From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2009:
Titus, 35, the “Gorilla King” of Volcanoes National Park in
the Virunga mountains in Rwanda, died on September 14, 2009 of
injuries apparently suffered in a fight with another silverback
gorilla. Most of Titus’ family were killed by poachers, reported
Edmund Kagire of the Kigali New Times. Abandoned by his mother,
after she was attacked by the surviving silverback, Titus was
accepted into an all-male gorilla band. They were eventually joined
by five females. When the first dominant silverback showed signs of
age, Titus dethroned him, and went on to sire more offspring than
any other known mountain gorilla. Featured in the film Gorillas In
The Mist, based on the life of primatologist Dian Fossey, Titus was
buried near Fossey, who named him, at the Karisoke Research Center.

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2009:
Danny Bampton, 9, of St. Charles County, Missouri, was
killed on August 19, 2009 when hit by a car. “Investigators say the
boy was riding with his mother when he saw an injured duck in the
road and asked her whether he could save it. After she pulled the
car over, Danny hopped out and put the duck in a roadside culvert on
the south side of the highway. When he tried to cross back over the
rural, two-lane road to his family’s car, Danny was struck by a
westbound Subaru Legacy driven by Alayna R. Hitz, 18, of
Wentzville. He died at the scene,” wrote Joel Currier of the St.
Louis Post-Dispatch. ANIMAL PEOPLE reminds readers that the safe way
to rescue animals from roadways is from the side of the road that the
animals are on, using one’s vehicle to block traffic, with four-way
flashers on.

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2009:

Hugo Bear, recalled as “one of our most beloved rescued
dancing bears at the Agra Bear Sanctuary” by cofounders Kartick
Satyanarayan and Geeta Seshamani, died on August 7, 2009.

Emi, 21, a Samatran rhino who was imported to the
Cincinnati zoo in 1995, died on September 5, 2009. Her first of
three calves, Andalas, born in 2001, was the first Sumatran rhino
bred in captivity since 1889.

KM04, a puma blamed for killing 15 bighorn sheep in seven
months in southwestern Arizona, was shot on September 2, 2009 by
state wildlife staff, under pressure from conservationists and
trophy hunters.

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2009:
Sam the koala, rescued by firefighter David Tree during
bushfires that killed more than 170 people in northern Victoria
state, Australia, in February 2009, was euthanized on August 6,
2009 due to incurably painful cysts caused by urogenital clamydiosis.
The disease afflicts as much as half of the koala population.

Dunham, a dolphin rescued from stranding shortly before
Christmas 2008 and rehabilitated by Gulf World, was euthanized on
July 21, 2009 due to injuries suffered when he was mauled by a tiger
shark soon after his release. Harbor Branch Oceanographic
Institution director Stephen McCullogh saw the attack but was unable
to prevent it.

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2009:
Kitty Langdon, 94, died July 28, 2009 in Aurora,
Colorado. “Kitty was one of Denver’s original organized
rescuers–feisty as hell to the end,” recalled former Rocky Mountain
Alley Cat Allies director Audrey Boag, for whom Langdon was longtime
mentor. Born in Britain, where she became known for feeding strays,
Langdon came to the U.S. as a war bride in 1944 aboard the Queen
Mary, then in service as a troop ship. She and her husband Sam
lived briefly in Boston and then in Walla Walla, Washington, before
settling in the Denver area in 1956. They began rescuing dogs in
Walla Walla circa 1949 “as soon as we had a fenced yard,” Langdon
told ANIMAL PEOPLE in 1993. They formed the Sunrise Foundation in
1972, initially to promote dog adoptions and sterilization. After
Sam Langdon died in 1980, Kitty Langdon refocused on helping cats.
She was among the very early U.S. practitioners and advocates of
neuter/return feral cat control, and was an early and enthusiastic
ANIMAL PEOPLE donor. Late in life she also became an outspoken
advocate for the rights of long-term care patients, profiled in 2006
by Denver Post columnist Diane Carman.

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2009:
Princess Elizabeth de Croy, 88, died on
May 18, 2009 at the Refuge de Thiernay she
founded in 1968, three miles from the Chateau
d’Azy, her birthplace and the de Croy ancestral
home. The Princess worked as a flight attendant
in the early years of commercial aviation,
traveled with actor Rex Harrison, and knew
General Charles DeGaulle. She did humanitarian
relief work in Biafra, and with her six sisters,
helped to raise funds for Mother Teresa. Her
first experience in humane work included
introducing the use of captive bolt guns to
French slaughterhouses in 1962, as a member of
the French organization ‘uvre d’Assistance aux
Bêtes d’Abattoirs. She demonstrated stun guns
donated by the International Society for the
Protection of Animals, a subsidiary of the
Massachusetts SPCA which was in 1981 merged with
a subsidiary of the Royal SPCA of Britain to form
the World Society for the Protection of Animals.

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2009:
Victoria Wellens, 58, died of cancer on
March 28, 2009. Executive director of the
Wisconsin Humane Society since 1994, Wellens
arrived with no background in animal work, but
had worked in child welfare. She inherited
dilapidated premises, a factionalized and
demoralized staff, a high rate of shelter
killing, animal control contracts with 19
cities, and adversarial relationships with other
humane organizations and local media. Her first
action was to make the Wisconsin Humane premises
child-friendly. Eliminating sharp-edged
furniture, harsh language, and any activity or
posters that would easily upset a child tended to
produce a more comfortable environment for staff
and volunteers. Dropping the animal control
contracts, which Wellens saw as the source of
most of the stress within Wisconsin Humane,
Wellens helped the cities to form the Milwaukee
Area Domestic Animal Control Commission.

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2009:
Qannik, 8, a beluga whale, died from a bacterial blood
infection on March 27, 2009 at the Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium in
Tacoma, Washington, his home since 2007. Qannik was the eighth
beluga to live at Point Defiance, where belugas have been exhibited
for about 25 years, and was the fourth to die there. His mother,
Mayauk, had two stillbirths at Point Defiance before she was
transferred to the John Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. There she
successfully birthed Qannik and a sibling. Qannik at Point Defiance
replaced Turner, 13, who died in 2006. Beethoven, 16, companion
to both Turner and Qannik, is to be returned to Sea World San
Antonio, his birthplace, where he will join the Sea World captive
breeding program. As none of the 34 other belugas now in captivity
in the U.S. need a new home, Point Defiance “has applied for three
California sea lions as part of the government effort to trap and
remove dozens of the animals, who are feeding on endangered salmon
on the Columbia River, reported the Tacoma News Tribune.

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2009:
Socks, 18, the White House cat throughout the Bill Clinton
administration, died on February 20, 2009. Originally kept by
former President Clinton’s daughter Chelsea, who adopted Socks from
a litter born in her piano teacher’s yard when Clinton was governor
of Arkansas, Socks had lived with Bill Clinton’s former secretary
Betty Currie in Hollywood, Maryland since the Clinton family left
the White House in early 2001. After Socks and a newly acquired
chocolate retriever named Buddy had several altercations on the White
House grounds, then-First Lady Hilary Clinton in 1998 published a
book of children’s letters to the animals entitled Dear Socks, Dear
Buddy. Bill Clinton likened trying to achieve a truce between Socks
and Buddy to seeking peace in the Middle East, a problem Hilary now
confronts as Secretary of State.

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