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Most age-old questions -- Do all dogs actually go to heaven? Does a cat actually have nine lives? -- might never be answered.

But the San Francisco SPCA could answer one: What happens to your pet if you die?

"Apparently, this woman believed that no one could possibly love or take care of her dog the way she could," said Katy Volz, an SPCA employee who coordinates the Sido program. "Well, it turned out there were plenty of people here at the SPCA who believed they could."

"I don't even want to think about what could have happened to Dolly if it weren't for the Sido program," said Dolly's new owner, Robyn Paret. "First of all, she's an older dog -- and she had a cast on her leg at the time. Dogs like that don't get adopted very easily."

"And we knew she loved music," said Paret. "We also sing 'Hello Dolly' to her every day."

Small familiarities like that could make a big difference to a puzzled and distraught pet, said Louisa DeRosa, Sido's animal grief counselor. "Heath cliff here was so depressed when we got him," she said of a Sido cat currently up for adoption. "He'd put his face up against the wall and just stare at it."

"They belonged to a doctor here in the city that left us with instructions on exactly what each cat needed," said Volz.

Now open for cats and dogs, the Sido program has put away hundreds of animal lives since the 1980s. Hundreds more still don't make it for the reason that many pet owners don't think of their animals when they die.

"I hear it all the time -- things like, 'My auntie died, and she left us all these cats that we don't know what to do with.' Well, now you know what you can do. Sign them up in the Sido program, and we'll make sure they find happy homes," said Volz.