Carol Sonnex worked tirelessly to help animals with both the Capital Regional District and for the volunteer group Greater Victoria Animal Crusaders.
Advocate worked on the side of animals
BY JIM GIBSON Times Colonist staff
Carol Sonnex danced with dogs. Literally, according to Carol Bond, a volunteer at the Capital Regional District pound where Sonnex was assistant kennel master for almost the past three years.
Sonnex had a knack that made the most fearful and the most fearsome of dogs wag their tails like future family pets. “It was really hard to tell if they were adoptable,” Bond says.
Sonnex wanted every animal to find a home. If no one, for example, wanted a scruffy old tom missing an ear, Sonnex would just as likely take it home with her to Colwood. When the 51-year-old died suddenly last month, she had two dogs and five cats of her own.
Both Sonnex and Bond set up the Victoria Adoptables website for pets. Whenever there was a dog Sonnex thought adoptable, she would expect Bond to drop everything at home and rush over to take its picture for the website. Sonnex’s attitude was: “This is important. This is a priority.”
She wasn’t above lobbying even her boss, CRD bylaw chief Don Brown, to take home a pet.
“You need a dog,” she would tell him. A former dog owner, Brown resisted, insisting he already had pets, Buzz and Angelina, the hummingbirds who, when their feeder is empty, tap on his window.
Sonnex’s concern extended beyond domestic animals. Pamela Saddler, a colleague from the Greater Victoria Animal Crusaders, remembers Sonnex spending hours with a Q-tip removing dust from the eyes and skin of a tree frog she rescued from a blasting site.
When Brown hired Sonnex, the single mother of now 13-year-old twins was on social assistance. He had dealt with her for several years through her animal advocacy work with the Crusaders. He had no regrets hiring her. She did a good job in the kennels and organizing the volunteer dog-walkers.
“We didn’t always agree with certain animals,” he adds, describing Sonnex as “very convincing at changing people to her way of thinking.”
Sonnex had a strong personality, agrees Saddler. “She did what was right for the animal, and if it ticked someone off, then too bad.”
Friends know little about her life before Victoria. Sonnex told them she was born in Vancouver, where her father was in management at a downtown hotel. It was through her father that she met singer Neil Diamond, then a hotel guest. She was a big fan. His Cracklin’ Rosie and Sweet Caroline played at her memorial service earlier this month at the Juan de Fuca picnic shelter.
Sonnex came from an animal-loving household. Early in life, she began bringing home strays. Her father never knew what he would encounter when opening the bathroom door — once even finding a duck in the tub.
She finished high school at 16 and by 18 graduated from a hotel-management course. She worked in the service industry, mentioning that at one time she managed a chain family restaurant and a dress shop popular with television people. Later she moved to Nanaimo, where the father of her twins died in a fall from a roof soon after they were born. She then went to Lake Cowichan where she had cousins, her only family apart from her twins. When her children were approaching kindergarten age, she moved to Victoria, wanting to expose them to experiences such as the Nutcracker ballet at Christmas and meals at The Empress. “She lived from paycheque to paycheque,” says Brown. Nonetheless, she would save up for these excursions to give her children a taste of the life she had had growing up. Her children dressed appropriately for these outings, even if Sonnex went without new clothes herself. She was fiercely proud of her children — like a mother bear with her cubs, remembers Bond.
Sonnex was a lifelong activist who recalled being fire-hosed off the steps of Vancouver city hall during an anti-war protest. More recently, her activism mostly took the form of letters-to-the editor to Island and Lower Mainland papers. Despite her critical advocacy, she had a sense of humour and a memorable laugh. “When she found something funny, you’d hear about it across the room,” says Bond. A tiny woman barely five feet tall, Sonnex has left big shoes to fill at the Crusaders, according to Saddler. Although not a founding member of the 33-year-old non-profit organization, Sonnex had become the driving force behind it.
“When people thought of GVAC they thought Carol Sonnex and when they thought of Carol Sonnex they thought GVAC,” Bond says. Last year, Sonnex initiated the group’s monthly veterinary clinics for street pets. She also worked with a women’s shelter to foster any pets of its clients. Sonnex handled the crusaders’ phone lines, often receiving 40 calls a day about animals in distress or needing medical care their owners couldn’t afford. Hers might well have been the toughest job at the volunteer organization, Saddler says. The group’s rescue work can be upsetting. “When I didn’t want to do it anymore, she motivated me,” says Saddler.
Many of her colleagues talked to Sonnex daily. Yet, until recently, they were unaware of her debilitating stress from being a full-time employee, non-stop volunteer and single mom without an extended family.
“That’s what saddens me. Was she in pain all that time?” wonders Saddler.