On most days, the International Wildlife Museum sees a steady stream of visitors, drawn by coy marketing or morbid curiosity to this peculiar citadel in the Tucson Mountains west of town.
That was even more the case one crisp Saturday in mid-February, as the museum auspiciously celebrated its 25th anniversary with jaunty food trucks and a big birthday cake.
It was a notable achievement for a once-controversial institution, born amid protests over its inventory of dead animals and homage to the hunters who killed them.
But time waits for no crusade. Passions fade, as does memory. Yet the museum remains, stalwart in its hillside lair. Today, there seems nothing fragile about this edifice, constructed to resemble a French Foreign Legion post in Africa. You could even consider the design itself an architectural conceit, exalting those globe-trotting, well-heeled, big-game hunters of Safari Club International.
After all, it was the high-caliber gentlemen of the Safari Club who founded this museum and stocked its halls with their trophies. And it is their political pull that still marches forth, from the club’s headquarters right next door.
From here, the organization directs its campaigns to weaken the federal Endangered Species Act, to maximize hunting and motorized access across public lands, and to eliminate restrictions on the importation of trophies shot in foreign countries. Most recently, club officials showed up in court to urge the removal of polar bears from the federal list of threatened species.
In another case, the club challenged a federal court mandate that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service finally decide about extending protection to more than 750 dwindling species. Many of those creatures have lingered in limbo for years; some have since gone extinct.
In opposing the ruling, the Safari Club had hoped to retain hunting rights for at least three species, including the increasingly rare New England cottontail rabbit.
But you won’t learn much about this agenda from a tour of the International Wildlife Museum. Nor is such information shared on the museum’s website, which instead explains that its approximately 400 stuffed critters were donated by “various government agencies, wildlife rehabilitation centers, captive breeding programs, zoos and individuals.”
In truth, the lion’s share arrived via a clean shot, many of them delivered from the business end of SCI founder C.J. McElroy’s top-notch rifle.
“Originally, most of them were legally hunted by hunters, primarily McElroy,” says museum director Richard White. “These days we get them from fish and game agencies; we get them from hunters, or zoos where they have an animal that dies.”
It also appears that the Safari Club and its museum get a lot more than road kill from state agencies such as the Arizona Game and Fish Department. Their ties seem to run deep on everything from endangered species policy to the sponsorship of youth hunting programs.
The evening after the Game and Fish Commission’s March meeting in Sahuarita, for instance, the Safari Club hosted a commission junket to a youth hunting camp west of town. Participation in the camp was limited to kids registered through the club.
Pushing its agenda through ties with state officials is a time-honored Safari Club strategy, says Patrick Parenteau, an expert on wildlife protection policy at the Vermont Law School in South Royalton, Vt. “They have connections to the state departments of wildlife, because those departments have a vested interest in recreational hunting. They exert lot of influence behind the scenes.”
That sway is largely targeted at constraining the Endangered Species Act, Parenteau says. “They’re a user group and their concern is that the act restricts their ability to hunt and kill species, particularly charismatic mega-fauna.”
Meaning big, fascinating animals such as wolves and polar bears. “Their mission is to maintain hunt-able populations of every species on Earth,” Parenteau says, “and to challenge anyone who suggests that they shouldn’t be hunted.”
Neither Safari Club executive director Phil DeLone nor deputy director Nelson Freeman returned phone calls seeking comment.
But museum director White argues that the Safari Club is really all about protecting animals.
“We are conservationists as much as anybody else,” he says. “You can’t have sustainable use of animals if they’re all killed off. That is why we do so much in the conservation arena.”
The term “conservation” does see plenty of action in Safari Club promotional materials. On the website, for example, you’ll find a tab saying “Click here to help save lions.”
Make that click, and you’re taken to this less-than-tender plea: “What do deer and lions have in common? The antis want to stop the hunting of them and everything else.
“This year the antis are out to stop hunting of African lions,” it continues. “Is the whitetail deer next? Your donation to the African Lion Defense Fund helps SCI take the fight against the global assault on hunting to Africa and stop it there before it spreads worldwide.”
