Toward a Post-Mortem Legal Framework for Companion Animals

A gap that begins at death

Chilean law has made meaningful progress in regulating companion animals while they are alive. Law No. 20,380 recognizes them as living and sentient beings, and Law No. 21,020 organizes responsible ownership around duties of identification, registration, food, shelter, humane treatment, and veterinary care. During the animal's life, there is therefore a relatively clear legal structure identifying who is responsible and which duties must be fulfilled.

Death, however, changes that setting. With it, the sentience that explained much of the welfare regime disappears, but not every legal consequence connected to the animal disappears. From that moment onward, the body may require custody, transport, or examination before it is cremated, buried, or subjected to another legally permissible form of disposition. That is precisely where the problem arises.

Chile has rules applicable to some of those moments, but no regulation that continuously accompanies the transition from death to final disposition. This lack of continuity leaves the most important questions open: who can decide what happens to the animal's body, who must care for it while it is held in custody, how its identification is retained, and at what point the responsibility that the legal system had associated with that animal ends.

The problem, then, is not an absolute absence of rules. Rather, the available rules still do not organize this process as a complete legal sequence.

Death also needs to be established

If death opens a different stage, the first issue is how to establish the fact that begins it. Current rules provide for its notification and registration, but do not articulate a general rule on the material confirmation of death, veterinary intervention, or the determination of its cause when those circumstances acquire legal relevance.

The issue may appear straightforward when death occurs at a veterinary clinic and a professional confirms it, but it is less clear when it happens at home, an animal is found already dead, or there are doubts about when and how it occurred. That information may matter not only for registry purposes, but also in deciding whether a necropsy should be performed, the body preserved, or an investigation commenced.

A post-mortem regime should therefore define which minimum information must accompany the notification of death and in which cases veterinary confirmation is necessary. This would not mean imposing an identical formality for every death, but ensuring that the beginning of this stage can be adequately established where circumstances require it.

That confirmation would make it possible to connect the material fact of death with the legal consequences that follow. The registry could then be updated, custody of the remains could begin, and the person responsible for guiding them to their final destination could be identified.

Death does not immediately erase the animal's identity

Registry rules show, in fact, that death does not immediately end every legal reference to an animal. Article 43 of Supreme Decree No. 1,007 of 2018 provides that, when a pet or companion animal dies, the responsible keeper must ask the municipality to record the date of death within ninety calendar days. The information is also retained in the database for statistical purposes.

The system therefore maintains a certain continuity after death. It continues to record that the animal existed, that it was linked to a particular registration, and that a person appeared in the registry as responsible. The problem arises afterwards, when that information no longer clearly follows the fate of the animal's remains.

Law No. 21,020 and its regulations do not establish a chain expressly linking the animal's identification to the custody, transport, and final disposition of its remains. Thus, while death does produce a defined administrative effect, the later course of the body remains much less structured.

Sanitary rules cover only part of that course. Decree with Force of Law No. 1 of 1989 of the Ministry of Health subjects the installation and operation of public or private cemeteries, crematoria, and biological-waste incinerators to sanitary authorization. There is thus a general basis for control, but it does not by itself resolve the specific questions that arise when an identified companion animal is involved.

A crematorium may therefore be subject to sanitary requirements while the special regime for companion animals still does not expressly determine who may authorize cremation, how the identity of the animal entering the facility must be verified, or which safeguards apply when an individual service is contracted. The registry retains information and sanitary rules regulate the facility, but a legal link is still missing between them to organize the movement of the remains from death to final disposition.

Congress has seen the problem, but only in pieces

The disconnect between identity, custody, and final disposition has not gone unnoticed by the legislature. In recent years, several initiatives have been introduced to regulate cemeteries, crematoria, and the handling of companion-animal remains, although none has yet brought these matters together within a single framework.

The broadest attempt was Bill No. 12,930-11, introduced in 2019 and archived in 2026. It sought to extend the responsibility of the owner or possessor until the animal's burial or cremation and, at the same time, to regulate cemeteries and crematoria through records identifying the animal and documenting the procedure performed. Its interest lay precisely in extending responsibility beyond death and connecting it to the final destination of the remains.

