From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1999:

Sue Avanzino, 56, wife of
Maddie’s Fund president and former San
Francisco SPCA president Richard Avanzino,
died in April from advanced breast cancer.
Recalled Richard Avanzino, “Sue not only
shared her heart and home with me, our three
children Lisa, Amy and Scott, our son-in-law
Joe, and two grandchildren, Michael and
Alexander, but also for 31 years shared my
passion for animals and waged her own personal
campaign on behalf of needy pets. She
fostered underage kittens, rescued stray cats
and dogs, and operated a quasi-adoption
satellite shelter from our home in Moraga,
California. Throughout her life, Sue maintained
an open door policy, not only for her
children’s friends, other family members,
and neighbors, but also for any cats or dogs
in need of shelter, a warm meal and loving
care. In fact, Cricket, a feline companion
who spent 17 years with us, just walked
through the front door one day and never left.

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1999:

Gidget, 14, a grouchy tabby, fond
of dogs but not of most cats, died in her sleep
on the night of May 8, after a short illness.
Thrown from a car in Monroe, Connecticut,
at about three months of age, Gidget was rescued
and named by Easton animal lover Bobbi
Edwards, but refused to stay in Edwards’
home with her other animals. Instead, Gidget
repeatedly fled to a nearby barn. After Kim
Bartlett moved into a cottage attached to the
barn in September 1986, Gidget ate on
Bartlett’s porch, where she met her first feline
friend, Keeter, a feral; walked often with
Bartlett and her dog Zooky; and held her own
in spats with raccoons and opossums. Moving
to Shushan, New York, in 1992, Gidget
enjoyed indoor privileges but continued to prefer
the outside. One evening a coyote who
was suspected of having already eaten at least
nine feral cats made a move on her––but while
all other cats the coyote had encountered
apparently bolted, and were caught from
behind, Gidget spat in his face with a snarl
that brought the whole household running.
Whatever she did next caused the coyote to
shriek and race like a flash up the nearest
mountain, without a backward glance, never
to return, as Gidget strutted to greet her people
and other astonished cats. Mellowing
slightly as she aged, Gidget became a role
model for Alfred the Great, the most political
cat in the house, who followed behind, learning
to emulate her growl and swagger, convincing
younger cats he was a great fighter
even though he never won an altercation with
any other cat in his life. Relocating to Clinton,
Washington, in 1996, Gidget became chiefly
an indoor cat, enjoying the ANIMAL PEOPLE
circulation basket as her special sleeping
place, and acquiring from Wolf, then age six,
the honorary title “Devil of the Boss Cats.”

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1999:

Edward (Mike) Seymour-Rouse,
79, died on March 19 after a long struggle
against cancer. “The son of the late Major
General James Seymour-Rouse, Edward at
age 19 followed his father into the Brigade of
Guards as World War II broke out,” friend
and colleague Chris Fisher recalled. “Serving
with Special Duties, he was captured by the
Germans in Belgium in May 1940. He made
four unsuccessful attempts to escape, finally
reaching Switzerland in 1944. He was repatriated
the following year. During this time
he fought alongside the Polish resistance in
Warsaw, and was subsequently awarded the
Polish Army Cross, a link he often renewed
on Remembrance Day with Polish veterans.”

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1999:

Staccato, northern right whale
mother of at least six calves since she was first
identified by markings in 1974, was found
dead off Wellfleet in Cape Cod Bay,
Massachusetts on April 20, two weeks after
she was last seen alive near the same location
by staff of the Provincetown-based Center for
Coastal Studies. Preliminary investigation
discovered she may have suffered from an
infection––and also found that her right jawbone
was broken, a possible effect of being hit
by a ship. There are an estimated 300 northern
right whales left alive in the wild.

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1999:

Margaret Hodgson Gurd, nearly
90, a former longtime member of the
Canadian SPCA board of directors, died on
March 22 in Montreal. No one could
remember when the blunt-spoken Gurd
wasn’t intensely active in humane
work––rescuing animals, badgering politicians
and media, handling communications
for half a dozen organizations and committees
at a time. Gurd was already a veteran
campaigner when she took on the Atlantic
Canada seal hunt in January 1967, and old
enough even then that she recalled
International Foundation for Animal Welfare
founder Brian Davies and Care For The
Wild founder Bill Jordan as “bright and
energetic young men,” whose arrival in the
cause she found invigorating. In the earlyto-middle
1980s Gurd sent news tips and
rosters of contacts in weekly two-page letters
to ANIMAL PEOPLE editor Merritt
Clifton, who was then a rural Quebec newspaper
reporter, and aggressively lobbied his
editors to make space for investigative articles
on animal issues.