Conservation at its finest? Samantha Hagio thinks not. She’s wildlife protection policy manager for the Humane Society of the United States in Washington, D.C. “Rather than direct their conservation efforts to truly conserve the species, (the Safari Club) fought the listing of the polar bear on the endangered species list and would prefer to hunt them instead,” she writes in an email to the Weekly.
“They have also been large proponents of hunting three endangered antelope species—the dama gazelle, scimitar-horned oryx, and the addax—on captive hunting ranches, fenced enclosures where animals are stocked and shot for guaranteed trophies. These … antelope are considered critically endangered in their native habitat, and the scimitar-horned oryx is actually considered extinct in the wild.”
The Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity recently had its own court dust-up with the Safari Club, after club lawyers appealed that decision forcing the Fish and Wildlife Service to decide the fate of 700-plus species. The ruling had resulted from lawsuits by the center and WildEarth Guardians.
The Safari Club opposed that ruling “because they want to hunt some of those species,” says center executive director Kieran Suckling.
As stated in court, the club’s desired prey included the greater sage grouse, the lesser prairie chicken and the New England cottontail rabbit. To Suckling, even mentioning the cottontail reveals just how much ideology trumps common sense in the Safari Club’s alternate universe. “There are rabbits all over the country and they want to hunt the one species that’s down to 300 animals,” he says. “No one has hunted this rabbit in decades; no one has even seen this rabbit, it’s so rare.
“This isn’t really a hunting issue at all,” Suckling says. “To the extent that they can use hunting interests as an excuse to scuttle endangered species protection, that’s what is going on.”
This article appears in Mar 28 – Apr 3, 2013.
I have a tin-foil hat for you…
I like to refer to the “International Wildlife Museum” as the “International Dead Life Museum”. It’s nothing but a vanity piece from the Safari Club’s egotistical members.
Unfortunately, I doubt very much if this “investigative reporter” did much investigating. I seriously doubt if he visited the International Wildlife Museum, either for this article of during its 25th Birthday event in February. Certainly the picture he uses over his name is not a recent picture. Wouldn’t it have made sense, if he wanted to get the facts, that he’d have visited the museum, and asked to interview them, or get a tour? I’m sure they would have accommodated him. He also neglects to mention that most of the money for conservation activities comes from hunters – the Pittman-Robertson Act here in the US, and from hunting license fees in other countries. The P-R money in the US ranges between 177 and 324 million dollars per year for conservation activities. He seems also to be unaware of the recent article in the New York Times which detailed how the hunting of lions in Africa was actually contributing to their preservation as a species. All in all, a very lop-sided, biased article, and rather poor journalism, even if well written.
My photograph was taken during a tour of the museum on Saturday, March 23, 2013. Roughly 11 a.m. or so, as I recall. Perhaps the exhibit has changed since then. Can’t be sure.
As mentioned in the article, I attempted to interview both the director and deputy director, who unfortunately chose not to return my calls.
-Tim
Thanks, Tim. Safari Club is no defender of wildlife. In the 25 years that the “museum” has been open, Tucson grew and enough newcomers are here who have no idea that it’s a giant tax write off for zillionaires who like to shoot endangered animals.
In the interest of full disclosure let me first state that I am a hunter and a very proud member of Safari Club International. Now a quote from the greatest conservationist in American history:
“In a civilized and cultivated country wild animals only continue to exist at all when preserved by sportsmen. The excellent people who protest against all hunting, and consider sportsmen as enemies of wild life, are ignorant of the fact that in reality the genuine sportsman is by all odds the most important factor in keeping the larger and more valuable wild creatures from total extermination.”
President Theodore Roosevelt, 1905
Tim Vanderpool’s “editorial” on the International Wildlife Museum and Safari Club International is a complete embodiment of the ignorance President Roosevelt observed in his early 20th Century statement. Vanderpool states in a post above that he was unable to interview the director and deputy director of the museum to get their perspective but I doubt seriously anything they would have said could have changed his mind or altered his blatantly biased and inaccurate attack piece in any meaningful way. The poster adocus accurately addresses above the massive investment that hunters make for the benefit of wildlife and habitat conservation each year just in the U.S. But hunters also contribute significantly to the conservation of many species around the world, particularly Africa. Here’s a link to the recent article featured in the New York Times written by Alexander N. Songorwa, Director of Wildlife for the Tanzanian Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/18/opinion/…
In terms of bias by omission, Vanderpool neglected to state that the WWF (yes, the World Wildlife Fund) and 42 countries including Canada where polar bear hunting is a matter of survival for native Inuit populations, joined Safari Club at the recent CITES conference in Bangkok in defeating a ban on international polar bear trade. Below is a link to a recent article in National Geographic which accurately portrays the real threats to polar bears:
http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/20…
There are many other inaccuracies, errors and omissions in the article but hopefully I’ve made the point that legal hunting is in fact a protector of wildlife just as President Roosevelt made that point over a century ago. The International Wildlife Museum is dedicated to science-based sustainable use conservation and, to that end, serves an important mission in the Tucson community.
