Orleans: a giraffe settles in the Museum

For a few days now, a 4.60 m giraffe has adorned the new monumental hall of the future Muséum d'Orléans for biodiversity and the environment (Mobe). In this vast building under construction, close to the station, the teams took almost a week to move and install this giant of the savannah, an animal that is rarely exhibited in museums. “We had to knock down partitions. In the passage of a staircase, it was played at 5 cm! "Says Laure Danilo, curator of the Mobe.

The city of Orléans acquired the animal in 2002 from a Belgian taxidermist, in anticipation of an exhibition. But the exhibition was done without it. "It's very complicated to move," says Laure Danilo. The giraffe spent ten years in the reserves of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris "because we had no place to exhibit it," says Laure Danilo. She has been in Orleans since 2012, but the public has never seen it before.

A male who lived in a European zoo

Giraffa Cameleopardalis Rothschild lives in the savannah of the southern Sahara, mainly in Kenya, Sudan and Uganda. This specimen is a male who lived in a European zoo before dying of his beautiful death in 2002. Does he have a first name? No doubt, as in all zoos. But Laure Danilo does not know him: "And we will not attribute it to him, animals do not give each other first names. The objective of the museum is to provide a look at nature which is not anthropocentric. "

Closed since 2015, cleaned in 2018, and under construction since January 2019, the Mobe was due to reopen in September. But it will be rather at the beginning of next year, due to the confinement and the new working conditions on construction sites. After eighteen years of waiting, the giraffe is no longer in a hurry…