Later initiatives have addressed more specific parts of the same problem. Bill No. 16,669-12 focuses on the establishment of pet cemeteries by municipalities, while Bill No. 17,552-06 seeks to allow them to install and operate cremation services. Both expand the material options for final disposition, but leave largely unregulated what happens before the body reaches those facilities.

That intervening space is addressed more broadly by Bill No. 18,130-11, introduced in 2026. The initiative proposes that cemeteries and crematoria for companion animals be expressly subject to sanitary authorization and adds to Law No. 21,020 a duty of proper handling and disposition of the carcass. In this way, it recognizes that death does not immediately end every responsibility connected with the animal, although its response remains focused primarily on the sanitary dimension.

Taken together, these initiatives show that the legislature has begun to recognize the issue, although still only partially. The bills have addressed responsibility after death, infrastructure for disposing of remains, and sanitary control, but none has yet articulated a regime that continuously organizes everything that occurs between an animal's death and its final destination.

From identification in life to traceability after death

If the problem lies in the lack of continuity between death and final disposition, one of the first elements that should be retained is the animal's identification. During life, the microchip and registry distinguish it from any other individual of the same species and link it to a responsible person. That function does not lose all utility upon death, since it remains necessary to know which animal will undergo a necropsy, which body was delivered to a clinic or crematorium, and from which individual the ashes later returned actually originate. In every one of these cases, identification makes it possible to preserve a correspondence between the animal that existed in life and the actions taken after its death.

The microchip could therefore serve a broader function than the one currently recognized. Rather than being confined to the animal's life, it could become the starting point for a chain of traceability accompanying the remains to final disposition. Individual cremation makes especially clear why this matters. A person who contracts that service does not merely seek the incineration of a body; they seek separate treatment for that specific animal and assurance that the ashes returned actually belong to it.

Identification thus ceases to be purely administrative data and becomes a basic guarantee of continuity between the animal registered in life and the destination given to its remains after death.

Who may decide about the body

Retaining the animal's identity after death makes it possible to follow the course of its remains, but it is not enough to resolve what should happen to them. Before any decision about necropsy, cremation, burial, or the return of ashes, it is necessary to determine who is legally authorized to make it.

That answer cannot always be drawn from ownership. The legal framework itself distinguishes among owner, possessor, and responsible keeper, so registry enrollment cannot simply be treated as proof of title. The problem becomes especially complex when several people have ties to the same animal and disagree about the fate of its remains.

In these situations, relying exclusively on proprietary categories may be insufficient and, in some cases, lead to disputes that are difficult to resolve. A post-mortem regime should therefore expressly establish who has the authority to decide and what weight should be given, for that purpose, to ownership, possession, registry enrollment, and the effective care provided before death.

The person recorded as responsible could be a reasonable starting point, although that rule would have to be supplemented for co-ownership, multiple responsible persons, or conflict between the person named in the registry and the person who in fact provided day-to-day care.

Clarifying who may decide would also make it possible to determine who must answer during this final stage. The authority to dispose of the remains should be accompanied by the duty to hold them in custody, comply with applicable sanitary and registry requirements, and ensure that they receive a legally permissible final disposition.

The regime would not therefore need simply to choose between property, keeping, or administrative responsibility. It could articulate those categories to identify both the person with decision-making authority and the person who must care for the body until final disposition.

When no one can take responsibility

Determining who decides and who is responsible assumes that there is a person to whom those functions can be assigned. That will not always be the case. An animal may be found dead on a public street, lack identification, have a responsible person who cannot be located, or simply be left without anyone willing to take charge of its remains.

These cases also require an answer. The absence of an identifiable responsible person should not translate into an absence of responsibility for the body, especially where sanitary, environmental, or even evidentiary reasons may require its preservation and later disposition.

The law should therefore establish a subsidiary mechanism to identify the authority that must assume custody, check for a microchip, and attempt to identify the responsible person before disposing of the remains. When identification is impossible or no one can take responsibility, it should nevertheless ensure appropriate final disposition and leave a sufficient record of it.

This would allow the system to cover not only the animal whose responsible person actively takes part in the process, but also cases where that relationship has broken down before the animal's remains can reach their final destination.

