Obituaries
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Jacques Cousteau, 87, died June 25. Often ill as a child, Cousteau swam for his health near his home in St. Andre de Cubzac, France. He first dived in 1920 on a visit to Lake Harvey, Vermont, but only began diving in earnest after a 1936 car crash forced him to leave the French Naval Academy flight school. With engineer Emile Gagnan, Cousteau in 1943 invented the aqualung and took up underwater filming, earning the French Legion of Honor for anti-Nazi espionage.In 1950 Cousteau bought the minesweeper Calypso and re-equipped it as a floating film and TV studio. |
Photograph of
Jacques Cousteau courtesy CNN.
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| The screen edition of his first book, The Silent World (1953), won the Grand Prize at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival and his first of three Academy Awards. Cousteau initially touted the oceans’ economic potential, but reinvented himself as the world’s most prominent and popular ecological crusader in The Living Sea (1963) and World Without Sun (1965), along with the ABC specials, The World of Jacques Cousteau (1966) and The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau (1968). “The only creatures on Earth who have bigger and maybe better brains than humans are the Cetacea, the whales and dolphins,” Cousteau often repeated, sparking the “save the whales” movement. “Perhaps they could one day tell us something important, but it is unlikely that we will hear it, because we are coldly, efficiently and economically killing them off.” As whale-saving grew into earth-saving, Cousteau spoke out against the nuclear arms race, noted often that human population had quintupled within his lifetime, and encouraged population planning but warned fellow anti-population crusaders that becoming involved in the abortion issue would be suicidal. Forming the Cousteau Society, based in Norfolk, Virginia, Cousteau and company won 40 Emmy nominations for their PBS series Cousteau Odyssey (1977) and Turner Broadcasting System series, Cousteau Amazon (1984). In part due to his own success in raising appreciation of the sacredness of life, Cousteau took hits from the animal rights movement in later years over aspects of his early work, “We’ve learned since then,” Cousteau acknowledged in a 1986 interview with Louise B. Parks of the Houston Chronicle. “It’s horrifying when I see what we used to do. We didn’t know better. We used to chase whales. Now when we spot the whales, we stop and wait for them to come to us. But we were learning. As we learned, we helped create the legislation that tells people how to behave toward mammals in the sea. If you look at the law today and our shows 15 years ago, we would go to jail.” Denouncing the capture of cetaceans for exhibit, Cousteau in 1991 opened the Paris-based Parc Oceanique Cousteau, the world’s first high-tech oceanarium without animals, but by 1994 it was out of business, partly because rapid advances in technology had already rendered much of it obsolete. Cousteau’s later years were saddened by the 1979 death of eldest son Philippe in a seaplane crash, the 1990 death of first wife Simone Melchior, and a bitter lawsuit against second son Jean-Michel, 57, over use of the Cousteau name in connection with a Fijian resort. Cousteau also had two children, Diane, 16, and Pierre-Yves, 14, with his second wife, France Triplet. | |
| George Wald, 90, Harvard biologist who won the 1967 Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering the biochemical reactions that produce vision, died April 12 in Cambridge, Massachsetts. A longtime advisor to the Farm Animal Reform Movement, Wald was “deeply involved in a number of social issues, including peace, nuclear power, and child and animal welfare,” according to FARM president Alex Hershaft. | 
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Photograph of George Wald courtesy the Nobel Foundation |
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| Gloria
Blevins, 72, longtime adoption counselor for the San Diego County
Department of Animal Control, who died in April, was memorialized in
June by an anonymous gift of $100,000 to the shelter. “Gloria had a
passion for saving all the animals she could, and in the end that number
reached into the thousands,” SDC/DAC director Hector Cazares told
media. Cazares said the donor “is a strong supporter of this
department and sees this as seed money to attract other donors, which
would enable us to make significant capital improvements.”
