Animal obituaries
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2002:
Buddy, 4, a black Labrador retriever who spent 12 days
waiting beside the remains of his master Bill Hitchcock in February
2002 on Knight Island in Prince William Sound, Alaska, and then led
rescuers to the body, was killed in April 2002 by Anchorage Animal
Control at request of Chignik mayor Jim Brewer. Brewer was chosen to
adopt Buddy by Hitchcock’s employers, Rober and Marilyn Stowell of
Spokane, Washington, from among an estimated 1,000 applicants–but
Brewer had Buddy killed after Buddy bit his hand, inflicting a wound
that required 14 stitches, soon after Buddy was neutered. Buddy was
nominated for the Lewyt Award for Heroic and Compassionate Animals,
though he did not win, and is remembered by the Friends of Buddy
Memorial Fund created by the Gastineau Humane Society to assist other
orphaned pets.
Arnold, 18, for six years the misnamed female bar cat at
DJ’s Wheelhouse in Seward, Alaska, and then for 12 years a resident
of the nearby Brown & Hawkins clothing store, died on June 5.
Probably the most famous cat in Alaska, Arnold stole the show when
as part of a special called The Great Alaska Train Adventure, Oregon
Public Broadcasting tried to interview Brown & Hawkins owner Hugh
Darling, whose grandfather built the store in 1903. Thereafter,
Darling recalled, visitors would ask for Arnold by name. Her demise
rated a full obituary in the Seward Phoenix Log newspaper.
Chandrasekharan, 70, head elephant and idol-holder at the
Thiruvambady Devaswom temple in Thrissur, India, died on May 16.
Originally belonging to the Travancore royal family, Chandrasekharan
fell on hard times during the 1960s and worked as a logging elephant
until Bhaskaran Menon of Thrissur bought her and donated her to the
temple in 1973.
Phang Jampa, 27, a cow elephant whose suffering from
infection after the death of a calf in her womb had much of Thailand
praying for her, died on June 9 despite the efforts of the Kasetsart
University Animal Hospital to save her. She was among 30 elephants
hired to carry tourists by the Elephant & Conservation Club of
Kanchanaburi.
Onyx, 38, better known by the nickname Big Mac, 38, died
in mid-May from a ruptured intestine at the Dickerson Park Zoo in
Springfield, Missouri. Onyx was imported from Thailand in 1965 by
Arlen Seidon a.k.a. Murray Hill, of Fordland, Missouri, who
trained him to perform. In 1980 Hill donated him to the Dickerson
Park Zoo in Springfield, where he sired 12 calves.
Tuss, 50, a cow elephant born in Assam, India, who was
the Bronx Zoo matriarch since 1976, died on May 16.
Scarlet the Rottweiler, 15 months, died suddenly in
mid-June at her adoptive home with Angela Fredrickson, of Victoria,
British Columbia, due to a sudden bad reaction to an insect bite.
“Kept day and night on a short chain [by her original keeper],
living in her own excrement with no human companionship or exercise,
her howls attracted attention,” earlier in 2002, recalled Malcolm
Curtis of the Victoria Times Colonist. Pressured by the Animal
Advocates Society of B.C., the British Columbia SPCA confiscated her
in February, in one of the first B.C. cases of a dog being seized
due to prolonged chaining. Moja, 29, a chimpanzee born
at the now defunct Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery
in Primates in Tuxedo, New York, died on June 6 at the Central
Washington University Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute,
whose co-director Roger Fouts acquired him in 1979. Fouts, then
working at the University of Oklahoma, took Moja with him to CWU in
1980, and taught him to become fluent in American sign language.
Mike, 17, the orangutan star of the Lop Buri Zoo in
Thailand, whose weddings to mates Zuzu of Taiwan and Mali, a fellow
Thai, became national celebrations, died on June 13 from a herpes
infection that turned into severe pneumonia.