Kieran Suckling of the Center for Biological Diversity is one of the two most evil persons in AZ. He and his ilk feel that the ends justify the means even if it means lying and falsifying data. They need to be sued out of existence.
The other person that shares the most evil label along with him is Cathy Herrod of the Focus on the Family.
I am ashamed that both call Arizona home.
And Don_Coyote, that was a very excellent post.
Thank you ic69hunter. Too often we hunters ignore or dismiss the attacks of the anti-hunting zealots as meaningless and ignorant and don’t fight back. However, their words and actions may have consequences especially when they reach a largely uninformed public. Many of their well-intended actions to protect certain species can have unintended adverse consequences. Case in point is the issue of wolves. Wolves have no serious natural predators. Consequently, when afforded endangered species status they have re-populated quickly and now pose a threat to native species like big horn sheep and elk as well as livestock and humans in some western states.
One earlier poster refers to the International Wildlife Museum as the dead life museum. Using that logic to describe the museum, one could say the same about the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Unlike live animal zoos like Reid Park and the Desert Museum, facilities like the IWM allow people, especially families with children, to get a close-up view of the animals and even touch them where allowed to gain a hands on understanding of the animals’ natural features. And unlike zoos, natural history museums like IWM don’t hold live animals in captivity.
Love animals, touch them, hold them. And then kill them. Y’all have a very strange way of expressing and teaching your love for conservation.
I volunteered at IWM in 2002. I can tell you a couple of things.
For one, a fellow docent who shall remain nameless (to tell the truth, I can’t remember their name) told me that, contrary to what the museum publicly stated, there was indeed at least one animal that had been shot for the express purpose of being exhibited at IWM–some kind of antelope, I think.
But the real problem with IWM is that, unlike the picture that Don_Coyote paints, it was hardly educational. Compared to a museum like the American Museum of Natural History or the Academy of Natural Sciences, IWM’s educational potential was pitiful. When I started volunteering, the taxonomical information on many species was woefully out of date. Javelinas were described as being part of the pig family, when more recent research had placed them in a family of their own. Mongooses and civets were placed in the same family. A Chinese water deer was exhibited alongside an African jackal, leading people to believe that the two either inhabit the same area (they don’t) or are related in some way (they’re not). I realize that some of this sounds arcane, but it is an important part of science.
Looking at the bigger picture, many of IWM’s specimens were poorly exhibited, with little to no information in general on most of the species displayed in the “Red Room”. If memory serves, some animals did not even have their scientific names listed. Where’s the education in that?
The exhibits weren’t even very well planned. Here are the insects, here are the birds of the world, here are the ducks, here’s the Red Room, here’s Sheep Mountain, here’s the Sonoran Desert, and here’s the café. Voila. Nothing with a similar theme to, say, the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Biodiversity. As a matter of fact, the subject of biodiversity was not even explored. Neither was paleontology. Neither were marine animals, presumably because they cannot be shot. Whole orders of mammals were by and large ignored, such as bats, whales, monotremes, and many primates. And if it was extinct, it was of no interest. How will this give kids a comprehensive view of the natural world?
So tell me how educational and valuable IWM is. What can you expect in a state whose AIMS science test relies more heavily on reading comprehension and spatial math skills than real scientific knowledge?
Correction: There is a woolly mammoth (or replica thereof) on display at IWM, so what I stated earlier about their disinterest in extinct species is not entirely true. But still, what do they have to say about prehistoric animals in general and the current theory of the present-day sixth extinction? Without these issues, the puzzle of information on natural history is incomplete.