The Bear Necessities If you look at me with sadness, fair enough. I’m a fully mounted young North American Black bear, part of a bigger collection (administered by the Department of Conservation) of items confiscated at New Zealand’s border under the Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. The museum has become the custodian of many of these examples of human cruelty and strangeness. There is a lot of ivory, snake and scorpion wine, tinned whale meat, crocodile oil (whatever that is!), tiger bone, turtle shells, lion and leopard skins and, of course, some elephant’s foot umbrella stands. Many of the animals probably met an untimely end for no good purpose. But I was probably shot legally – the taxidermy is of too high a standard to be from the black market. Maybe I simply didn’t have the correct paperwork to be imported to New Zealand. Whatever my story, the trade in endangered species, alive and dead, still flourishes, and the Museum becomes home to the likes of me because the DOC warehouses keep filling up with what they confiscate.
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Join Dr Tom Trnski, Research Manager and John Early, Curator of Entomology and get closer to the stories, tales and historical information for this unique collection of objects.
Click to listen or
to save to your computer or media player - right click link and select "Save Target As" (3.14 mb). Download before you visit the Museum.
Download the Audio Tour Transcript (pdf 152kb) |
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Explore Secrets Revealed objects and listen to their stories |
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