The Humane Society of the United States on Monday sent Y. officials a letter demanding they block the specimen from being mounted at the Y.'s Monte L. Bean Life Science Museum, as well as future museum acquisitions through trophy hunting.
"Killing animals for museum exhibition is not acceptable in our day, especially when the target is one of the rarest large mammals in the world," Humane Society President Wayne Pacelle wrote Y. president Cecil Samuelson Monday in a letter that invoked the words of BYU's namesake church leader.
"The founders of the Church of Latter Day Saints taught that animals should be treated with kindness and respect, and this action is at odds with the principles of compassionate care of animals," he said.
Bean officials recruited museum benefactor Fred Morris of Draper last year to hunt a rhino at South Africa's Mkuze National Park. The park sells the rights to hunt excess rhinos to finance its conservation efforts, officials said.
Bean officials last week expressed hopes to acquire a black rhino, a hippopotamus and a giraffe for future exhibits.
Trophy-hunted wildlife once poured into the nation's natural history museums, but that was an era when the public had yet to appreciate the gravity of wildlife extinction, especially in far-away lands.
"Museums can obtain specimens through other means-such as through specimen exchange with other museums-rather than asking hunters to kill wild animals solely for the purpose of public display," Pacelle wrote in his letter to BYU. "While this practice was common a century ago, it is no longer common and most reputable museums pursue other strategies for obtaining specimens."
The Bean's plan is to mount the rhino skin on an artificial form as part of an ongoing taxidermy exhibit at the museum through January and later add the mount to a waterhole diorama. In that exhibit, the rhino would join an elephant that was also obtained by a modern hunter. But the Humane Society called on the Y. to put an end to these plans.
"Stuffed and mounted hunting trophies have limited educational value and have no value to scientific research," Pacelle wrote. "Educational and research values should form the foundation of university museum donation policies; university museums should not serve as a repository for the spoils of the hunt by wealthy museum benefactors."
The Humane Society is specifically asking the Y. to suspend the display of the rhino and future acquisitions from hunting, conduct an investigation into how Morris was recruited to kill the animal, provide a public accounting, and adopt policies that address the ethical issues raised in by the Bean's rhino controversy.
