He even has a shopping list: He has already bagged a stuffed elephant. And, with the help of Draper trophy hunter Fred Morris, he now has his own rare white rhino.
Next, the vertebrates collection manager for Brigham Young University's Monte L. Bean Life Science Museum wants a real hippo, an endangered black rhino and a "life-sized" giraffe to complete his water-hole diorama. The list goes on and on.
Both Morris and Skidmore say their role in the African circle of life is for a good cause: education and conservation. The $30,000 Morris paid for his rhino hunting tag goes back to Mkuze National Park in South Africa, the protected home of the rhino. Skidmore gets one more on his list of megafauna - "We don't have the money to buy one," he says. And Utah children can watch the dead beast gather dust for years to come. It's education and conservation in its most lifeless form.
Museum Director Larry St. Clair told my colleague Brian Maffly that displaying carcasses is better than using film or pictures because the stretched and stuffed skin will be set "in the context of a natural history story." The university sent Morris back to get the rhino's skull to enhance the "scientific value of the specimen."
I thought this method of filling a natural history museum - recruiting rich men who like to shoot wild things, stuff their kills and donate them - peaked a century ago. Apparently not. While hunting and taxidermy offend modern sensibilities about endangered animals, they still are accepted museum practices. But some use the tools of the trade more than others.
"Museums are very careful about how they decide what they're going to be displaying and what stories they're going to be telling with their collections," says Sarah George, director of the Utah Natural History Museum at the University of Utah. "We're a lot more selective today than in times past."
To be fair, the U. museum has stuffed dead animals too - a collection of moldering mule deer, a spray of birds from Farmington Bay and a scene of Boulder Mountain carnivores, including a bear and bobcat. Those displays are 30 to 40 years old; the bobcat was donated by state wildlife officers.
George says the university limits its collecting to animals or plants involved in research or education programs. Right now, scientists are conducting a conservation study in the Philippines and re-collecting mammals and plants from the West to study chromosomal changes. University scientists have no plans to venture into Africa.
"We focus on Utah," George says.
That's one way to avoid the mess BYU has stepped in.
On Monday, the Humane Society of the United States threw the words of the university's namesake back at museum managers, noting leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have taught that animals should be treated with "kindness and respect."
"University museums should not serve as a repository for the spoils of the hunt by wealthy museum benefactors," wrote Wayne Pacelle, Humane Society president.
In a church magazine article 30 years ago, former church President Spencer W. Kimball cautioned against the "unnecessary shedding of blood and destruction of life . . . this principle should extend not only to the bird life but to the life of all animals." He called such destruction "wicked."
Would this rhinoceros qualify?
walsh@sltrib.com
