ANIMAL LIFE Magazine. A British publication from the early 1960s

 

In Britain in the early 1960s two magazines about animals appeared from different publishers within two months. The second of these was ANIMALS with the first issue in January 1963. I covered that in my article here. The first to appear was ANIMAL LIFE in September 1962 as a monthly. It was published by City Magazines.

A problem with searching for information on or copies of a magazine called Animal Life is that there have been a number of magazines published over the years in Britain, the USA and elsewhere with that name. For example I have found one published in the early 1950s at least by St Francis Publishing Company in London. The current magazine of the RSPCA is also called Animal Life. Also adding to the confusion is Purnell’s Encyclopedia Of Animal Life Magazine sold between 1968 and 1970 in weekly parts. In the USA, an Animal Life began publication in December 1953.

We know that ANIMAL LIFE was first published in September 1962 but I have been unable to find any information on when publication ended. The latest issue I have found is No 43 of March 1966. Were there any more? There is erroneous information out there on the length of the magazine’s run. Booksellers I have found are often the source of incorrect information; one claims to be selling a complete run of the magazine with the final issue was in April 1964. The British Library shows the start date as 1962 but provides no end date for its holding. My guess is that production ended some time in 1966. It had clearly gone by 1968 because the Purnell weekly parts publication would surely not have risked confusion with a magazine on the market with the same title.

Although ANIMAL LIFE was a British magazine it clearly, to judge by the letters and queries, had wide international sales in the English-speaking world, USA, Canada, Australia, South Africa, for example.

City Magazines was founded in 1955 and seems to be remembered as a publisher of comics, adult, like Blighty, as well as children’s. I have found no information on its ownership and publication of ANIMAL LIFE.

The size, style and content of ANIMAL LIFE show great similarities with the 1936-41 magazine, a joint venture of Odhams Press and the Zoological Society of London, called variously over its short life, Zoo, Zoo and Animal Magazine and, finally, Animal and Zoo Magazine.

Throughout and particularly in the early issues many of the articles were by French authors, suggesting the publisher had some arrangement with a magazine publisher in France. British and other others  had few but then an increasing number of articles in each issue. Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald (1900-1981), a well-known author on country matters, arrived on the scene in March 1963 to answer queries and correspondence from readers; he had an article in the magazine a few months earlier. There is no indication that I have been able to find on who edited the magazine.

City Magazines recruited four patrons, all well-known in Britain, particularly to television viewers, at the time:

Aubrey Buxton (later Baron Buxton of Alsa, 1918 –2009), a director of Anglia television and founder of the television series Survival which more than made the BBC run for its money.

Bernhard Grzimek (1909 –1987) was director of Frankfurt Zoo and well-known for his work with his son, Michael, in the Serengeti and the film Serengeti Shall Not Die of 1959. His son was killed in a plane he was flying in the same year.

Guy Mountfort (1905-2003) was a well-known amateur ornithologist, author (A Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe) and conservationist. We was one of the founders of the World Wildlife Fund in 1961.

Reginald Greed (1906-1974) was director of Bristol Zoo.

The Patrons provided articles from time to time.

Some of the articles have historical interest and I will touch on a few in further articles, including a latter I remembered having written but had never seen in print. Zoo historians can find useful snippets of information there—and the advertisements are worth a look. The new Ford Consul Classic 1½ litre for £722.17.9d tax paid.

Buying both ANIMALS (then weekly) and ANIMAL LIFE  (monthly) was not cheap: at today’s prices  nearly £13 per month.

Does anybody have more information on ANIMAL LIFE magazine, particularly anything after March 1966?

