OBITUARIES
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1995:
Brigid Brophy, 66, British author and feminist, died August 7 in London after a
12-year battle with multiple sclerosis. Best known for her successful crusade to require British
libraries to pay royalties to authors whenever their books are checked out, leading to the pas-
sage of the 1979 Public Lending Rights Act, Brophy was a vegetarian and animal advocate
throughout her adult life. Her first novel, Hackenfeller’s Ape (1954) attacked vivisection. “I
am the very opposite of an anthropomorphiser,” she wrote in Don’t Never Forget. “I don’t
hold animals superior to or even equal to humans. The whole case for behaving decently to
animals rests on the fact that we are the superior species. We are the species uniquely capable
of imagination, rationality and moral choice––and that is precisely why we are under the
obligation to recognize and respect the rights of animals.” Later, Brophy added,
“‘Sentimentalist’ is the abuse with which people counter the accusation that they are cruel,
thereby implying that to be sentimental is worse than to be cruel, which it isn’t.” In all,
Brophy’s aphorisms on animal rights occupy six pages of The Extended Circle, Jon Wiynne-
Tyson’s “Commonplace Book of Animal Rights.”
Psychologist Beatrix Tugendhut Gardner, 61, who with her husband Dr. R. Allen
Gardner taught the chimpanzee Washoe to use sign language, died of a central nervous system
infection on June 5, while the couple were visiting Padua, Italy. Born in Vienna, Gardner
and family were in Poland when the Nazis invaded in 1938. They fled to Brazil, entering the
U.S. in 1944. Gardner won her Ph.D. in 1959 at Oxford, as aide to Dr. Nicholas Tinbergen,
who won the Nobel Prize for behavioral research on seagulls. Gardner worked with stickle-
back fish, whose nesting habits resemble those of birds, until she met her husband at
Wellesley College, near Boston, where both taught. He was then doing rat studies. Together
they studied rhesus monkeys raised in isolation; moved to the University of Nevada in 1963;
and in 1966 began teaching American Sign Language to Washoe, then 10 months old. In early
1967 they announced that Washoe had learned a large vocabulary, used metaphors, and was
apparently teaching sign language to a younger chimp. They taught signing to four more
chimps before turning Washoe and the research over to Roger and Deborah Fouts in 1971,
amid controversy over the legitimacy of their findings. The Foutses, on their team since 1967,
eventually settled at Central Washington University in Ellenburg, where Washoe, now 30, is
the star of their Chimpanzee and Human Communications Institute.
Brajendra Singh, last Maharajah of Bharatpur, India, 76, died at home on July
8. In his youth, Singh became notorious for hosting huge duck shoots at the Keolado Ghana
marsh, 100 miles south of Delhi. A 39-gun shoot held to honor Lord Linlithgow circa 1938
reputedly killed 4,323 ducks in one day. Stripped of ruling authority in 1947, after India won
independence from Britain, Singh lost his title too in 1970 when India abolished the royalty,
and in his first race as a commoner, lost a seat in Parliament he had held since 1966. Taking
his defeat as a signal to change his ways, Singh laid down his guns and led the drive to turn
Keolado Ghana into India’s most famous bird sanctuary.
Donald Sinclair, DVM, 84, model for veterinary novelist James Harriot’s charac-
ter Siegfried Farnon, died July 3 in Thirlby, Yorkshire, England, a month after his wife of 53
years, Audrey, and five months after the death of Herriot himself, whose actual name was
Alfred Wright. Wright and Sinclair’s younger brother Brian joined him in a veterinary practice
during the Great Depression, which they ran together until after World War II. Herriot based
his classic All Creatures Great And Small and many sequels upon his memories of their part-
nership. Brian Sinclair died in 1988.
