Funerary poems on animals form a subgenre of the standard epitaph written to commemorate a deceased person. The poet who created the conditions necessary for the establishment of this kind of poetry in Sweden was the queen dowager Hedvig Eleonora’s court poet Erik Lindschöld (1634–1690); his poems mourning the death of the queen’s bitches were presumably composed in the 1670s. These poems constitute the starting-point for similar poems written over the next century by among others Israel Holmström (1661–1708), Olof Hermelin (1658–1709), and Olof von Dalin (1708–1763). The major issue treated in this article concerns the functions that the writing of epitaphs on dogs served. Why were they written, and for what purpose? I examine the manifold, predominantly social functions of these epitaphs on dogs, and demonstrate that such poems were written for a variety of reasons: they could, for example, promote careers; they could serve as covert ways of paying homage to noblemen and royalty; they could be instrumental in criticizing those in power, or cloak the treatment of politically sensitive topics.