ANIMAL PEOPLE is the
leading independent newspaper providing original investigative coverage
of animal protection worldwide. Founded in 1992, ANIMAL PEOPLE has
no alignment or affiliation with any other entity.
Frank Perdue, 84, died on March 31 at home
in Salisbury, Maryland. His father, Arthur Perdue, started an egg farm
in the year that Frank Perdue was born. After leukosis killed their 2,000
leghorns in the early 1940s, they switched to raising broiler hens, began
developing factory-style protection methods, and prospered during the
World War II meat shortage. Frank Perdue took over the $6 million a year
business in 1952. Annual revenues were up to $56 million in 1970, when
Perdue introduced the Perdue Farms brand name to supermarkets, appearing
in approximately 200 TV commercials during the next 24 years to promote
it. By 1991 Perdue Farms was the third largest poultry firm in the U.S.,
worth $1.2 billion a year. In April 1997, Animal Rights International
founder Henry Spira asked Perdue to lead the way in reducing the suffering
to poultry that results from factory farming. After Perdue ignored repeated
requests from Spira, Spira in October 1989 began exposing conditions at
Perdue Farms in full-page New York Times advertisements. The most famous,
entitled “The P. Word,” noted Perdue’s appointment to the
University of Maryland Board of Regents. “There’s a word for
someone who does bad stuff for money,” it proclaimed. “Perdue.”
The ad noted that, “In 1986 Perdue admitted to the President’s
Commission on Organized Crime that when his workers tried to organize,
he went to New York’s Gambino crime family to get their help…National
Public Radio reported that women were urinating on the [Perdue] workline
because they were afraid to leave it.” Recalled Spira biographer
Peter Singer, “The advertisement continued in that vein, highlighting
Perdue’s false advertising, his conviction for polluting Virginia’s
waterways, his abuse of animals, and his evasion of a manslaughter charge
after he killed someone when speeding the wrong way up a one-way road.”
Spira, who died in 1998, never won concessions from Perdue, but his ads
were cited in many Perdue obituaries.
Phil Simard, 40, one of the two animal control
officers in Portland, Maine, since 1990, died on the job of an apparent
heart attack on March 26. He was found dead still holding the leash he
had just put on a stray husky, said Portland police chief Michael Chitwood.
Judith Ball, 65, general curator at the Woodland
Park Zoo in Seattle, died on February 10 of complications from Alzheimer’s
Disease. Learning in 1996 that the Sepilok wildlife rehabilition center
in Borneo was overcrowded with sun bears confiscated from illegal traffickers,
Ball and William Karesh of the Wildlife Conservation Society evacuated
10 bears to U.S. zoos, including two who came to Woodland Park.
Henry Everding III, DVM, 42, was killed by
falling rocks on February 19 in a climbing accident in Pategonia, Chile.
Everding had for the past four years been medical director at the nonprofit
Harrison Memorial Animal Hospital in Denver, and had done veterinary volunteer
work in Nepal.
Natalie Ann Chambers, 30, a vet tech in Tumwater,
Washington, on February 14 descended 15 feet from a trail above the White
River to try to rescue her border collie Phoebe, who had fallen onto a
ledge. Holding Phoebe, trying to climb back up by gripping a tree branch
in her other hand, she plummeted 350 feet into the river when the branch
broke. Phoebe survived with a minor hip injury.
