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MARCH 2005

Animal Obituaries

Miriam Rothschild, 96, died on January 20 in Northamptonshire, England, recalled by The Times of London as “Beatrix Potter on amphetamines.” Like Potter, Rothschild performed dissections and vivisection early in life, but became a strong animal advocate later in life. The daughter of banker Charles Rothschild, who as a hobby identified more than 500 flea species, Miriam Rothschild catalogued more than 30,000 flea species between 1953 and 1973. Her uncle Lionel Walter Rothschild also encouraged her interest in biology, collecting more than 2.3 million butterflies, 300,000 bird skins, 300,000 birds’ eggs, several pet cassowaries, and 144 giant tortoises. Miriam Rothschild followed them into entomology, working with Nobel Prize-winning chemist Tadeus Reichstein to decode the relationship between insects’ consumption of toxins to deter predators and their protective coloration. She also became a leading expert on parasitic flatworms. After a World War II air raid destroyed her seven years’ worth of flatworm research, she broke codes for British military intelligence, while housing 49 Jewish children who had escaped from Nazi Germany. Eventually she began to think about the ethics of her scientific work. “I was once taken aback,” she wrote in her 1986 book Animals and Man, “by an unusually able assistant of mine suddenly deciding to quit zoology. Apparently she had been given a live, instead of a dead mouse, to feed to a stoat. Not having the courage to kill the mouse herself, she hurriedly pushed it into the cage. She watched fascinated while the animal crouched terrified in a corner, facing the tense, bright-eyed stoat preparing for the kill. To the girl’s consternation she then experienced a violent orgasm… Looking back at the first half of my life as a zoologist,” she continued, “I am particularly impressed by one fact: none of my teachers, lecturers, or professors, none of the directors of laboratories were I worked, and none of my co-workers, ever discussed with me, or each other in my presence, the ethics of zoology. I know several zoologists,” she added, “who have admitted that they suffered from the fear of being dubbed ‘unmanly,’ and struggled to overcome their dislike of causing animals pain, or killing them.”

Ernst Mayr, 100, died on February 3 in Bedford, Massachusetts, remembered as “the leading evolutionary biologist of the 20th century” by The New York Times, and “The Charles Darwin of the 20th century” by Reuters. An avid birder as a boy in Germany, Mayr at age 19 “was about to leave for medical school,” wrote Carol Kaesuk Yoon of The New York Times, “when he spotted a pair of red-crested pochards, a species of duck who had not been seen in Europe for 77 years. Though he took detailed notes, he could not get anyone to believe his sighting,” until he met Berlin Zoological Museum ornithologist Erwin Stresemann, who invited Mayr to become a weekend assistant. Completing a Ph.D. in natural history, Mayr collected––and ate––more than 3,000 birds between 1928 and 1930, doing field research in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands as an employee of Lionel Walter Rothschild (see Miriam Rothschild obituary, above). This work inspired his theoretical exploration of how species come to be differentiated. Mayr cofounded the Society for the Study of Evolution in 1946 and was first editor of the journal Evolution. Joining the Harvard faculty in 1953, he remained active in evolutionary study to the end of his life. He was credited with identifying 24 bird species and more than 400 bird subspecies.

Barbara Jo Petry, 57, better known as the mystery writer Barbara Burnett Smith, was killed by a car on February 19 near her home in Austin, Texas, while trying to retrieve a newly adopted rescued Airedale from the street. Petry was known to friends for her love of her two cats, Naranja and Sinatra, and her older rescued Airedale, Rafferty.

Katlyn Collman, 10, of Crothersville, Indiana, on January 25 detoured into a rundown apartment house on her way home from a convenience store to tell a resident that his dog had been hit by a train. Unawares, she saw a methadrine lab allegedly operated by Charles Hickman, 20, and two alleged co-conspirators. Her remains were found in a stream five days later, hands bound behind her back. Hickman is charged with murder. Two other men are charged as accomplices.

Myrtle “Myrt” Starr, 62, died of cancer on February 9 in Lompoc, California. From 1984 to 1996 Starr ran the petting zoo at the Alisal Ranch in Solvang. “We had sheep in the closets, baby pigs in the oven, we even had a bobcat and a hawk,” daughter Susan Mailander told Hildy Medina of the Santa Barbara News-Press. “Everyone was always bringing animals to us who needed a home.” In early 2003 Starr found several hundred neglected horses on the land of an acquaintance, Buellton rancher Slick Gardner, while looking for a foal whom Gardner had promised to give her. Gardner was eventually convicted in one of the largest neglect cases ever, jailed for a year, and put on probation for five years. Starr cofounded an organization, Wildhorses in Need, to help look after about 300 horses who were removed from the Gardner property.

Jerry Berard, 85, died on February 15 in Wausau, Wisconsin. A 30-year employee of Standard Oil, Berard upon retirement became an animal control officer for the Humane Society of Marathon County, working in that capacity for 24 years.

Gerd Kohl, 39, a seven-year keeper at the Vienna Zoo in Austria, was impaled on the tusks of a four-year-old bull elephant named Abu on February 20, while giving the elephant a shower. Kohl had raised Abu since infancy. Founded in 1752, the Vienna Zoo last had a keeper fatality in 2002, when a 21-year-old woman was killed by a jaguar.