![]() China also donated a mounted giant panda. An African elephant that was mounted after Brockhouse’s death added to the display. The natural history museum that bore Delbridge’s name opened in 1984. Delbridge snapped up the collection and donated it to the city. When the hardware store closed, Brockhouse’s friend C.J. But by the time he died in 1978, international laws and the Endangered Species Act were cracking down, as there was a growing concern that hunters were pushing some exotic animals to the brink of extinction. If you see a head poppin’– one or two miles away – wherever it may be, you start shootin’,” one passage reads.īrockhouse proudly displayed some of his prize kills at his store, West Sioux Hardware. “For walrus, you have to go out and travel the sea. It wasn’t this messy 80 years ago, when a Sioux Falls businessman embarked upon a series of international hunting expeditions chronicled in his eponymous book, “A True Safari Hunter: Henry Brockhouse.” But state law stipulates that exhibits like this must remain within the state. Under federal law, they could be given to another museum. The Endangered Species Act protects animals even in death, so the collection can’t be sold. But even if they can convince the town to get rid of the animals, they’ll have to navigate a web of federal and state laws to do so. The mayor and zoo officials believe reason and safety are on their side. Most institutions with older collections take safety protocols, like using special vacuums and wearing personal protective equipment while cleaning the taxidermy, said Gretchen Anderson, a conservator at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.īut for Sioux Falls, there is “there is no acceptable level of risk when you are dealing with a known carcinogen,” City Attorney Dave Pfeifle told reporters last week. “Just don’t lick the taxidermy,” said Fran Ritchie, the chair of the conservation committee of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections. The arsenic, he adds, is a heavy metal, not something that wafts through the air. These were sculptures,” said John Janelli, a former president of the National Taxidermists Association, likening destroying them to scraping off the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. They are buoyed by experts who say the arsenic risk is overblown, the mounts nothing short of art. Some locals who grew up around the menagerie, which used to fill a hardware store, are fighting the mayor and zoo officials to keep the collection while marshaling support online and in the Sioux Falls City Council.
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