Obituaries
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2012:
Obituaries
“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
Judy Dynnick, 61, of Rives Junction, Michigan, died on May 22, 2012 after a struggle of more than a year and a half against
liver cancer and other health problems. Long involved in animal, environmental, and feminist advocacy, Dynnick in 2004 formed Jackson County Volunteers Against Pound Seizure to continue a struggle against the sale of shelter animals for laboratory use that was begun in 1960 by Jackson Animal Protective Association founder Dorothy Reynolds. Reynolds died in 2001 at age 86. The major buyer of the shelter animals for resale to labs, Fred Hodgins of Hodgins Kennels in Howell, Michigan, had won libel verdicts against two activists who attacked his business in letters to newspapers, and won a reduction of a USDA penalty of $13,500 for alleged violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act to just $325, plus reimbursement of attorneys’ fees of $155,385. But Dynnick persisted. On June 18, 2006 the Jackson County commissioners voted 10-1 to stop selling animals to Hodgins. Dynnik credited her predecessors for their groundwork, thanked attorney Allie Phillips and psychologist Bob Walsh for legal and scientific support, and moved on to her next campaign, the County Animal Shelter Wall Fund. In November 2010 Dynnick thanked “everyone who contributed to the fund to get our Jackson County animal shelter walls completed,” in place of the
previous chain link fencing. “Even the isolation area is now completed,” Dynnick wrote. “This will help to keep employees safe
and greatly reduce disease transmission. It is also much quieter at the shelter, because the dogs can’t see each other.” Wrote Aggie Monfette of Royal Oak, Michigan, “I was never fortunate enough to meet Judy face to face, but we became very close friends through the phone and e-mail. The animals have lost one of their best champions and I have lost a wonderful friend.”
Ellen Witmer Truong, 64, of Springfield, Virginia, died on May 1, 2012 after a two-year struggle with multiple myeloma. A
longtime employee of the Humane Society of the U.S., as was her husband Hop Truong, “Ellen was a principal assistant to Dr. Michael W. Fox,” an HSUS vice president from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, recalled HSUS senior policy advisor Bernard Unti. “Later she worked at the Center for the Respect of Life and the Environment,” which Fox founded, “for Humane Society University, and in membership services,” Unti said.
George Sukol, a retired postal worker, died on December 21, 2011 in Bellevue, Washington. Political activists in Berkeley,
California during the 1960s and early 1970s, Sukol and his wife Diane formed the Committee for the Protection of Domestic Animals.
In 1972, collaborating with Julie Stitt and Martha Benedict of Friends of the Berkeley Dogs, they won abolition of the use of decompression to kill dogs and cats at the city pound. Berkeley was the first city to halt decompression killing, but it was abolished throughout the U.S. by 1985. Decompression killing had been pushed for shelter use by the American Humane Association since 1950. Since 2010 AHA has promoted the use of decompression for killing poultry.
