Obituaries

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January-February 2007:
Carol Chapman, 66, was killed along with 12 cats and her
smallest dog, Zoey, on December 18, 2006 after falling and
breaking her nose and neck while fighting a pre-dawn housefire at her
home in San Jose, California. “Chapman loved cats,” recalled Scott
Herhold of the Mercury News. “She sometimes had as many as 30 or 40
of them, not to mention Buddy, her German shepherd mix, or her two
other beloved mutts, Lacy and Zoey. Before she became sick with
cervical cancer, she rescued hundreds of cats,” placing them in
adoptive homes. A retired Santa Clara social worker, Chapman
reputedly screened adopters more thoroughly than the county screened
foster parents. She “worked with a clutch of animal rescue groups,
most recently with Furry Friends Rescue,” Herhold recalled, “often
stood outside a local Petco to interest people in taking on an
unloved animal,” and “Every other week on the Greg Kihn show on KFOX
radio, gave a short blurb offering a cat or dog to a good home.”

Allison Haskell, 49, died of ovarian cancer on December 17,
2006, nine days short of her 50th birthday, at home in Ashfield,
Massachusetts. After earning a masters degree in wildlife biology
from the University of Massachusetts, where she studied the
population ecology of the Plymouth redbelly turtle, Haskell studied
at the Tufts University Veterinary School and spent five years as
chief veterinary technician at the Tufts Wildlife Clinic. Haskell
worked for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service as a research specialist
in the Division of Federal Aid from 1993 to 2003, then was national
coordinator for Partners in Amphibian & Reptile Conserv-ation.
Haskell formed two nonprofit organizations herself, Northeast
Wildlife Heritage, funded by sales of her own paintings and
handicrafts, and Cures For Ovarian Cancer, incorporated–after she
fell ill herself in 2002 –to promote early detection screening.

John F. Kulikowski, 51, the first registered animal rights
attorney in Connecticut, and a frequent visitor to the offices of
the Animals’ Agenda magazine when it was based in Westport and
Monroe, Connecticut, died on October 4, 2006, from cumulative
effects of meningitis, which he had battled for 10 years.

Virgil Butler, 41, died during the night of December 15,
2006 “in his car in front of his [Arkansas] home where he lived with
his partner, Laura Alexander,” United Poultry Concerns founder
Karen Davis announced. “Butler was a Tyson chicken slaughterhouse
worker turned activist,” Davis recounted. “In testimony given
through PETA in January 2003, Butler described the horrific
treatment of chickens that he witnessed every night at the Tyson
slaughterhouse in Grannis, Arkansas, from 1997 to 2002. He changed
his life completely, speaking out boldly on behalf of chickens, and
against the terrible abuse they suffer, at considerable risk to
himself in a region dominated by Tyson. In 2002,” Davis added,
“Butler was a keynote speaker” at the annual UPC Forum. An animal
rights movement celebrity, Butler was less well received by
mainstream news media after the Los Angeles Times distributed a
nationally syndicated profile of him in December 2003, but within
days retracted the lead paragraph. “It said that Butler took part in
the U.S. invasion of Panama,” the L.A. Times corrected, “where he
recalled killing enemy soldiers, but the Army has no record of his
service. The article stated that Butler shot a man to death in the
parking lot of a bar and went to prison for manslaughter. He was
convicted of felony burglary. The shooting could not be confirmed.”