By Thomas A. Parmalee
For funeral professionals, pet loss and aftercare services continue to raise questions about how best to serve families.
Serving all members of the family can give firms a chance to boost service standards, diversify products and services and clearly set themselves apart from competitors. Whether a firm opens their own pet loss business or not, there are ample ways to serve this community by partnering with others.
One company that is seeking to serve pet owners in new and innovative ways is Honor Pet, which Max Lemper-Tabatsky joined as chief business officer five months ago.
He’s no stranger to questions surrounding loss, having co-founded Honos, a modern celebration of life company comprised of three brands: Oaktree (oaktreememorials.com), Samuel Michell Design (samuelmitchelldesign.com) and Loyal (trustloyal.com).
While he’s focusing most of his efforts on his latest initiative at Honor Pet, he remains an adviser to Honos.
FuneralVision.com recently reached out to Lemper-Tabatsky to learn how lessons from traditional funeral service are shaping Honor Pet’s approach to identification, chain of custody, memorialization and grief support.
He also explores the potential for collaboration between human and pet deathcare providers, the growing interest in alkaline hydrolysis, also called aquamation, and why funeral homes considering pet aftercare must approach it with the same commitment to dignity, trust and professionalism that families expect when a human loved one dies.
How do you define Honor Pet’s role within the broader deathcare profession?
We are deathcare. I say that without hesitation. The families we serve are experiencing a real loss, and the standards we hold ourselves to are the same standards any great funeral home holds itself to: dignity for the deceased, an unbroken chain of custody, and care for the people left behind. The fact that the family member had four legs does not change the responsibility. If anything, it raises the bar, because pet families have historically been given so little that doing this well means everything to them.
Many funeral directors view pet aftercare as a parallel industry to human funeral service. Do you see Honor Pet as part of the deathcare profession, the veterinary profession, or a unique hybrid of both?
It is a hybrid, and I think that is actually our advantage. Our front door is often veterinary. Families find us through their clinic, and our in-home euthanasia work is medical care delivered by licensed veterinarians. But everything after that moment is deathcare: transport, cremation, memorialization, grief support. We live in both worlds, and the companies that will win in this space are the ones that respect the professional standards of both rather than treating aftercare as an afterthought to medicine.
What lessons has Honor Pet borrowed from traditional funeral service when designing its customer experience?
The biggest one is a principle we repeat internally all the time: you cannot undo a cremation. Traditional funeral service figured out generations ago that certain steps are irreversible, and irreversible steps demand zero-defect processes. Identification, chain of custody, capturing keepsakes like paw prints and fur clippings before cremation. We hold those to a different standard than anything correctable. We also borrowed the idea that families need choices presented with clarity and without pressure, at a moment when they are not equipped to do research.
Looking ahead five or ten years, how do you envision the relationship between human deathcare providers and pet specific providers evolving?
Convergence. Families increasingly expect the same level of care for a pet that they would expect for any family member, and I think you will see human deathcare providers and pet specialists borrowing from each other constantly. Pet providers will keep adopting the operational rigor of funeral service, and I think human providers will adopt some of the consumer experience innovation happening on the pet side, because pet deathcare is being rebuilt right now without a century of legacy expectations attached to it.
Do you currently partner with traditional funeral homes, crematories, or cemetery operators?
Our partnership model today is built around veterinary clinics. We are the aftercare partner for clinics across the Los Angeles market, and we have invested heavily in making that experience seamless for the clinic and the family. That said, I came up in this industry on the human side, and I am genuinely open to conversations with funeral home and cemetery operators. There are natural ways to work together, and I expect that to be part of our story over time.
Have you seen interest from funeral home owners who want to expand into pet preplanning or aftercare as an additional business line?
Yes, and the interest is growing. Funeral home owners are smart operators. They see the same demographic data we do: pet ownership climbing, households treating pets as family, and a service gap in most markets. The conversations I have had are less about whether to enter the space and more about how to do it credibly, because families can tell immediately whether pet aftercare is a real commitment or a bolt-on.
What advice would you give a funeral home considering adding pet cremation or memorial services?
Treat it as its own discipline, not a side business. The operational details are different, the emotional dynamics are different, and the trust you have built with human families does not automatically transfer if the pet experience feels like an afterthought. Get your chain of custody airtight from day one, because your reputation in this category rides entirely on families trusting that they received their pet back. And invest in your people. The staff member handing an urn to a grieving pet parent is doing the same sacred work as a funeral director. Hire and train accordingly.
What are the biggest operational differences between serving pet families and serving human families?
Speed and setting. Pet loss often happens with very little runway. A family may call us in the morning and need in-home euthanasia that afternoon, so our logistics have to run at a pace most funeral homes don’t always deal with. The setting is different, too. So much of our most meaningful work happens in the family’s living room. And there is enormous physical variability, from a hamster to a Great Dane, which affects everything from transport to equipment to pricing. What is not different is the grief. That is identical.
Do you believe pet preneed and/or aftercare can help funeral homes diversify revenue and better serve today’s families?
