The C.A.S.H. Courier Newsletter

PO Box 275, Burlington IN 46915, USA, Tel: 765-566-3800, www.icrc.org

Hope Ryden Remembers CeAnn Lambert

I heard about CeAnn long before I met her in person. One of her admirers wrote to me after reading my then newly published book on coyotes (God’s Dog) and suggested that she and I should get to know one another.

That was 35 years ago and I am grateful for his suggestion, which resulted in such a long and beautiful friendship. For many of those years we were only pen and phone pals, supporting one another’s efforts on behalf of the much maligned and misunderstood animal that we both loved and admired.

But in later years I made it my goal to meet her in person and I drove to Indiana to see her. And what a joy it was.

CeAnn’s energy and dedication to the coyote was unlimited, and her on-site animals provided her with insights unmatched by anybody I know. And how she loved and understood each coyote that was delivered to her care. Each of these un-releasable animals was respected and treated by her as the individual being that each was born to be and its individual needs were met to the best of her ability to do so.

Since they were doomed to remain captives, she had to devise the best way to create happy environments for them and this she understood required that she pair them up——- find an appropriate mate for each of the animals that was brought to her.

Of course it was required by the state that they all be altered so as not to produce more captive coyotes, but CeAnn knew that wouldn’t stop them from bonding to a mate. She knew that this animal bonds with its mate for life and that the short annual mating season is not the reason for their loyalty to each other.

And so she paired them up in separate pens, and as the years passed she enjoyed seeing how they cared for their mates and howled together and groomed one another, and thrived on the road-killed deer carcasses that she found and dragged to their pens —- a natural food that provided them with their needs. And CeAnn mourned that she could not do the one thing they needed. She could not grant them freedom.

And more coyotes were brought to her and she took them all in and more pens were built.

And still she had time and energy to work for the wild coyotes that were living free – to battle for them at state hearings and to fight against the dreadful sport of placing them in pens for the purpose of training dogs how to kill them. And it was while she battled the forces that were intent on making this “coyote penning” a sport that she became ill. Yet no one suspected that CeAnn, while giving her all to this cause, was battling cancer.

Her death came quickly and shocked the many, many people who loved her.

I cannot find words to say how much I miss her. She had such empathy. She was selfless in her caring, and she was fun and joyous. CeAnn was the best person I ever knew.

Hope Ryden is a well-known naturalist and author of 23 books. Her behavioral findings have been published in National Geographic, Smithsonian, and Audubon magazine, and her books have been translated into German, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Dutch, Spanish, Italian and Russian. She is the author of God’s Dog: A Celebration of the North American Coyote. Please see the C.A.S.H. catalog to order a copy of God’s Dog.

Holly Hadoc is a wildlife rehabilitator and new president of the Indiana Coyote Rescue Center.