This is so dishonest and disgusting on so many levels, I hardly know where to begin! Here's the scam:
...trophies shot on expedition or safari to places such as South Africa, Mongolia and game-hunting parks in Texas... they remain surprisingly valuable to one group in particular -- the hunters who shot them and had them preserved...
Often appraised for many times their market value, the trophies can yield hefty income tax deductions if nonprofit organizations agree to accept them as charitable gifts.
That's right, our tax dollars are paying for wealthy men and women's hunting trips. And groups promoting this aren't at all shy about it either. From a brochure:
"Hunt for Free," goes on to say: "If you write and tell us where you are going, we'll suggest what extra animals to take and donate for tax savings. We'll then send you a written guarantee we have a museum to accept them upon your return."
Now you might be thinking, a museum? Well, there are museums and then there are museums...take the
Wyobraska Wildlife Museum.In all, there were more than 800 big-game and exotic animals piled into an old railroad car behind the Wyobraska Wildlife Museum, a modest and lightly visited facility here, far from any population center. It was just one of four large containers packed with animal mounts and skins --
You see, the purpose of this museum isn't for the public to visit and enjoy (although why looking at dead animals would be enjoyable is beyond me). It's a holding station of sorts...a place to store the trophies until they can find a non-profit organization to accept them as a donation, thereby making that hefty tax deduction possible. And how do they appraise the worth of these trophies?
What makes charitable giving so popular with big-game hunters is that their trophies are being appraised at top dollar, often using a donor-friendly "cost of replacement" method that estimates how much a hunter would have to pay to track down the same quarry again.
But maybe I'm being too hard on these people...after all, they're only performing a public service.
The public benefits, hunting advocates say, because visitors get to see animals they would otherwise never encounter.
Please stop my eyes from rolling right out of my head! Yes, I can see the benefit of us paying for the hunting of endangered animals into extinction, on the off chance that we someday end up in the alley behind the
Wyobraska Wildlife Museum... </sarcasm>
I'm glad to see that the Senate Finance Committee is going to be investigating this, although I can't believe it's taken this long to raise any red flags or that there is apparently no record of how much we are being ripped off each year.
Nobody knows how many trophy mounts are donated yearly to nonprofit collections, or how much tax revenue is being lost to the charitable deductions. But at the Wyobraska museum, the floodgates are open wide.
Records show that in 2000, Wyobraska took in mounts worth $1.4 million. In 2004, the museum's curator said, the value of donations grew to more than $5 million