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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: JAN-FEB 06

OBITUARIES

The Animals In War memorial, London. (Kim Bartlett)


Tony Banks, 62, died on January 7, 2006 from a stroke sufferedon vacation at Sanibel Island, Florida. A Member of Parlia-ment 1983-2004, sports minister 1997-1999, and named to the House of Lords in mid-2005, Banks was a vegetarian and “a staunch animal welfarist who played a key role in having hunting with dogs banned in Britain,” World Society for the Protection of Animals director general Peter Davies recalled. “He was also a strong supporter of my separate charity which erected the Memorial to Animals in War in Park Lane, London,” Davies said. Added League Against Cruel Sports chair John Cooper, “In his firm belief that people have a moral responsibility to animals, Banks was not just a figurehead for millions of animal welfare supporters across Britain, but a determined street fighter in the corridors of Westminster.” At his death Banks was League Against Cruel Sports vice president.

 

Ethel Thurston, 94, died at home in New York City on January 4, 2006. A longtime professor at Hunter College, Bryn Mawr, New York University, and the Manhattan College of Music, Thurston was globally known as a musicologist who recreated the original sounds of compositions from the Middle Ages and Renaissance. But Thurston was legendary, friend Sara Sohn recalled, as “a pioneer of the animal rights movement, who devoted the last three decades of her life to running the two organizations she founded. The American Fund for Alternatives to Animal Research,” begun in 1974, “provided grants to scientists who were committed to developing, validating, and implementing non-animal alternatives. Beauty Without Cruelty USA,” started in 1978, “informed the public on where to find cruelty-free cosmetics and household products, and also vegan clothing and footwear. I met Dr. Thurston when I was 15 and had the privilege and honor of working with her for ten years,” Sohn said. Funded for seven years by AFAAR, cytotoxicologist Bjorn Ekwall of Sweden developed human cell culture tests which by 1998 could “predict human lethal concentrations with 71% precision,” Thurston told ANIMAL PEOPLE in 1998. Ekwall died in 2000, but the Bjorn Ekwall Foundation has continued his work. Thurston started Beauty Without Cruelty USA as a branch of an organization begun in Britain in 1957 by Muriel, The Lady Dowding, who died in 1993. In 1963 the Lady Dowding spun off the cruelty-free product manufacturing firm Beauty Without Cruelty Inc. as an independent company. Thurston’s first BWC-USA project was a week of anti-fur protest held in March 1979 to coincide with the American Inter-national Fur Fair. Featuring appearances by the Lady Dowding, Fund for Animals founder Cleveland Amory, and Broadway actress Gretchen Wyler, who later founded the Genesis Awards program (see page 15), the effort is remembered as the ignition of the U.S. anti-fur movement. Thurston also helped boost animal rights philosopher Tom Regan to prominence. Recalled Regan, “On behalf of the International Association against Painful Experiments on Animals, Ethel and IAPEA founder Colin Smith [deceased in 2001] invited me to organize and chair a 1984 conference on religion and animals. In 1986, I was privileged to publish the proceedings as Animal Sacrifices: Religious Perspectives on the Use of Animals in Science.” The New England Anti-Vivisection Society in 2000 honored Thurston with the Cleveland Amory Humane Achievement Award.

 

Joan Wells Root, 69, was shot three times in her bed with an AK-47 automatic rifle on January 13 at her home in Naivasha, Kenya, 56 miles northwest of Nairobi. Naivasha police chief Simon Kiragu three days later announced the arrest of a welder and a schoolteacher, who were identified by tracking dogs. Twenty-one other people were held for questioning. A watchman saw the attackers approach with the gun and a machete, shining a spotlight into the house until they found Root, but was unable to intervene, Kiragu said. “There is speculation that Mrs. Root may have been targeted over efforts to stop illegal fishing,” wrote Independent correspondent Anthony Gitonga. “Mrs. Root married Alan, a self-taught film-maker, in 1961,“ recalled Guardian correspondent Jeevan Vasagar. “The Roots were the first people to fly over Mount Kilimanjaro in a hot-air balloon and set up the first balloon safaris over the Masai Mara.” Together they made nature films including Baobab: Portrait of a Tree (1973); Castles of Clay (1978), featuring a termite hill and an aardvark; Mzima: Portrait of a Spring (1983), focusing on the life of a hippopotamus; Year of the Wildebeest (1984); Kopjes: Islands in a Sea of Grass (1985); Legend of the Lightning Bird (1989) ; Season in the Sun (1989); and Heart of Brightness (1990). Post-divorce, Root focused on operating her own small wildlife rehabilitation center. “Raised in Naivasha, Mrs. Root developed an early love for animals after helping to nurse an injured baby elephant back to health,” wrote Xan Rice of The Times.

 

Mary Aiken Littauer, 93, died on December 7 at her home in Syosset, New York. Raised in Manhattan, she developed an interest in ridng during family vacations in Nevada, then volunteered as a horseback courier for the Frontier Nursing Service in rural Kentucky. She married Vladimir S. Littauer, a former cavalry officer in the army of Czar Nicholas II of Russia, who authored eight books on riding and training horses, and founded the Boots & Saddles Club near their home on Long Island, where he taught riding until his death in 1989, at age 96. Restricted in his own riding during the last 20 years of his life, Littauer suggested to his wife, who did not wish to ride alone, that she might like to try her own hand at writing about horses. She published her first article about horses of ancient times in the British journal Antiquity in 1968. Soon thereafter she began a 30-year collaboration with University of Amsterdam professor of Aegean archaeology Joost Crouwel. Together they produced 65 scholarly articles and two books, Wheeled Vehicles & Ridden Animals in the Ancient Near East (1970) and Chariots & Related Equipment from the Tomb of Tutankhamen (1985).

ANIMAL OBITUARIES

Angus, 27, believed to be the world’s biggest captive elephant, was found dead on January 8 by his trainer, Michael Hackenberger, at the Bowmanville Zoo near Toronto. The star of the Bowmanville Zoo elephant ride concession for 20 years, Angus died about 30 hours after a sedative test given in preparation for retiring him to the Pumba private game reserve near Port Elizabeth, South Africa. Born in Kruger National Park, Angus was captured at age two. He toured with the Garden Brothers Circus and briefly resided at zoos in Quebec and Texas before arriving at Bowmanville with Hackenberger and his wife, zoo veterinarian Wendy Korver. A highlight of his life was swimming with beluga whales in the St. Lawrence River on one occasion while on tour.

 

Ragtime, 19, a miniature performing horse who was involved in a landmark 1989 zoning dispute in Thousand Oaks, California, died on January 2, four days after his trainers, Rich & Patty Fairchild, moved him and his mate Sassy to Colorado Springs.

In Memoriam

In Memory of Mothi. Sweetheart bird of Swathi Buddhiraju.