HUMAN OBITUARIES

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2000:

Mary Warner, almost 90, died
recently at her home in Berryville, Virginia.
Originally from Minnesota, Warner won her
first reputation in animal protection by tracking
down horse thieves. She began investigating
dog and cat theft, she recalled in 1992,
only after she and her husband retired to
Virginia in 1974. “We finally got away from
the horse thieves,” she said, “and then our
dog was stolen, right out of our yard.”
Warner responded by founding Action-81, an
anti-pet theft advocacy group named for I-81,
the truck route used by Appalachian bunchers
to haul dogs to laboratories along the
Atlantic seaboard. For the rest of her life
Warner gathered pet theft reports, lobbied
animal protection groups to act on pet theft,
and hounded her elected representatives.

Warner recorded an apparent boom in pet
theft after New York in 1977 repealed a law
that obliged public shelters to surrender animals
on demand to research institutions.
Eight other states, with 332 research facilities
among them, halted selling pound animals
to labs by 1985. This increased the
demand for random-source dogs and cats
from the midwest and south. Warner contended
that this, too, sent pet theft rates soaring––although
changes in teaching and testing
methods had by then cut lab use of dogs
and cats in half from the levels of the 1970s.
Some of the pet theft statistics Warner used
proved to have been inflated more than a
thousandfold, but her activity did help win
passage of the 1990 Pet Theft Act, which
amended the federal Animal Welfare Act to
require vendors of dogs and cats to labs to
keep records on each animal they sell.
Taking effect in January 1993, the Pet Theft
Act enabled USDA inspectors to shut down
more random-source dog and cat dealers than
remain in business. Of hundreds active when
Warner started, a mere 27 are left.
Ruth Young Manwaring, 73,
died on September 18 in Needham, Massachusetts.
A former radio journalist and publicist
for the American Automobile Association,
involved in many other branches of
charity, Manwaring was best known and
remembered as longtime president of the Dog
Orphans shelter in Douglas, Massachusetts.
Patti Nickerson Manning, 40,
was found shot to death at her home in
Richmond Township, Michigan, on
September 21, after her second husband
Donald Manning, 44, told police he had
killed her. Donald Manning was charged
with murder, held without bond in the
Marquette County Jail, and may face life in
prison if convicted. Patti Nickerson Manning
had four children with her first husband,
Dale Nickerson, whom she divorced in the
mid-1980s. On March 2, 1989, on a subzero
day in National Mine, Michigan, her
five-year-old daughter Angie got off her
school bus between her own home and that of
her grandparents, across the street, and was
fatally mauled by a Malamute/wolf hybrid
who was adopted from an animal shelter and
given to her aunt Tammi Alderton by a
boyfriend five days earlier. Angie’s partially
eaten remains were not found for more than
an hour because each family thought she had
gone to the home of the other. After a series
of bitter lawsuits among the family members,
Nickerson Manning fought for legislation to
prohibit owning and breeding wolf hybrids
and other dangerous pets. Michigan finally
adopted the law she wanted in July 2000.
Phillip Glasier, 84, died on
September 11. Introduced to falconry by an
uncle who let him make a pet of an African
hawk eagle, Glasier became a bird photographer
and falcon trainer after World War II.
He eventually became personal falconer to
Princes Philip and Charles. Settling at
Clifford Mesne, Gloustershire, with 12 birds
in 1966, Glasier opened the Falconry Center
with 60 a year later. There Glasier was
among the first people to successfully breed
kestrels, Indian tawny eagles, African
pygmy falcons, and American black vultures
in captivity. Glasier also introduced the use
of falcons rather than shotguns, nets, and
poison to keep birds away from airfields. The
Falconry Center was in 1979 retitled the
National Birds of Prey Center. Although
Glasier’s 1979 book Falconry and Hawking
is called “the bible of falconing,” he liked
most animals better alive than dead, keeping
a home full of pets including ferrets and, at
one point, a thoroughly tame deer.
Lisa O’Shea, 27, died on October
1 at the University Medical Center in Reno,
Nevada, after she leaped from her motorcycle
on September 24 to try to rescue a
German shepherd/chow mix and a Rottweiler
who had unwittingly plunged into a hot
spring after jumping out of a pickup truck in
the Black Rock Desert near Gerlach. O’Shea,
the dogs, and a companion who also tried to
help, Andy Crowell, 25, were all virtually
boiled alive. One dog died in the water; the
other required euthanasia. Crowell at latest
report was still in critical condition.