Probe hunts, trustees urged

The Humane Society of the United States wrote California State University trustees Monday asking them to investigate how many animals were killed to stock a proposed natural history museum at Sacramento State.

The letter also asked CSU trustees to compensate for the animals' suffering and "waste of life" by funding animal protection efforts in Tanzania.

Roberta Achtenberg, chair of the board of trustees, is preparing a response to the letter but declined to discuss the issue with a reporter, according to CSU spokeswoman Claudia Keith.

The Humane Society letter comes a week after The Sacramento Bee disclosed that Alexander Gonzalez, president of California State University, Sacramento, asked the Tanzanian government to let two potential donors hunt 84 different species for a now-abandoned natural history museum.

Gonzalez wrote Tanzania's director of wildlife on behalf of auto dealer Paul Snider and his wife, Renee, who had been considering giving the campus $2.4 million and a vast collection of mounted animals from decades of hunting trips.

Both letters, written in 2004 and 2006, asked permission for the Sniders to hunt at least one each from lists of species that aren't covered by Tanzania's standard hunting license.

The university gave up on the museum plan last summer, citing dissension on campus, but didn't disclose the change of plans publicly until mid-September.

At the time Gonzalez signed the letters, three of the species sought were on the World Conservation Union's "red list" of animals that could be in danger of extinction. Two more joined the list later.

"It is unthinkable that an institution of higher learning would contemplate endorsing, much less effectively request, the killing of so many wild animals for such a questionable motive," Humane Society President Wayne Pacelle wrote Achtenberg Monday.

"This concept went out of fashion 100 years ago," Pacelle said.

Saying he was writing on behalf of 10 million Humane Society members, including nearly 1.2 million in California, Pacelle asked for an investigation into how many animals actually were killed and what methods were used to kill them.

He noted that several primates were listed in the university letters, including the vervet monkey, the blue monkey and the galago.

"As these animals are closely related to humans, surely you can appreciate the suffering involved," Pacelle wrote. He also asked trustees to communicate with other colleges and with museums about "reasons they should not endorse the killing of animals in order to procure museum specimens."

CSU spokeswoman Keith suggested that Gonzalez had partly addressed that concern in an e-mail he sent to faculty and staff on Sept. 18, the same day The Bee article appeared detailing the university's letters.

In that e-mail, Gonzalez wrote that Sacramento State's College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics is working on a policy about accepting specimens. The university president also wrote campus employees that, "looking back, I should have used a much higher level of scrutiny regarding the original letter and the later follow-up."

Since early last week, the office of CSU Chancellor Charles Reed repeatedly has declined to comment on whether Reed thought the letters were appropriate.

Spokesman Paul Browning would say only, "We trust that any actions taken by the president were in the best interest of the campus fulfilling its overall academic mission."

Several CSU trustees, including Bill Hauck, head of the California Business Roundtable, and Kyriakos Tsakopoulos, son of developer Angelo Tsakopoulos, declined to comment on the Humane Society request.

Herbert Carter, a former United Way and CSU executive who has served as a trustee since 2004, said he would want the board's legal staff to look into the request for investigation.

As to the hunting letters signed by Gonzales, Carter said, "I don't think that's an appropriate exercise that one ought to be engaged in. ...

"It would have been better if he had not written the letters, but he did. He made a mistake and he apologized."

To date, no one at Sacramento State has been able to describe the educational or scientific value of the animals the letters sought.

Paul Snider, in interviews with The Bee, said he wanted to offer museum visitors a broader array of animals, so he asked his safari outfitter to help develop the list.

He said that he and his wife killed a few dozen of the animals listed in the Sacramento State letters during two hunting trips to Tanzania.

About the writer:

• The Bee's Carrie Peyton Dahlberg can be reached at (916) 321-1086 or cpeytondahlberg@sacbee.com.