The young woman cradled a stuffed teddy bear in her arms and blinked back tears as she walked through the cemetery.

"This was his favorite toy," Lucinda Inzunza said, fingering the fluffy white bear. "He loved to play with it. I kept it after he died."

Lucinda wasn't mourning a lost child as she gazed at marble grave markers spread beneath her feet at the Gardena memorial garden. The 16-year-old La Puente girl was remembering Buster, her 2-year-old German shepherd. She had come to Pet Haven Cemetery to arrange for his burial after he was hit by a truck.

Lined with tiny headstones inscribed with such eulogies as "You Were Mommy's Little Baby," pet cemeteries have been a Los Angeles fixture for 60 years.

For much of that time, Los Angeles County's two animal graveyards have been viewed by many as further proof that Southern California is a land of wacky excesses.

The manicured gardens have had a reputation for attracting eccentric old people--those with both the inclination and the means to spend hundreds of dollars to memorialize dogs and cats that have been longtime, faithful companions.

But things are changing.

"We're seeing younger faces now," said Mary Bayer, manager of Los Angeles Pet Memorial Park in Calabasas. "More young people are bringing their pets. For many of them, this is the first time they've ever dealt with death."

Said Julie Rouse, co-owner for the past year of Pet Haven: "I'm surprised. We have just as many young people as older people."

Los Angeles Pet Memorial Park was started in 1928 by a woman who decided to bury her family's pets in the corner of a cattle grazing range in Calabasas, at the western edge of the San Fernando Valley.

Pet Haven was created in 1948 in Gardena by a pet owner who was upset that a lack of water in Calabasas prevented him from growing grass over his dog's grave there.

The image of dotty elderly ladies gathered in pet cemetery "slumber rooms" over satin-lined caskets containing poodles named Fifi have amused many, including English author Evelyn Waugh. His satirical 1948 novel, "The Loved One," which later became a movie, was set in a Southern California pet cemetery known as the "Happier Hunting Ground."

But pet cemetery operators say their clientele is growing younger partly because of the way Los Angeles has changed.