Obituaries [April 2009]

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2009:
Paul Harvey, 90, died on February 28, 2009 in Phoenix,
Arizona. Beginning in radio journalism while still in high school in
Tulsa, Oklahoma, Harvey met and married Lynne Cooper, whom he
called Angel, while working for St. Louis radio station KXOK in
1940. She became his chief researcher until her death in 2008. They
were later joined by their son, Paul Harvey Jr. At peak in the
1970s, their broadcasts reached more than 24 million listeners via
more than 1,200 American Broadcasting Company affiliates plus 400
Armed Forces Radio stations. In addition, 300 newspapers carried
Paul Harvey’s syndicated column. “Paul and Angel were two of the best
friends that animal protection and the Humane Society of the U.S.
ever had,” recalled HSUS president Wayne Pacelle. “The same must be
said of Paul Harvey Jr. The September 1956 issue of HSUS News
records that Harvey reported on the activity of the House
Agricultural Com-mittee in regard to humane slaughter,” during the
campaign for the Humane Slaughter Act, passed in 1958. “He also
appealed for an end to slaughterhouse cruelties in his newspaper
column,” Pacelle continued.

“He visited a Chicago slaughterhouse to
watch the killing as part of his orientation to the issue, and gave
the keynote address at the 1956 HSUS annual conference. He spoke out
against puppy mills, animal fighting, seal clubbing, and factory
farming. He endorsed the landmark farm animal protection ballot
initiatives in Arizona in 2006 and in California in 2008. With a
generally conservative political orientation,” Pacelle noted, “his
unyielding support for animal protection was a reminder to all his
millions of listeners that this cause was not of the left or the
right, but is a cause that every decent American should embrace.”
Paul Harvey received a Genesis Award from the Ark Trust in 1986, and
in 1987 received the inaugural James Herriot Award from HSUS.

Norman Seaton, 87, died on March 20, 2009. Born in
Vancouver, British Columbia, Seaton became a vegan at age 12. A
laser researcher at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California,
Seaton refused to participate in projects of military purpose. The
husband of Animal Switchboard cofounder Virginia Handley for 39
years, Seaton in 1971 cofounded the San Francisco Vegetarian Society.
Sailing with the Greenpeace VII from San Francisco on July 12, 1975
to confront the Russian whaling ship Vostok off the Mendocino coast.
Seaton “rigged speakers outside the wheelhouse and piped Gustav
Holtz’s The Planets throughout the ship,” recalled Rex Wyler in
Greenpeace: How A Group of Ecologists, Journalists, and
Visionaries Changed The World (2004). The voyage produced iconic
photographs of Greenpeacers racing motorized rafts between the
Vostok’s harpoon gun and the whales the Vostok was trying to shoot,
and of Paul Watson, who founded the Sea Shepherd Conservation
Society two years later, standing on a fatally injured whale to try
to keep the Vostok crew from pulling the whale aboard.

Haren Kalita, 30, a member of the Home Guard at Pathsala,
Assam, India, was fatally shot on March 20, 2009 in a
confrontation with poachers. Manas National Park deputy director
C.R. Bhobora and another Home Guard member were wounded. Sixteen
alleged poachers and the remains of leopards, tigers, deer, and
bison were captured.

Kamaraju Bhuyan, a forester, was trampled by elephants on
February 16, 2009 at Raampu village, Berhampur, Orissa, India,
while trying to rescue a two-year-old elephant who fell into a well
after her weight broke the concrete cover.