At the National Wildlife Property Repository, only the imagination runs wild. Everything else is dead and lies on the crowded shelves of this warehouse outside Denver.
There's a Hartmann's mountain zebra, its hide a rifle case -- the souvenir of a safari to southern Africa.
Some deaths here, however, defy imagining -- like that of the orangutan, whose skull, carved with decorative swirls and lightning bolts
Held for educational purposes, future undercover operations and possible use by the Smithsonian or other museums, the items in this building represent, in the words of one agent, nothing less than "the evil in mankind."
In another age and era, they represented the privilege of empire. Today, they are a crime against the Endangered Species Act and the Lacey Act.
'Greed and status," says Grosz, when asked to explain why the trade and market for animal products exist. They're the reasons these items symbolize for him such evil.
clipped from: www.latimes.com 