UPDATED 17 October 2024

Two Wandering Hedgehogs

‘There’s a hedgehog by the road’. ‘Just opposite the house’. They were the shouts from the bedroom immediately before we all went to see what was going on. There—in the middle of the day—was a young but well-grown hedgehog, these days called the West European Hedgehog (Erinaceus europaeus). I kept enough hedgehogs in the 1950s and early 60s to know that a hedgehog out by day is in trouble. There was a great deal of local building and road works during that week and we suspect their shelter had been disturbed. It was in a dangerous position by a road and with only an open small school field and a busy road in the other direction. The house’s chief animal wrangler—not me—donned her gloves and soon had the beast in a container. Hedgehogs if disturbed by day are hungry and so it was offered the few earthworms to be found but a profusion of large slugs from the garden. These it attacked with a great deal of slurping, wiping off slime and chewing with enthusiasm. We are fortunate in having a belt of woodland behind the house, well inhabited by hedgehogs, including in all probability the parents of this one. We released it with even more slugs which again it devoured before trundling off into the undergrowth. No sooner had we done that than another one was spotted in the same spot as the first. It too received a quick meal of slugs and was sent on its way.

With hedgehogs having declined in the UK it was a delight to see that we still have a breeding population. We have picked on a trail camera by night but not in the numbers we had around 20 or 30 years ago. They are relatively long lived and it does take a while for a relict population to die out if breeding ceases.

What surprised us was the lack of external parasites. When we or the long-gone dog encountered hedgehogs decades ago they were crawling with fleas and often had a number of ticks. Four-year old grand-daughter visiting from Hong Kong was thus able to see and stroke a hedgehog for the first time. Which reminds me. I must put the trail camera out to see if we pick them up.

Under the school fence is not a good place for a Hedgehog to be in the middle
of the day

Off into the woods

Salt Glands Revisited. The tragic story of an early salt-gland researcher and his family

Fifty years ago the late Jim Linzell and I were writing our monograph, Salt Glands in Birds and Reptiles, for the Physiological Society's Monograph Series; it was published in May 1975. In this series I revisit some of the topics and people who followed up the discovery of salt glands in birds by Knut Schmidt-Nielsen.

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Larry Zane McFarland
from Find a Grave

As well as Hubert and Mable Frings and the albatrosses of Midway (here) others followed up the discovery of salt glands by seeing which other species had them and how they worked. One was Larry Zane McFarland of the Department of Veterinary Anatomy at the University of California at Davis. He had a series of short notes in Nature in the late 1950s and 1960s (when that journal published letters of wide-ranging and topical interest). Amongst them was one which confirmed and extended the finding in albatrosses that ‘excitement’ induced or enhanced secretion. He worked on gulls and when producing secretion in response to a salt load found that light or sound increased the rate. The rapidity of response to shining a light at the birds or playing ‘individual notes, chords or a melody’ suggests the involvement of higher centres in the brain modulating the secretory reflex. McFarland described the musical instrument he played to the birds as a ‘quittar’, an old English word still used apparently and particularly in the USA for ‘guitar’.

In 1964 McFarland also introduced use of the ‘minimal stimulatory load’, the quantity of salt that needs to be introduced into the blood circulation in order to turn the salt glands on. That enable me to investigate the short-term and medium-term stimulatory and inhibitory effects of hormones and drugs on salt-gland secretion. 

Only after publication of our Salt Glands in Birds and Reptiles did I hear what had happened. I was at a conference in the USA, talking to someone who had worked at the vet school at Davis. I casually mentioned that McFarland, whom I had been quoting in the book, worked there. I was taken aback by the response that he was a dreadful man who had killed his wife and family, and then himself. And that is all I knew until a couple of weeks ago.

from Peaker & Linzell 1975

Larry Zane McFarland was born on 16 December 1930 in Des Moines, Iowa. There he attended Roosevelt High School. Before the veterinary course at Davis he was a student at Berkeley. He was known as a very hard worker. To fund his studies he worked a 40-hour week on night shifts.

He was awarded the DVM degree in 1956 and a PhD in 1960. At Davis he worked his way up to become chairman of the veterinary anatomy department, where he was remembered as an excellent teacher, in addition to doing research on a variety of subjects.

