OBITUARIES

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1997:

Bruno Zehnder, 52, of Manhattan,
froze to death in an Antarctic blizzard
circa July 7, returning from an expedition to
photograph breeding emperor penguins.
Zehnder was reportedly about a mile from
safety at Mirnyy Station, a Russian research
base which he had missed by 50 yards despite
flares set out to guide him. Born in Bad
Rogov, Switzerland, Zehnder emigrated to
New York City in 1977, after making his
first international reputation with photographs
of Vietnam after the Vietnam War, but his
real home was Antarctica, where he lived
much of each year at the bases of Chile, New
Zealand, the U.S., Denmark, and Russia.
Zehnder married Heather May of New York
City in 1984 at Marambio, an Argentinian
research station, surrounded by tuxedo-clad
penguins––but the marriage lasted just three
years, as the penguins seemed to be his more
enduring love. “His frequent sojourns in
Antarctica resulted in photos that won several
prizes,” The New York Times r e m e m b e r e d ,
among them the 1987 United Nations
Environmental Protection Prize, the 1990
BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year
award, and election to the Royal Geographic
Society. “One of his most widely published
pictures was of a pair of emperor penguins in
tender embrace with a chick between them,”
the T i m e s recalled. “Another, made last
year, was of a mother emperor penguin trying
vainly to feed her chick, whose beak had
frozen closed.” The photo helped draw international
attention to the threat of global
warming to penguin survival.

Stuart Jewell, 84, died July 13 at
home in Costa Mesa, California. A pioneer
of both aerial photography and time-lapse
nature photography, Jewell in 1953 collaborated
with five other Disney Studios cameramen
to produce the Academy Award-winning
documentary The Living Desert. His most
remarkable work, however, might have been
the first-ever views of the transition of queens
in a beehive, obtained for the 1956 Disney
documentary The Secrets of Life.

Josh the Wonder Dog, 16,
described by Washington Post staff writer
Amy Argetsinger as “a terrier mix who overcame
a devastating gunshot injury to become
the most-petted dog in America,” died July
23 in Annandale, Maryland. Attorney
Richard Stack found Josh in 1984, a week
after completing his first children’s book,
The Doggonest Christmas, whose fictional
canine hero Josh resembled. Two successful
sequels led to promotional visits to more than
2,000 schools, as Stack quit his law practice
to write fulltime. In the interim, in
December 1987, Josh was sole survivor of a
series of still unsolved dog shootings around
his neighborhood. He became the most petted
dog despite spinal cord damage that kept
him from wagging his tail.

Ron Scott, director of Two Mauds
Inc., a foundation supporting animal rights
projects, died July 16 at home in Garrison,
New York. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts,
Scott graduated from Princeton in 1955, and
as a pilot rose to the rank of Lieutenant
Colonel in the U.S. Air Force and New York
Air National Guard. He later worked on both
coasts as a singer and actor. As a graduate
student in anthropology at Columbia
University, Scott was a student assistant to
Margaret Mead, 1969-1974. In 1969 he and
the late Dallas Pratt founded Argus Archives,
a New York-based organization dedicated to
the collation of information on animal abuse.
He formed Two Mauds in 1994.
Remembered by animal rights philosopher
Tom Regan as, “A big kid with a wicked
sense of humor,” Scott is survived by his sister,
Janet A. Scott, his longtime companion,
David Finkbeiner, and a niece and nephew.

Alan J. Charig, 70, noted for his
1986 destruction of so-called “creation science”
in the journal Science, died July 15 at
home in Oxted, England. Joining the Natural
History Museum in 1957, Charig became
curator of fossil reptiles, mammals, and
birds. His field expedition finds included the
earliest known mammal skeleton, the earliest
known herrings, and the 30-foot, 124-million-year-old
fish-eating dinosaur B a r o n y x
Walkeri, discovered in 1986 in a Surry quarry,
named for plumber Bill Walker, who
first stumbled on the fossilized bones.