Obituaries

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2007:

Marjorie Goodness Kelley, 59, on August 4, 2007 was on her
Harley motorcycle, turning into her driveway, when a car struck and
killed her, e-mailed White Mountain Animal League president Mickey de
Rham, who credited Kelley with naming the League. Marge was a board
member and co-founder of WMAL in 1989, de Rham wrote. For someone
who promotes spay/neuter, I greatly admired Marge as a dog breeder.
She had started a book about Apple, a red Doberman bitch, who was
really something. I wish that book could have been finished. I just
found out, de Rham added, that Marge was writing a tribute to
Bossie, our Old Man of the Mountain cow, spokescow for the WMAL,
,who was euthanized shortly before she herself died. De Rham acquired
Bossie, noted for markings resembling the Old Man of the Mountain
rock formation that is the New Hampshire state symbol, at about the
same time the White Mountain Animal League was formed. She was subject
of a children s book, Hey Bossie, You re A Spokescow, by de Rham,
illustrated by Leigh Gusterson, published in 2004 to benefit WMAL.

Rocky Spencer, 55, carnivore specialist for the Washington
state Department of Fish & Wildlife, was killed on September 8, 2007
when he walked into a helicopter rotor while helping to move bighorn
sheep from the Yakima River canyon. Wrote Ralph Thomas of the Seattle
Times, Cougars and black bears were his latest specialty. His job was
to find ways to prevent them from coming into conflict with humans.
What he and fellow researcher Brian Kertson were finding is that cougars
are in our midst hunting, mating and raising their young far more
often than we ever imagine. While some may find all of this alarming,
Spencer and Kertson saw it as proof that, with proper precautions,
cougars and humans can and do coexist without much trouble. Spencer and
Kertson examined about 150 cougar kill sites, Thomas wrote. Spencer
said what they saw was that pets and livestock made up less than 2% of
cougar prey in their study area. Mostly, he said, cougars feed on
deer and smaller critters, such as raccoons and rabbits animals often
drawn to the suburban fringes by backyard gardens, garbage, and
feeders. One surprise to the biologists was how often cougars feast on
beavers.

Robert Henry Degroot, 67, died of cancer on September 16,
2007, his wife Carolyn notified ANIMAL PEOPLE. Degroot was a frequent
contributor of information to ANIMAL PEOPLE for nearly 15 years. A
former naval officer and retired IBM employee, Degroot founded the
Maryland Alliance for Greenway Improvement and Conservation, after many
years of involvement with the Sierra Club and a variety of environmental
coalitions. He campaigned on behalf of protecting wildlife habitat and
attracting wildlife to backyard habitat, and opposed wind power because
of the toll that wind turbines often take on birds and bats, but his
deepest interest was in establishing wildlife corridors. As Nathaniel
H. Axtell summarized of one of Degroot s conference presentations in
2001, He dreams of a day when eastern cougars can travel unimpeded by
development from the mountains of Pennsylvania into the Maryland hill
country and across the spine of Appalachia into Virginia and West
Virginia all without leaving the protection of forest. Degroot also
dreamed of a day when coyotes would be properly appreciated and
respected. I hope the public officials responsible for killing these
animals make a real effort to educate themselves, and learn why the
coyote is important to our environment, he wrote in 2005. In lieu of
flowers the family requests that donations be made in Bob s name to the
Humane Society of the U.S., Carolyn Degroot said.