Mexico’s environmental protection agency seized a nearly
full-grown jaguar that had been walked on a leash in a park in the city
of Culiacan, considered the nation’s capital of drug trafficking.
The Associated Press
Published Thursday, August 3, 2017 2:11PM EDT
MEXICO CITY -- Mexico's environmental protection agency seized a nearly
full-grown jaguar that had been walked on a leash in a park in the city
of Culiacan, considered the nation's capital of drug trafficking.
The agency said Wednesday that while the animal appeared healthy and
had papers, it was being held in inadequate conditions -- a fenced area
about the size of a small dog run.
Photos posted on social media showed a young woman walking the cat on a leash.
In June, photos circulated in Culiacan of a tiger being driven in a
pickup truck. And in January, authorities found a tiger cub on the
streets of a nearby city.
Mexican drug traffickers have been known to keep big cats, though there's no evidence the jaguar's owner had any criminal ties.
A group of artists to see the Louis Agassiz Fuertes collection of exquisite paintings and illustrations from the 1926 Field Museum-Chicago Daily News Abyssinian Expedition.
Requests have also included: viewing a handwritten catalog detailing the largest collection of Inca antiquities held outside Peru, and information about a map that’s been long-held in the family and cherished and was once produced by the Museum to accompany the Malvina Hoffman exhibition.
Disappointment coexists with possibility, and it is not one-sided. At times, we have to politely but firmly turn away hopeful inquiries from the public as well as researchers asking if the Museum not only documented, but also kept every possible item from the World’s Columbian Exposition (and beyond, but particularly the WCE). (No, the Museum did not have, nor ever did have, the following items, which are all actual requests for information and viewing: the first electric chair; a dress made entirely of glass; images and records of a freak show.) Conversely, Museum staff are sometimes disappointed when a lead on a possible donation goes cold, as in the recent case of an offer of lantern slides from the World’s Columbian Exposition that never materialized.
Ultimately, as Museum staff, our purpose is to continue to carry the torch of knowledge already extracted and exposed, while also forging ahead with new research and discovery. In this work, sometimes it feels like we commune with the dead, but more often than not we are turning over rocks that reveal nothing. As much as we’d like them to, and much as the public asks it of us, the photos and objects cannot talk back to us. And so, on Members’ Nights, as well as year round, we bring volumes from the climate controlled Rare Book Room or objects from the darkness within drawers, and lovingly place them on a book pillow or under a vitrine or out in the open for display, and begin the work of trying to extract and share meaning, context, and truth. Because, ultimately, these rare books, shells, insects, mammals, and photos of unknowable, beautiful strangers—they belong to us all. They tell the stories of our planet as well as our humanity—at times heroic and other times less so. And as staff, we’re here for a short time in a long line as their caretakers.
Gretchen Rings is a reference & interlibrary loan librarian.
