Chris Fisher

Chris Fisher, a respected and beloved advocate for animals, died this week at his home in Agonès, France. For many years he endured heart disease and nearly died from it on at least one other occasion. A vegan of many years, his family tragically endured a history of heart disease, which took his father and brother. My first meeting with Chris was at the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection in the mid-1980s. He led the rescue of the BUAV from a well-intended but misguided group of activists in one of those regrettable but sometimes necessary internal battles prevalent in social movements. His leadership at the BUAV demonstrated tenacity and vision. He utilized the same skills when he later worked as an independent consultant with other animal welfare groups. Several years ago, he relocated to the Montpellier region in France and became involved with the local arts scene and cared for feral cats, who, he made sure, were spayed and neutered. Like most of us who care passionately about the world but want to see things improved, his tenaciousness sometimes became a tendency to be stubborn and his vision a refusal to be told what he should be doing to look after himself. Regardless of these traits, his friends loved him greatly and, most likely, because of them. I hadn’t seen Chris in more than 22 years. We arranged to meet for lunch the day after he arrived in London. But it turned out that after flying in from France he was found unconscious at Kings Cross Station and taken to the nearby University College Hospital. Instead of a slow, lazy lunch with Chris consisting of reminisces and catch-ups, Anthony Lawrence and I went that afternoon to UCH’s Intensive Care where he was conscious, smiling and chatting but clearly unwell. For example, he had no short-term memory and repeatedly asked me if I was still living in the USA without recalling that I had just told him I wasn’t. He also thought he was still in France. In the following days, he stayed with Anthony and Sally Beggs in what turned out to be his final visit to England. It consisted of him saying goodbye to London and his friends, who, like me, had the good fortune to see him one more time. The friends who were robbed of their last good-byes feel their grief with equal intensity.