Hard working as he was, a colleague noted: ‘He used to preach to us that he did not expect us to devote too much extra time at the university, that it should go to our families. His devotion to his family was complete and total’.

McFarland had bought a large house with land in Davis. And it was there on 8 April 1972, that firemen found the bodies of McFarland, his wife Sonia, and their three children, Michael (14), Kenneth (10) and Nina (9), in the burning building. The two boys and McFarland had been shot while Sonia and Nina had been bludgeoned to death. A note was found in his vehicle containing the statement, ‘I am taking the life of myself and my family in the belief that a family should remain together in life or in death”.

The proximate cause of his behaviour that night seems to have been a phone call from his wife earlier in the day (7 April). Unbeknownst to most of his colleagues Larry and Sonia had become estranged, with Larry having lived in a nearby apartment for several months. 

Although a colleague in the department described McFarland as outgoing in personality he said that McFarland, like his colleagues, ‘led a "lonely existence" because of a "peer contact-peer judgment system of promotion" on university campuses. This "lonely existence" prevented any of his associates from detecting that something was going wrong. He said the problems McFarland was experiencing may have been deliberately kept secret as "a factor of his life which might have affected our opinion of him and influenced our decisions regarding his possible advancement”. The work situation common to many campuses, he said, "prohibits human exchange of human concern of one man for another”’.

The physical ramifications of McFarland’s actions that night, were evident in Davis for decades. The house McFarland had bought was the 15-room Chiles Mansion, built in 1902, which also had a large barn and other outbuildings on five acres. The house was gutted by the fire which McFarland had started with petrol in four or five places.

After a legal battle, Sonia’s mother gained the right to go against Larry’s wishes for the family to be buried together and she also gained possession of the property. The remains of the house were left untouched until McFarland’s mother-in-law died in 2006, aged 98. The barn was used a livery stable and tales can be found on the internet of the place being haunted, with horse owners reporting mysterious movements of the animals and the sighting of ephemeral white figures. The estate was sold to developers for $4.2M in the late 2000s and is now the site of 90-odd new houses on ‘Chiles Ranch’.

Thus behind the bland list of references, McFarland (1964) etc, at the end our of book, and in other papers, there is nothing that prepares anybody for the utter horror of McFarland’s actions in April 1972. All we can do is remember that Michael would now have been 66, Kenneth 62, and Nina 61.

The Argus, Fremont, California

Grey-headed Kingfisher: a colour plate from 1960

In the days when colour printing was extremely expensive, the Avicultural Society had special appeals for funds to support the appearance in Avicultural Magazine of the occasional colour plate. A well-known bird artist was then commissioned. Although the whole run of the Society’s magazines can be found online, the plates rarely see the light of day. Therefore I decided to show one, now and again, on this site. This is the 20th in the series.

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The artist for this plate was Chloe Elizabeth Talbot Kelly (born 1927) who went on to illustrate a number of field guides. Her paintings of birds appear in art sales. She began painting in 1945 at the Natural History Museum in London.

The article accompanying the plate was written by Alan Reece Longhurst (1925-2023). He was a well-known oceanographer and expert on plankton communities who spent a short time working in fisheries in New Zealand. He was born in Plymouth and after four years in the army he returned to London and university life. He graduated in entomology and then proceeded to a PhD on the ecology of notostracans. Fisheries research in West Africa then followed (with the short period in New Zealand in the middle). Spells in Plymouth and the USA were followed by a career in Canada. He became Director-General of the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Nova Scotia.

The Grey-headed Kingfisher (Halcyon leucocephala) is widely distributed in Africa. Like many kingfishers it does not live up to its name. It is terrestrial, never diving for aquatic prey, feeding on Insects, other invertebrates, mice; lizards, frogs etc.. It does dive into water but only to bathe. 

Avicultural Magazine 66, 1960