U.S. District Judge Charles R. Richey, 73, died of cancer on March 20, nine days short of six years after issuing perhaps his most controversial decision, which held that contrary to implementing regulations issued by the USDA, Congress meant the 1985 Improved Standards for Laboratory Animals Act to apply to mice, rats, and birds, who are the animals most commonly used in biomedical research, as well as to primates, dogs, and other species. The verdict was later reversed on grounds the plaintiffs, Animal Legal Defense Fund and three individuals, had no standing to bring the case. The 1985 Act still isn’t fully implemented. On October 29, 1996, Richey issued a similar verdict, again on behalf of ALDF, this time striking down so-called “performance standards” set by the USDA in lieu of firm definitions. Performance standards, Richey pointed out, have historically proved unenforceable. This verdict too may be reversed on the standing issue, as Richey was notably more inclined to recognize the standing of advocacy groups to sue on behalf of animals than any other federal judge. Appointed to the federal bench by former President Richard Nixon in 1971, Richey within less than two years presided over the first of the Watergate cases to go to trial. He was remembered in syndicated obituaries for verdicts that “advanced the rights of women but curtailed the powers of presidents,” but the Animal Welfare Institute argued in a special appreciation that he will be remembered longest “for his magnificent series of landmark decisions for the protection of animals,” also including an order to the National Marine Fisheries Service to enforce the Marine Mammal Protection Act to prevent U.S. boats from netting tuna “on dolphin.” Commenced one of Richey’s AWA verdicts, “At the outset, the Court shall state the following: This case involves animals, a subject that should be of great importance to all mankind.” William Collins, 67, father of Timothy Collins, the newly elected Member of Parliament for Westmorland and Lonsdale, died May 24 when he tried to pull his Labrador retriever from a pond that unknown to him had been electrified by a faulty pump, and was himself electrocuted. Collins owned and ran the Hobbs Cross equestrian center. Hans Suskind, 90, Holocaust survivor and cat rescuer, died May 17 in Okeechobee, Florida, leaving most of his $250,000 estate to the Okeechobee Rehabilitative Center for use in cat care. “Suskind had no family,” the Miami Herald remembered. “He fled Germany and Hollard before ending up in Indianapolis, where he was a door-to-door salesman and kept a cat. After he retired to Okeechobee, his cat died. But he got another, who started a small colony of felines on the bank of a canal where Suskind lived. When he could no longer care for himself and his cats, Suskind entered a nursing home. While he was there, a woman who cared for his property called animal control and had the cats picked up. They were put to sleep at the Okeechobee Rehabilitative Center.” Christina Bauer, 87, artist and jeweler, of Keene, New Hampshire, died in February 1996, noted for longtime service to the Monadnock Humane Society as a volunteer, board member, and frequent donor of paintings, auctioned to raise funds. Her biggest gift, however, her $111,000 estate, was only disclosed on May 1, 1997. Juan Alvarez, 19, a park worker in Yakima, Washington, drowned on May 31 while trying to rescue a duck who had become tangled in fishing line at the children’s fishing pond in Sportsman Park. Richard A. Baker, 18, of St. Peters, Missouri, was electrocuted on June 6, the day after he graduated from high school as class president, when he lifted a 30-foot aluminum irrigation pipe to free a rabbit who had become trapped inside and one end of it touched a power line. Mary McCarthy Dotts, 91, manager of the Delaware County SPCA for 50 years, assisted by her late husband Horace T. Dotts, died June 17 in Media, Pennsylvania. Horace Dotts died in 1976. |
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| Animal
Obituaries
Zooky , a husky mix who was once “the fastest dog ever,” died on June 11 at approximately age 11, from congestive heart failure that no longer responded to treatment. Adopted from the Southhold, Long Island animal shelter in July 1987, Zooky in her prime outraced every dog of any breed she ever met. On leash, she loped 25 miles with ease and begged for more. Yet she was never really fully domesticated, digging for water like a coyote and regarding small animals as potential prey—even newly arrived cats, though she would eventually accept them as family. She is missed by the entire ANIMAL PEOPLE entourage, but especially by her favorite cats Keeter and Voltaire, who spent many an evening kneading her and purring. |
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Millie, 12, former “first dog” of the U.S. as companion to George and Barbara Bush, 1989-1993, died May 19 in Kennebunkport, Maine. Given to the Bush family by Will and Sarah Farish, of Houston, at age 1, Millie became famous after birthing four puppies in the White House in March 1989. The Bushes kept one, named Ranger, until his 1993 death of cancer. Millie meanwhile wrote a 1990 bestselling memoir of “first family” life, ghosted by Barbara Bush, who donated royalties of $900,000 to the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy. |
Millie Bush, former First Dog |
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| Ralph, 3, police Malinois, was allegedly drowned on June 23 by burglary suspect Kwane Dwayne Edie, 17 who apparently waded into a small pond to evade pursuit by police in North Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Edie is charged with 12 criminal counts, including the murder of Ralph and five counts of attempted murder of human police officers. Paramedics and firefighters tried unsuccessfully to revive Ralph at the scene. | |
| Sugar, a dolphin believed to be 34 to 44 years old, died June 13 at the Sugarloaf Lodge, where she had lived since her capture with a companion, Loafer, in 1968. |  |
| Loafer soon died, but Sugar was acquired with the lodge by the Lloyd Good family in 1973, and was the first and last resident of the Sugarloaf Dolphin Sanctuary. Amid the acrimony surrounding the short-lived sanctuary, which tried to rehabilitate five other dolphins for release, 1994-1996, Sugar seemed to be the only participant who got along with all the other humans and animals involved. | |