When the body may become evidence

Even where a person is authorized to decide, that authority should not be unrestricted. The need to preserve traceability becomes even clearer where there are doubts about the cause of death. In those cases, the animal's body may become a decisive source of evidence. A necropsy may reveal poisoning, trauma, anesthetic errors, undetected disease, or signs of abuse. If the body is cremated or destroyed before those circumstances can be examined, the evidence may be irreversibly lost.

For that reason, the decision about the fate of the remains cannot always be treated as purely sanitary or funerary. When a dispute about the causes of death is known or reasonably foreseeable, the need to preserve the possibility of a later investigation also comes into play.

In such cases, it would make sense to establish a limited duty of preservation before any irreversible disposition. That duty should be time-bound and compatible with sanitary storage requirements, but it would prevent premature cremation or burial from making it impossible to clarify what occurred.

The chain of custody would thereby acquire an additional function. It would not only preserve the identity of the remains during transport and disposition, but also protect their integrity when they may have evidentiary relevance.

What other legal systems have already resolved

The need to organize this stage legally is not unique to Chile. Other legal systems have already begun to connect identification, disposition of remains, sanitary control, and registry closure in a more continuous way.

Spain offers a particularly useful example. Law 7/2023 requires the deregistration of an identified companion animal after death to be accompanied by documentation proving its cremation or burial by a recognized company. That documentation must make it possible to identify the animal and its responsible person, and the law prohibits the disposal of bodies subject to mandatory identification without first verifying their identity.

The importance of this model lies in the sequence it creates. Death is recorded, the fate of the remains is documented, and only then is the administrative closure completed. Identification does not end at death; it accompanies the process to its conclusion.

European Union law adds another dimension by subjecting animal bodies to specific sanitary and environmental rules within the animal-by-products regime. Under certain conditions, it also allows the competent authority to authorize the burial of companion animals, subject to safeguards intended to prevent risks to health and the environment.

Some legal systems develop these requirements in greater detail. Germany permits the individual burial of companion animals on certain land belonging to the responsible person or in specially designated places, with restrictions related to water-protection zones and proximity to public roads. In England, pet cemeteries are likewise subject to requirements concerning registration, location, and protection of water sources.

The solutions differ, but they share the same logic. An animal's death is not treated as an isolated event, but as the beginning of a final regulated stage in which identification, the fate of the remains, sanitary conditions, and proof that the process was properly completed continue to matter.

A possible solution for Chile

Comparative experience shows that it is not necessary to build an entirely new system, but rather to organize coherently elements that Chile already has in dispersed form. Law No. 21,020 identifies the responsible person and organizes their duties during life; Supreme Decree No. 1,007 records death and retains the animal's information; and sanitary law regulates facilities intended for the disposition of remains. From that basis, the central rule could be relatively simple: responsibility associated with an animal should not be extinguished by its death, but should continue until its remains have received authorized and duly documented final disposition.

That continuity would organize the remaining questions. The law could establish how death is confirmed where circumstances require it, determine who has authority to decide about the body, impose duties of custody while it remains in the care of clinics, transporters, or crematoria, require preservation of its identification throughout the process, and link registry closure to proof of cremation, burial, or another permitted form of disposition.

Where there is no identifiable person who can assume these functions, the same regime should provide who must take subsidiary responsibility for the remains and which steps must be taken before disposing of them.

It would also be necessary to distinguish clearly between individual and collective cremation, especially where ashes must be returned, and to provide for temporary preservation where the body may have evidentiary relevance.

Technical conditions for storage, transport, crematorium operation, cemetery location, and sanitary or environmental protection could be left to regulations. What matters is that the law first establish the basic architecture of the system and define how this stage begins, who decides, who is responsible, how traceability is maintained, and when the process may be considered legally complete.

A reform of this kind would reach much further than merely regulating cemeteries and crematoria. Its real contribution would be to recognize that the fate of a companion animal's remains remains a matter of legal responsibility: every decision should be attributable to a person authorized to make it, and every action should be properly documented.

If Chilean law has begun to recognize the individuality of companion animals while they are alive, the next step is to ensure that their identity continues to matter after death.