From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2003:

Sonora Webster Carver, 99, died on September 21 in
Pleasantville, New Jersey, one day after her lifelong friend
Josephine K. DeAngelis, 92. Sonora Carver’s father-in-law, W.F.
Carver, started the diving horse act at the Steel Pier in Atlantic
City, with her husband Al as one of the riders, but the act
lastingly captured public interest only after Sonora Carver rode the
horse through the 40-foot plunge in 1924. DeAngelis and Sonora
Carver’s sister Arnette Webster French then joined the act, which
became a resident attraction at the Steel Pier in 1929. In 1931
Sonora Carver was blinded by detached retinas in a bad fall into the
water with a horse named Red Lips, but continued to ride the diving
horses for 10 more years. Her 1961 memoir A Girl & Five Brave Horses
inspired the 1991 Walt Disney Inc. film Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken.
The Carver act ended in 1978 when the original Steel Pier was closed.
A parallel act at the Lake Compounce Amusement Park in Bristol,
Connecticut, used a riderless horse. That act reportedly ended long
before the park itself closed, after 146 years, in 1991. A similar
riderless act started in 1977 at Magic Forest in Lake George, New
York, and is now the target of protests led by Equine Advocates.

Read more

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2003:

Black Bear #107, age 15, was roadkilled on June 29 near
Spring Hill, Florida, in a location environmentalists had argued
would become a death trap for bears if a 24-hour Walmart Supercenter
was built nearby. The store was built anyway, opening earlier in
2003. Two black bear cubs were killed nearby in September 2001.

Mira, 6, rescued by the Ferret Association of Connecticut
at age three months after being stepped on and burned with bleach,
was euthanized on June 18 after a two-year battle with cancer.

“Maynard,” a squirrel monkey used in behavioral research at
New England Regional Primate Research Center, escaped from his cage
while being trucked across the facility on July 11, acquired his
name when spotted 10 miles away in the town of Maynard 19 days later,
and was roadkilled nearby on August 1.

Read more

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2003:

William B. Johnston, DVM, 56, State Public Health
Veterinarian for the Alabama Department of Public Health, and crrent
president of the National Association of State Public Health
Veterinarians, died on August 4 from esophageal cancer. Colleague
Millicent Eidson recalled him as a “national leader” in developing
the use of oral rabies vaccination to control raccoon rabies.
Eighteen states have now controlled rabies outbreaks by using the
Raboral vaccine.

Barbara Bonner, 46, founder and director of the Turtle
Hospital of New England, died suddenly at home in Upton,
Massachusetts, of unknown causes on August 1. Bonner was noted for
advocacy and educational efforts on behalf of Asian turtle species,
many of which are on the verge of extinction due to meat hunting.

Robert McCloskey, 88, died on June 30 on Deer Isle, Maine.
McCloskey won the American Library Association’s Caldecott Medal in
1941 as writer/illustrator of Make Way For Ducklings, about the
ducks who have long inhabited the Boston Public Gardens, and in 1957
for Time of Wonder, about the Maine coastal islands. He also wrote
and illustrated Blueberries for Sal (1948), in which a child and a
bear each follow the wrong mama home.

Read more

From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  July/August 2003:

Pakko,  the German shepherd who was first Dr. Dog in the
Philippines,  died on July 8 from stomach cancer. “Yasmin Jadwani,
Pakko’s adoptive ‘parent,’  tells us that he was the largest dog in
her house,  but he was the gentlest of her more than 30 rescued dogs
and  50 rescued cats,”  recalled Glorianne P. Fernandez of the
Environments Collaborative.   “When a 13-year old ‘special child’
climbed on his back during one Dr. Dog session,  he buckled under the
weight and some of his fur was pulled out before teachers could rush
to his rescue,  but Pakko did not growl at the child,  hid any pain
and regained his composure immediately.”  Begun in Hong Kong by the
Animals Asia Foundation to elevate the image of dogs in nations where
they are eaten,  Dr. Dog is sponsored in the Philippines by the
Philippine Animal Welfare Society.

