Cautionary Tales
Listen to my story
For a number of years, the Childrens Discovery Centre (CDC) - on behalf of Auckland Museum, has had a most cordial relationship with the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) branch of the Department Of Conservation (DOC).
As an educational facility of some standing and reputation we are granted the privilege of being a repository for relevant object confiscated at NZ borders.
This has meant that we are in custodial possession of what may be the finest collection of ivory in NZ, an array of animal skins including wolf, lion, leopard. We have a large collection of snake and scorpion wine, tinned whale meat, crocodile oil, tiger bone plasters, turtle shells, a elephant foot umbrella stand and many, many more.
Most of these items have not yet been displayed and are held in CDC storage.
We have very recently been offered a fully mounted brown bear, which is currently causing a small accessioning head ache, but can be acquired with pretty short notice. Basically DOC do not have room to store or staff to manage these objects and regularly incinerate them if we don’t put our hands up.
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