ANIMAL OBITUARIES

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1997:

Zooky (above), a husky mix who
was once “the fastest dog ever,” died on June
11 at approximately age 11, from congestive
heart failure that no longer responded to treatment.
Adopted from the Southhold, Long
Island animal shelter in July 1987, Zooky in
her prime outraced every dog of any breed she
ever met. On leash, she loped 25 miles with
ease and begged for more. Yet she was never
really fully domesticated, digging for water
like a coyote and regarding small animals as
potential prey—even newly arrived cats,
though she would eventually accept them as
family. She is missed by the entire ANIMAL
P E O P L E entourage, but especially by her
favorite cats Keeter and Voltaire, who spent
many an evening kneading her and purring.

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HUMAN OBITUARIES

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1997:

Jacques Cousteau, 87, died June
25. Often ill as a child, Cousteau swam for
his health near his home in St. Andre de
Cubzac, France. He first dived in 1920 on a
visit to Lake Harvey, Vermont, but only
began diving in earnest after a 1936 car crash
forced him to leave the French Naval
Academy flight school. With engineer Emile
Gagnan, Cousteau in 1943 invented the
aqualung and took up underwater filming,
earning the French Legion of Honor for antiNazi
espionage. In 1950 Cousteau bought the
minesweeper Calypso and re-equipped it as a
floating film and TV studio. The screen edition
of his first book, The Silent World
(1953), won the Grand Prize at the 1956
Cannes Film Festival and his first of three
Academy Awards. Cousteau initially touted
the oceans’ economic potential, but reinvented
himself as the world’s most prominent and
popular ecological crusader in The Living Sea
(1963) and World Without Sun (1965), along
with the ABC specials, The World of Jacques
Cousteau (1966) and The Undersea World of
Jacques Cousteau (1968). “The only creatures
on Earth who have bigger and maybe
better brains than humans are the Cetacea,

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REVIEWS: Shiloh

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1997:

Shiloh
Starring Michael Moriarty,
Rod Steiger, and Scott Wilson
Warner Brothers Family Entertainment
video. 93 minutes.

Based on the Newberry Award-winning
novel of the same title by Phyllis
Reynolds Naylor, the live-action Shiloh also
resembles the Walt Disney animated classic
The Fox & The Hound. In each film, a hardedged
hillbilly recluse demonstrates the more
obviously despicable aspects of hunting, trapping,
and poaching; kicks and threatens to
kill a dog who doesn’t hunt; and eventually
commits at least one kind act, inspired by the
bond between the dog and in the former, a
boy, in the latter, a fox.

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BOOKS: Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1997:

Bonobo:
The Forgotten Ape
Text by Franz de Waal.
Photos by Franz Lanting.
University of California Press (2120 Berkeley
Way, Berkeley, CA 94720), 1997.

“With this book,” wrote Meredith Small
in a prepublication blurb, “de Waal and Lanting
ask us to give bonobos their due––to be considered
alongside the better-known common chimpanzee
as close human cousins. How nice to have the
peaceable, sexy bonobo added to the path of
human evolution! Bonobos represent the silver
lining in our ape heritage.”

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BOOKS: Bird Brains: the intelligence of crows, ravens, magpies, and jays

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1997:

Bird Brains: the intelligence of crows, ravens, magpies, and jays by Candace Savage
Sierra Club Books (85 2nd St., San Francisco, CA 94105), 1997. 114 pages, paperback, $18.00.

“The corvids are the top of the line
in avian evolution,” Candace Savage writes,
“among the most recent and successful of
modern birds. From some unknown pinpoint
beginning, they have diversified and expanded
to occupy most of the globe. Whether you go
to the Sahara or the Amazon rain forest,” or
for that matter the Arctic, “you will likely be
met by some kind of crow or crow cousin,”
such as a jay, “who will eye you boldly and
shout if you come too close.”
According to Native American legend,
says Savage, it was a crow cousin,
Raven, who attached visible genitals to male
mammals as a practical joke.

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BOOKS: Snakes: The Evolution of Mystery In Nature

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1997:

Snakes: The Evolution of Mystery In Nature
by Harry W. Greene. Photos by Michael & Patricia Fogden.
University of California Press (2120 Berkeley Way,
Berkeley, CA 94720), 1997. 351 pages, hardback, $45.

Harry W. Greene, curator of
herpetology at the University of
California’s Museum of Vertebrate
Zoology, had the bad luck to be awaiting
the imminent publication of his
opus, the summation of everything
known about snake evolution, just as
Michael Caldwell of the Field Museum
in Chicago and Michael Lee of the
University of Sydney announced perhaps
the most important paleontological
find about snakes ever––”The missing
link between the snake and the lizard,”

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BOOKS: HEAVY AND LIGHT

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1997:

Animal Acts:
Configuring the Human
in Western History
edited by Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior
Routledge (29 West 35th St., New York NY
10001), 1997. $17.95 paperback,
$69.95 cloth. 251 pages.

The Animal Acts introduction explains that
the purpose of the anthology is to “…configure the
human with the animal, to write zoomorphically and
anthropomorphically, to define zones of animality in
the human and zones of humanity in the animal.”
Emerging from this murk, after much more discussion
of the etymology of the word “configure,” is the
notion that we embody the best of animals, and they
embody the best of us. The rest of the book is given
over to essays describing in pompous, polysyllabic
and heavily noted detail just what this means, as
derived from literary rather than real-life sources.

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BOOKS: Sandy Dennis: A Personal Memoir

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1997:

Publicists regularly invade our mailbox and tie up our telephone touting
books by celebrities, usually written with substantial help from ghostwriters,
which purportedly have some sort of garbled animal protection message hidden
among drivel supposed to demonstate the celebrities’ multi-dimensionality––as if
anyone cares. We thus approached the late Sandy Dennis’ Personal Memoir
with the skepticism of an old cat toward a new dog. Dennis, however, like the
late Amanda Blake and the thriving Brigitte Bardot and Tippi Hedrun, evidently
was both sincere and so especially enthralled with cats that one or another is
mentioned on almost every page, whether or not cats are the subject of the
moment in a series of sketches that amount to a complete if brief interior autobiography.

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BOOKS: The World of the Arctic Whales

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1997:

The World of the Arctic Whales:
Belugas, Bowheads, and Narwhals
by Stefani Paine
Sierra Club Books (85 2nd St., San Francisco, CA 94105), 1997.
114 pages, paperback, $18.00.

Few if any true stories about whales have a
happy ending. The World of the Arctic Whales, a
lavishly illustrated coffee table reference, includes
three sad stories in one: the slaughters of the cheerfully
gregarious belugas, the ancient bowheads, and
the quasi-mythical narwhals. The saddest part, as
dispassionately recounted as the wealth of scientific
information Stefani Paine recites, is that all three
species are still killed in the name of aboriginal subsistence
by people whose only real reason for killing
them is preserving traditions of barbarity which also
included, in the heyday of whaling, both infanticide––especially
of females––and the exposure of old

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