There’s one thing you can say about Iowans: we know how to make the best of a bad situation. We have tornadoes and floods and hot summers and cold winters and no mountains and farm tractors going 25 miles an hour down the highway with no place to pass and our idea of fine art is a full-sized cow sculpture made out of butter. Life in Iowa might discourage a person from a pleasant state like California. But we Iowans carry on. So, earlier this month when US Customs agents at the Minneapolis-Saint Paul Airport detained an Iowa woman, demanding to know why she was bringing a box of giraffe poop into the country, she explained she thought it might make a nice necklace. Or a kind of, um, gag gift.
It’s not as if the woman was trying to be sneaky about it. Returning from her safari to Kenya, airport authorities asked if she had anything to declare. She wasn’t trying to smuggle diamonds or drugs or endangered species of exotic birds, stuffed into her socks. Just a small box of giraffe doo-doo. She explained that back in Iowa, she had made stylish items of jewelry out of moose poo and hoped the giraffe droppings would add worldly sophistication to her collection.
“We were a little shocked,” said Lauren Lewis, chief of agriculture for US Customs and Boarder Protection at the airport. “We don’t normally get fecal material in. Normally, we are inspecting a lot of fruits and vegetables….” Such material can pose a health risk in the form of swine fever, E coli, Shigella or hoof and mouth disease.
Looking at photos of the confiscated little balls of giraffe excrement, the idea that these would make pretty earrings is not the first thing that comes to mind. There is really nothing remarkable about them except the fact that for animals that grow to be up to 18 feet tall and weight around 4,000 pounds, their dung is kind of dainty. More like rabbit droppings. Also, they are pretty dry to start with. Giraffes drink only once every few days. And even then, it’s an inconvenience because, as famously long as their necks are, they are not long enough to reach the ground. So, in order to drink, a giraffe has to awkwardly spread apart its front legs and kneel down.
Giraffes are just weird—with their 18-inch-long black tongues and diet of thorny acacia leaves. A giraffe can run 37 miles-an-hour –faster than most horses. They only sleep 5-30 minutes a day (standing up!). They eat 145 pounds of food a day and poop 33 pounds a day of those little rabbit pellets. So, it’s not as if giraffe manure is a rare commodity. I’m guessing giraffe poo jewelry would probably not be a big seller in Kenya.
The unnamed giraffe poop jewelry maker was not fined or jailed, although her little box of feces was confiscated and destroyed by customs agents. The Iowa woman apologized for the inconvenience she caused. She only wanted to take something crude and make it pretty—to prove you can, in fact, polish a…well, you know.