From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2004:

Christopher Reeve, 52, died on October 10, 2004 in Mt.
Kisco, New York, from a severely infected pressure wound, a
complication of spending prolonged time in a wheelchair. Best
remembered as the star of the 1978 film Superman and three sequels,
Reeve “used his popularity and influence to support human rights,
animal rights, the environment, and other causes,” wrote
biographer Laura Lee Wren in 1999. Reeve was loudly booed, however,
when as a speaker at the June 1990 March for the Animals in
Washington D.C. he told the 24,000 assembled participants that, “If
you want to get things done, the worst thing that can happen to you
is to be identified as the fringe.” Reeve had nothing further to do
with the organized animal rights movement, but had just starred in a
documentary film about grey whales when in May 1995 he entered a
three-day riding competition. His horse, a thoroughbred named
Eastern Express, balked at the third jump. Reeve suffered a
severely broken neck, rendering him a quadruplegic for the rest of
his life, but recovered his ability to act and direct films. He
became a prominent spokesperson for animal use in biomedical
research, in counterpoint to the 1996 March for the Animals, and
merged two older organizations in 1998 to create the Christopher
Reeve Paralysis Foundation, raising more than $46.5 million for
spinal cord research.

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2004:

Houdini, a wild boar who escaped from the Scottish Borders
slaughterhouse on September 13, was roadkilled two weeks later after
brief residence in woods beside the river Tweed in the Lothian and
Borders region of Scotland.

Bessie, 9, Jersey cow pet of Fayette County SPCA vice
president and beef farmer Samuel Hunt, 54, was shot along with her
month-old calf by an unknown intruder on July 14 in North Union
Township, Pennsylvania.

Miracle, 10, a “white” bison at birth who attracted as many
as 2,000 visitors a day, died on September 19 on Dave Heider’s farm
in Janesville, Wisconsin, her lifelong home. Miracle was widely
associated with the white bison goddess of Native American mythology.
She darkened as she aged, passing through yellow, red, and black
color phases. By maturity she looked like any other bison. None of
her four offspring, all female, had her early-life light coloration.

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2004:

Sodade, a loggerhead sea turtle tagged with a radio
transmitter and tracked via satellite by the Marine Turtle Resarch
Group at the University of Exeter in Cornwall, U.K., was apparently
poached on August 25, 2004 off Cape Verde, an archipelago west of
Africa. “We started to receive an unusually large number of very
high quality location signals from Sodade,” researcher Brendan
Godley explained. “Such signals are received when a turtle spends
large amounts of time at the surface, suggesting she was likely on
the deck of a boat. Then the transmissions ceased, suggesting that
her transmitter was removed and dumped. Given the large number of
turtles captured for food in Cape Verde and the presence of fishing
boats in the area at the time, we think we know her fate.”

Peipei, 33, the oldest known panda in the world, died on
August 13 at the Hangzhou City Zoo in eastern China.

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