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Comment by maxklein | Hacker News Reader

I got the skin of a leopard. Completely unasked for, totally illegal and now I'm feeling very guilty, but unsure what to do. It's not good to have naive family members go on safari.

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I say auction it off with the donation $ given to a fund that saves leopards...

  * Some guy who wants one gets it without having to kill yet another.
  * The charity will save more leopard lives.
  * You get a tax deduction via charity donation receipt.

That's what I would do.

Even if owning it may not be illegal, I think trying to make a profit by selling it will surely end up with me posting an AskYC: How do I get out of jail?

http://www.furisdead.com/donate.asp

Oh gawd. Please don't give it to PETA. I don't have any better ideas, but I wouldn't do anything to support PETA. They're reactionary, inflammatory, and probably do more harm than good for the cause they support.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2003/mar/03/advertising.mark...

http://www.activistcash.com/organization_blackeye.cfm/oid/21

http://www.consumerfreedom.com/news_detail.cfm/h/2628-hyperb...

http://www.petakillsanimals.com/

"They're reactionary, inflammatory..."

In what way is PETA reactionary?

They want medical science to go back to the way it was before drugs were tested on animals.

The humane society has a much better fur recycling program, I think. Also, they aren't PETA

http://www.hsus.org/furfree/campaigns/c4c/

Okay, on further research and a bit of help from Wikipedia - I believe it's not leopard fur, but rather 'serval' fur:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Serval_in_Tanzania.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serval

Servals are not endangered, does not mean I'll be making myself a cape out of it though!

Awwww. I made a serval ethogram in my animal behavior class. =(

Since we're going on tangents here, I've taught an animal behavior class.

Since we are on tangents here, my downstairs neighbour owns a half-serval. It was illegally imported and abandoned: she takes care of it, together with another dozen of cats. When she has a litter, she needs to keep the serval away from the litter or it will kill the kittens.

What's the other half?

Probably regular domestic cat. They can and do breed.

She thinks that is indeed the case, but she isn't sure. She just knows it isn't a full serval.

she should breed it with a female house cat and make a ¼ serval

This probably isn't a popular thing to say, but assuming it's legal, I'd keep it. Anything that rare and precious is worth cherishing for the rest of your life.

Wait, what use is it if you're sitting there cherishing it? Especially if you don't particularly like it?

So he should cherish something just because it is rare and precious? It sounds like he couldn't care less and would probably store it somewhere in a closet. And good for him: we shouldn't care about what others think is valuable (except to prevent ourselves from needlessly offending them).

At first I thought you meant someone had burned you a copy of Snow Leopard. I guess that probably would've been better...

That's what I first thought too. Lol.

It would be really smart if Apple picked up on this and created a campaign where folks could get a discount on the OS when showing a receipt from PETA for donating a leopard fur.

I think I would like the Leopard Skin a lot better with the Leopard still in it. Not a very practical pet but they are a beautiful animal.

http://www.fugly.com/media/IMAGES/Strange/leopard_skin_sheet...

That's pretty disgusting. Good on you that you are figuring out a noble way to get rid of it.

that's a weird ass present, is it skin skin, or some garment made out of it?

The entire skin. Quite thick - not really wearable.

It actually might not be illegal. I was on safari last year and I was told you could buy a license to hunt leopards, just they are very expensive. You can also hunt lions and other big game.

http://reviews.ebay.com/Leopard-ocelot-seal-otter-Endangered...

Depends on the country it was shot in, and if the animal was wild or not.

Wild Leopard is a CITES Appendix I species, meaning that it's pretty much illegal to trade in or to move across borders. It's possible to do it legally, but in order for that to be the case your family would have needed a special export permit from where they hunted it, and they would have had to get a similar permit from the Fish and Wildlife Service to bring it back into the US - and this is quite difficult.

If they can prove that it was bred in captivity, then it only requires a FWS import permit (since captive Leopards are CITES Appendix II), which is reasonably easy to get.

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