Read more

From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  July/August 2003:

Nathania Gartman,  55,  died on July 4,  2003 from cancer.  A
cofounder of the Best Friends Animal Society,  Gartman “was raised in
Alabama and Louisiana,  and often talked of the turbulence of those
early days of de-segregation in the South,  having witnessed racial
discrimination first hand in the schools she attended,”  recalled
fellow Best Friends cofounder Faith Maloney.  “She became a champion
for people of all colors and creeds.  As a young woman,  she felt a
strong calling to serve God,  and worked for a while with the Billy
Graham Crusades, playing the organ at events throughout the South.
Later,  as Daffydil the Clown,  she worked with abused and sick
children in hospitals and institutions all over the country.  At Best
Friends,  Nathania began working with local schools,  and later
helped launch Utah’s Week for the Animals,”  with art and literature
programs complementing humane presentations in schools statewide.
“She was particularly proud of her work with Genesis, a restitution
program for young people out of the Utah Department of Corrections,”
Maloney added.  “Her work quickly went beyond the state, first with
several projects in Arizona on the Navajo Nation,  and then into
national programs.  She served on the board of the Association of
Professional Humane Educators,  and became president of the
organization. Even as she battled the cancer that would end her life
too early, she never missed a board meeting.  Teaching young people
to love animals was her passion and her life.”

Read more

From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  June 2003:

Bo,  formerly Worthless,  who inspired his person Tammy
Sneath Grimes to found the anti-chaining organization Dogs Deserve
Better,  was euthanized on April 25 “due to heart failure with
possible tumor complications,”  Grimes said.

Brutus,  24,  a black bear,  was euthanized on May 28 at the
Folsom city Zoo Sanctuary due to conditions of age,  a year after the
death of his twin sister Ursula.   Brutus and Ursula for many years
were the last animals left at the defunct and often flooded Royer
Park Zoo in Roseville.  Discovering them caged and alone,
then-16-year-old Justin Barker raised the first $25,000 of the sum
needed to move them to the Folsom Zoo,  where they enjoyed a markedly
better quality of life.

Read more

From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  June 2003:

Guy Mountfort,  97,  died on April 22 in Bournemouth,
England.   Honorary secretary of the British Ornithologists Union,
1952-1962,  and president 1970-1975,  Mountfort co-authored  A Field
Guide To The Birds of Britain and Europe,  a 1954 best-seller,  still
in print,  and wrote other books on nature themes including Portrait
of A Wilderness (1958),  which led eventually to the creation of
Donana National Park in Spain;  The Vanishing Jungle (1969) and
Saving The Tiger (1981),  which dealt with his role in founding
Project Tiger in India,  1968-1972;  and Rare Birds Of The World
(1988).   Mountfort in 1961 joined with Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust
founder Peter Scott,  zoologist Julian Huxley,  and British Nature
Conserv-ancy director general Max Nicholson to found the World
Wildlife Fund.  Mountfort served as WWF treasurer,  1961-1978,  and
thereafter as a vice president.

Read more

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2003:

Emily the cow, 10, who escaped from a Massachusetts
slaughterhouse in 1995 and was eventually purchased by Sherborn Peace
Abbey founders Meg and Lewis Randa, died on March 31 from cancer.
Boston Globe correspondent Benjamin Gedan remembered her as “an
inarticulate but persuasive spokeswoman for vegetarianism.” Added
Meg Randa, “It’s easy to go to the grocery, but Emily put a face on
that packet of beef.”

Randy the dolphin, 11, “so-called because of his attraction
to women wearing rubber wetsuits,” according to Martin Lea of the
Dorset Echo, was reportedly hit and killed by a boat in Weymouth
Harbor, England, on April 3, 11 months after dolphin rescuer Ric
O’Barry warned that such an accident would happen and tried
unsuccessfully to steer him back to his former home near Cherbourg,
France, where he was known as Georges.

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2003:

Franklin M. Loew, 63, died on April 22 after a three-year
battle with a rare form of neuroendocrinal liver cancer. “I come to
work but go home early because I tire out,” Loew e-mailed to ANIMAL
PEOPLE on February 2. “I’m in a clinical trial of thalidomide, of
all things, which has been shown to have anti-cancer properties,”
Loew added, seeming to enjoy the idea that he was himself now a lab
animal, participating in one of the voluntary trials of drugs in
terminal human patients that he had often mentioned as an accessible
option for “reducing, refining, and replacing” the numbers of
animals used in biomedical research. “The tumor has never caused me
any discomfort, but the chemo certainly has,” he concluded. Loew
communicated only briefly thereafter, to celebrate victories by the
Boston Red Sox. President of Becker College in Massachusetts since
1998, Loew “was hugely popular on campus,” recalled Becker provost
Bruce Stronach. “He knew many of our 1,000 students and every
employee by name, and never failed to greet all with a warm smile
and a hearty welcome. Dr. Loew was formerly president of Medical
Foods Inc. He held doctorates in veterinary medicine and nutrition,
and was a member of the National Academy of Science’s Institute of
Medicine. He was dean of veterinary medicine at both Tufts and
Cornell universities, was a division director at the Johns Hopkins

Read more