VANCOUVER — When her beloved cat Brittany died this month, Gillian Eggert figured she would bury her beside her five other late animals at the site of the old B.C. Pet Cemetery in Surrey.

Eggert was shocked and saddened to see the site in the 14700-block 76th Avenue in Newton being prepared for development.

"I hadn't been out there in six years but, the last time I was out there, everything was fine," she said.

Eggert had five pets buried there between 1972 and 1995. She paid former owners Mary and Daniel Blair $200 to bury each animal and $400 for each headstone.

The Blairs founded the 0.2-hectare cemetery in 1952 and about 670 animals were buried there. Mary Blair sold the four-hectare property to a developer for about $900,000 in the mid-1990s.

At the time, the developer offered to sell the cemetery portion to the Surrey Pet Cemetery Society but the group couldn't raise the $172,000 asking price. The new owner stopped taking burials.

Nicholas Lai, a Surrey planning manager, said the developer was allowed to build 23 houses but with one restrictive covenant — to preserve the cemetery until Jan. 1, 2010.

"It used to be a place we could go to take flowers and visit our pets and tell them how much we missed them," she said. "People paid good money for those burials and headstones, but no one cares now who is buried there."

shunter@theprovince.com