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1999:

Si Tanang, a baby dugong found
snagged in a prawn net on January 25 off
Sabeh, Malaysia, by fisher Atan Husin, 51,
and his son Roslan, 25, was discovered dead
by their friend Zahid Mohamed less than 48
hours after Atan released her on March 8,
under escalating pressure from the World
Wildlife Fund. The Malaysian government initially
told Atan he could keep and raise Si
Tanang, or sell her to an aquarium, but backtracked
as WWF turned up the heat. Atan and
family fed the baby dugong sea grass pulverized
in a blender, and she was reportedly
healthy when released. The Malaysian government
refused to allow Atan to bury her as a
deceased member of his family. Four dead
adult dugongs were later found floating in the
same vicinity, one of whom may have been Si
Tanang’s mother. The incident kindled new
interest in dugongs, believed to have been
extinct in Sabeh waters since 1974. All
Malaysia seemed to rejoice when on March 25
an aerial survey found three live dugongs
swimming off Pulau Nenas.

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1999:

Jake, 20, a bottlenose dolphin,
died on February 3 at the U.S. Navy marine
mammal center in San Diego, after emergency
surgery for a severe stomach infection. Jake
and two other Navy dolphins, Buck and
Luther, were in 1994 retired to the Sugarloaf
Dolphin Sanctuary in Florida, where a team
led by Dolphin Project founder Ric O’Barry
and Lloyd Good III tried to rehabilitate them
for release. The effort ran afoul of internal
strife, heavily influenced by an individual
calling himself Rick Spill. An ANIMAL
PEOPLE investigation found reason to suspect
Spill was actually Bill Wewer, the attorney
and fundraiser who earlier incorporated
both the Doris Day Animal League and the
anti-animal rights group Putting People First.
PPF identified itself at one point as representing
Norwegian whalers. O’Barry and Good
were in court in mid-February 1999, fighting
federal charges for releasing Buck and Luther
in May 1996 without National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration permission.
O’Barry and Good argued that the dolphins
were illegally captured and held in the first
place. Both Buck and Luther were recaptured
within days by Rick Trout, who was originally
also part of the Sugarloaf project, but was
ousted through Spill’s intervention after clashing
with O’Barry in late 1994. Allegedly emaciated
and wounded from fights with wild dolphins,
Luther was returned to the Navy with
Jake, while Buck remains at the Dolphin
Research Center in Grassy Key, Florida.

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 1999:

Gloria Marie De Martini
Stradner, 72, died on December 22 from
cancer of the lungs and brain, discovered
only six weeks earlier. For more than 50
years Stradner fed, neutered, and tried to
find homes for dogs and cats she found abandoned
at the Evergreen, Mount Neboh, and
Cypress Hills cemeteries in Brooklyn and
Queens, funding her work and supporting
herself with jobs in catering halls. “I would
estimate she saved thousands of animals,”
Last Post Animal Sanctuary manager Jeanne
Toomey told New York Times obituarist
Richard Severo. Stradner had no known relatives.
Fellow animal rescuers Michael and
Anne Marie Puccino reportedly took care of
her own two dogs, Lance and Ivy.

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1998:

Charles “Goat Man” McCartney,
97, died on November 15 in Macon,
Georgia. Recounted New York Times obituarist
Robert McG. Thomas Jr., “According to
research by Darryl Patton and Jimmy
Hammett, who collaborated on a 1993 Goat
Man video and a 1994 Goat Man book,
McCartney grew up on a farm outside
Sigourney, Iowa, where he was considered
such an odd child that the family goats were
about his only true friends. That helps
explain why he took off at 14, married a 24-
year-old Spanish knife-thrower, served as
her exhibition target for a couple of years,
then returned to Iowa and married at least
twice more. The last marriage ended when
he sold his goat-weary wife for $1,000 to a
farmer she’d already grown sweet on.” He
was by then already making frequent long
treks with 30-odd goats and a goat-drawn
wagon, selling postcards of himself and
passing himself off as the Second Coming for
a time in north Georgia until skeptics tarred
and feathered him. He continued preaching
and herding goats along rural roads between
Iowa and Georgia until 1968, when a gang
severely beat him and cut the throats of eight
of his goats at Signal Mountain, Tennessee.
He spent most of the rest of his life living
with his goats and a son, Albert Gene, who
predeceased him, in an old school bus near
Jeffersonville, Georgia.

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