Obituaries
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November/December 2010:
“I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do
lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones.”
–William Shakespeare
Avi Sivan, 53, was killed in a helicopter crash on November
23, 2010 while flyng between Doula and Yaounde, Cameroon. A former
commander of the Israel Defense Forces’ elite Duvdevan unit, Sivan
served as a security advisor for Cameroon President Paul Biya.
Sivan founded the Cameroon Wildlife Aid Fund in 1997, which became
Ape Action Africa in 1999. Operating a sanctuary in Mefou National
Park for more than 250 apes and monkeys, Ape Action Africa in 2000
became a charter member of the Pan African Sanctuary Alliance and
hosted the 2010 PASA management workshop.
Kathy Abell, 56, reportedly committed suicide on October 5,
2010 at her home in Elizabethtown, Illinois. Kathy and Al Abell, a
coal miner, started an exhibition facility called Cougar Bluff
Enterprises circa 1999, keeping wolves, pumas, a bobcat, and an
African lion. On February 12, 2004 the lion killed Al Abell and
escaped. His remains were found after police shot the lion at the
edge of the Shawnee National Forest. Two pumas still on the premises
at Kathy Abell’s death were evacuated by Big Cat Rescue of Tampa,
Florida.
Richard Goldman, 90, died on November 28, 2010 at his home
in San Francisco. Founder of Goldman Insurance Services, Goldman
and his wife Rhoda, who survives him, formed the Goldman Fund in
1951, distributing more than $680 million by his death. The Goldman
Fund in 1989 began awarding six prizes of $150,000 each year to
environmental advocates, mostly in the developing world. Many
winners have worked on behalf of animals, including four of the 2010
recipients, whose efforts were summarized in the June 2010 edition
of ANIMAL PEOPLE.
Nathan Jamieson, 32, formerly an elephant caretaker at the
Western Plains Taronga Zoo in Dubbo, Australia, was killed on
October 20, 2010 by a blow from the trunk of an elephant he was
attending at the Abu Camp safari and elephant reserve in Botswana.
David L. Grove, 31, a Pennsyl-vania Wildlife Conservation
officer since 2001, was shot dead on November 11, 2010 after
cornering suspected poacher Christopher Lynn Johnson, 27, of
Gettysburg at a cabin in Franklin Township. Johnson has been charged
with murder. Grove was the first Pennsylvania conservation officer
to be killed in the line of duty since Joseph McHugh was shot near
Weatherly in November 1915.
Margaret E. Meyer, Ph.D., 87, died on October 8, 2010
from complications of pulmonary disease. Starting her career as a
swine brucellosis control agent for the USDA, Meyer spent 40 years
doing brucellosis research at the University of California at Davis,
1947-1987. “She cared for feral cats near her Carmichael home and
supported wildlife advocacy groups,” recalled Robert B. Davila of
the Sacramento Bee. “In 1992 she testified in a federal case against
cattle ranchers’ claims that their herds were being infected with
brucellosis by bison from Yellowstone National Park.”
Frank Fenner, M.D., 95, died on November 21, 2010. A
professor of microbiology at the John Curtin School of Medical
Research in Canberra, Australia, Fenner researched the use of the
myxoma virus to kill rabbits from 1946 to 1950, when the virus
escaped from a test site in the Murray Valley and spread rapidly
through South Australia, coinciding with an outbreak of encephalitis
among humans. Fenner and two colleagues injected themselves with
enough myxoma virus to kill 1,000 rabbits to demonstrate that the
virus does not attack humans. Myxoma virus was then repeatedly
released to attack rabbits, but Fenner accurately warned that
because about half of 1% of the infected rabbits survived, the
survivors would produce enough immune descendants to rapidly rebuild
the population. After 1969 Fenner focused on smallpox eradication,
heading the World Health Organization’s smallpox eradication from
1977 until May 8, 1980, when smallpox was declared extinguished
worldwide.
