Hi, Museum-L friends.

A while ago we had a series of jokes on `Humor: unwanted donations.

Adrienne Dearmas contributed the following (typos, etc are mine):

My sister is a curator at a small petting zoo. While discussing
similar problems with mainraining collections, dealing with $ issues
and problems communicating with the public, she offhandedly related
this story:

Prior to her promotion to curator, the acting curator had engaged in
accepting a donation from a local resident of some bunny rabbits. The
deal fell in my sister's lap. The donor had not been apprised of the
petting zoo's standard donation form which says (and I paraphrase from
memory): We have the right to sell your donation and/or FEED it to
another animal in our collection. My question is, how can those of us
in non-zoos adopt this strategy effectively to avoid having to take
things into our collection that we cannot properly take care of :-)

I passed this onto a colleague, who obviously sat and thought about it
for a while. Yesterday I got the following reply on my desk:

I think we already have this strategy - we feed some of our objects to
the clothes moths and wood beetle, etc!

Seriously, though, our change of ownership agreement does have a
clause that says we can transfer to a more appropriate museum,
transfer to a study or demonstration collection or dispose of as we
see fit (again I paraphrase from memory) should the object no longer
be appropriate to the collection. Since we instituted this agreement
(approx 3 years ago, we have not yet had anybody refuse to sign it
-maybe they don't read the small print!

OK - I've got my fire extinguisher and I'm ready for the flames.

Cheers, Glyn