Absolutely, on both counts, and I would emphasize the second one. The revenue opportunity is real, but the deeper opportunity revolves around relationships. A funeral home that serves a family well through a pet loss earns trust years before that family needs human services. Preneed thinking translates naturally, too. Pet parents know their companion’s lifespan, and many would welcome the chance to plan ahead rather than making every decision in crisis.
Honor Pet has positioned aquamation as a core offering. What has consumer adoption looked like, and what does the process look like compared with how traditional providers do things?
Adoption has honestly exceeded what I expected. When we explain aquamation to families, the response is consistently positive. It is water-based, it is gentle, and it has a dramatically lighter environmental footprint than flame cremation, which matters a great deal to the families we serve in Los Angeles. We operate our aquamation facility out of our Comfort Center in the LA Arts District, so families can be with us for the euthanasia and know their pet never leaves our care. The process itself uses warm water and alkalinity to accelerate what nature does naturally, and what remains is returned to the family just as with flame cremation.
How is Honor Pet funded?
We are venture-backed. We have institutional investors who believe in the category, including investors with deep experience in animal health, and a board that pushes us to build this the right way: sustainable unit economics, real operational excellence, not growth at any cost.
Do you believe growing acceptance of alkaline hydrolysis (also called aquamation) for pets will influence future acceptance of this form of disposition on the human side?
One hundred percent. Pets are the on-ramp. When a family experiences aquamation for a beloved pet and sees that it is gentle, dignified, and environmentally responsible, the mystery around the process disappears. Years from now, when that same family faces a human deathcare decision in a state where aquamation is available, they will already understand and trust it. Pet deathcare is normalizing this technology one family at a time, and I think the human side of the industry will feel that shift within a decade.
Are you seeing regulatory or public-policy developments that could accelerate aquamation adoption across the broader deathcare industry?
The trend line is clearly positive. More states continue to authorize alkaline hydrolysis for human disposition, and sustainability pressure is only increasing, from consumers and in some cases from regulators looking at emissions. California, where we operate, has been ahead of the curve. I would not claim to be a policy expert on the human side, but everything we see suggests the regulatory environment is moving toward aquamation, not away from it.
As it relates to death and disposition, what do pet families today expect that they may not have expected five or ten years ago?
Transparency and communication, above everything. Ten years ago, a family dropped their pet at a clinic and got a phone call weeks later. Today families expect to know where their pet is at every step, they expect proactive updates rather than having to call and ask, and they expect real choices: in-home euthanasia, a calm dedicated space instead of a clinical exam room, aquamation as an alternative to flame. The bar has moved from acceptable to exceptional, and companies that do not see that are going to get left behind.
Have you observed generational differences in how people memorialize pets?
Very much so. Younger pet parents, millennials and Gen Z especially, treat pets unambiguously as family, and their memorialization reflects it. They want personalized keepsakes, paw prints, engraved urns, jewelry, and they are far more likely to share their grief and their memorials publicly. Older generations often carry a quieter grief, sometimes with a feeling that mourning a pet deeply is not fully sanctioned. Part of our job is telling every generation the same thing: your grief is legitimate, and you get to honor it however feels right.
Honor Pet places a strong emphasis on grief support. Why was that important to build into the business model?
Because pet loss is what grief researchers call disenfranchised grief. There is no bereavement leave, no funeral your coworkers attend, often no acknowledgment at all. Families are carrying real loss without the social scaffolding that human loss triggers, and if we only handled the logistics we would be doing half the job. Our client care team is trained for these conversations, and the entire experience is designed around the emotional reality of the moment, not just the transaction. It was never optional for us. It is the reason the company exists.
Are there best practices you’ve developed that human funeral providers might consider adopting?
Proactive communication is the big one. We do not wait for families to call and ask where things stand. We tell them, at every meaningful step, through the channels they actually use, including text. It sounds simple, but it removes an enormous amount of anxiety, and frankly most of deathcare, human and pet, still makes families do the chasing. The other one is designing the physical experience around the family. Our Comfort Center exists because we asked what a grieving family actually needs in that room, rather than what is operationally convenient for us.
How does technology help Honor Pet manage chain of custody, customer communication and memorialization?
Technology is core to how we deliver trust at scale. We built a completely custom internal operations platform that tracks every pet through every step of care, so chain of custody is not dependent on paper tags and memory. It drives our proactive family communication, coordinates our in-home visits and transport logistics, and connects the whole journey from scheduling through memorial delivery. The principle behind all of it is simple: technology should make the human moments better, not replace them. The software runs the logistics, so our people can be fully present with families.
If you could deliver one message directly to funeral directors and crematory operators, what would you want them to understand about Honor Pet and the future of pet deathcare?
Take this category as seriously as your families already do. Pet deathcare is not a novelty or a side market. It is deathcare, serving real grief, and the standards are rising fast. Honor Pet exists to prove that pet families deserve the same excellence, dignity, and care that the best of the funeral profession has always stood for. We would rather be colleagues than strangers to this industry. The professionals who engage with pet loss authentically are going to earn a generation of trust, and I would welcome any of them to come see how we do it.
