OBITUARIES

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1999:

Margaret Hodgson Gurd, nearly
90, a former longtime member of the
Canadian SPCA board of directors, died on
March 22 in Montreal. No one could
remember when the blunt-spoken Gurd
wasn’t intensely active in humane
work––rescuing animals, badgering politicians
and media, handling communications
for half a dozen organizations and committees
at a time. Gurd was already a veteran
campaigner when she took on the Atlantic
Canada seal hunt in January 1967, and old
enough even then that she recalled
International Foundation for Animal Welfare
founder Brian Davies and Care For The
Wild founder Bill Jordan as “bright and
energetic young men,” whose arrival in the
cause she found invigorating. In the earlyto-middle
1980s Gurd sent news tips and
rosters of contacts in weekly two-page letters
to ANIMAL PEOPLE editor Merritt
Clifton, who was then a rural Quebec newspaper
reporter, and aggressively lobbied his
editors to make space for investigative articles
on animal issues.

Thomas McMahon, 55, the novelist
and Harvard biomechanical scientist
who discovered how baselisk lizards run on
water, whose golden retriever Tess was perhaps
even better known at Harvard than he
was, died on February 14 near his home in
Wellesley, Massachusetts.

Corey Anderson, 9, of Norton,
Massachusetts, became lost in a blizzard on
February 25 while looking for his dog and
froze to death, just 300 yards from his
home. The dog returned to Anderson’s
home within an hour of his departure.