One of the first times Cindy Adams went to a board meeting of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, tempers flared.

The problem wasn’t the long-debated horse carriage issue. Nor was it how to prevent animals from being euthanized; the planning of the annual Bergh Ball, the organization’s biggest fund-raiser; or how to spend the war chest.

The issue was Ms. Adams’s hat. Specifically, that it was fur. “It was dumb,” Ms. Adams said last week of her sartorial miscalculation. “I shouldn’t have done it.”

But over the next couple of years, as Ms. Adams continued to serve on the board, dressed in a more politically correct manner, she was certainly an energetic patron. She plugged the A.S.P.C.A. relentlessly in her column in The New York Post; started an annual blessing of the animals at Christ Church on Park Avenue; and arranged a meeting between Christine Quinn, the City Council speaker, and A.S.P.C.A. executives, who’d had a tough time getting traction with elected officials.