .

Wouldn’t bother me at all. Actually it’s good that you know, it could be quite alarming to start digging and then start coming across large bones.
Our old dog is buried in our old garden, I do sometimes wonder if they have found her. She had only been dead 6 months when we moved so that would be a gruesome discovery.

Maybe they mentioned it in case you broke ground, thought you’d bought from mass murderer types, and promptly hit 101.

Can there be a garden in Britain without a dead pet in the garden?

At this point in history every garden has a few pets in it surely. Wouldn't bother me at all.

If anyone digs my garden they are going to think we were obsessed with rabbits the amount of them in my garden.

In reality DD hates seeing mixi rabbits suffering so i'm sent out to dispatch any she sees on the way home from school and then we have another bloody funeral for it. We also have a few dead moles, numerous road kill and two family pets.

Highly unlikely to find a garden without dead pets in!
Now if there were a missing spouse I might think twice...

I think it's normal to bury pets in the garden, we've certainly done it at every house we lived in - our current garden has at least 6 animal graves in it that we know of.

As long as it wasn't Shergar I wouldn't be bothered by it.

a mass grave from the English Civil War in our garden.

How big is your garden?!

In the old days gardeners would deliberately plant a rose in a cat's grave, they grew much better apparently!

The earth is made of decomposed corpses, and plant life of course, large and small ,there wouldn't be much of it otherwise!

Wouldn't be put off. In fact, the previous owner of our house buried their Labrador in the middle of the front lawn (about 3 months before they put the house on the market and 6 months before we bought it and moved in!) You could still see the 'hump' in the middle of the lawn. Only about 3" incline IYSWIM but yeah, right in front of our lounge window.

DH planted a little flower garden/heather garden around it, and it was pretty much covered within a year and a half.

Now if it was a HUMAN body buried there......... That is quite a different story.

(We are not in the same house now BTW. Moved several years back, but it was nothing to do with the dog being buried there.)

It’s pay for the extension if you finally located Shergar.

What about it is bothering you? Just trying to understand the issue.

It’s pay for the extension if you finally located Shergar.

That's true enough, I expect he's more likely to have been found in a glue factory than a semi-rural garden near Bristol though

When found the skull of the GSD dog belonging to the old owners when we dug a part of the garden. The DCs thought it was cool and have kept it outside the Wendy house,

No, wouldn't bother me. In fact, I would expect that pets had been buried in gardens. Just a part of history...

Wouldn't bother me. As a child we always buried rabbits, guinea pigs etc in the garden. But if it was a horse it would be a different matter........

Of course - you could hardly avoid it I would have thought.

Last year I sold a house with various crosses marking the graves of pets. Most people I know have buried pets in the garden.

This reminds me of when the Gas Network chaps came to lay a new pipeline through the garden and they stayed until about 9pm at night because I asked them (very nicely) not to disturb my recently deceased cats grave, so they had to do a big detour.

I am sure the builders will be considerate and respectful. Don't let it put you off.

Most gardens of family homes probably have a pet or two buried in them.

It’s a bit of a shame but I wouldn’t let it put you off the house. At least you know exactly where they are rather than coming across them unexpectedly.

There wont be much left

The horse a PP mentioned might give me a bit of a surprise, but after binge watching back to back episodes of Time Team, I can assure you that there is far far grimmer things you can find in your garden than a couple of small pets.

I would ask her if she wanted to take the dog with her.

A house near to my mother had not only many pets buried in the garden but also small headstones for the graves. And they were all at the front of the garden near to the pavement (no fences).