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Milwaukee Public Museum's 'Scoop on Poop' exhibit bowels 'em over

Alcott School students (left to right) Reece McGowan, Aireanna Hernandez, Jacob Almestica and Jovanny Navaretta are amazed as they stand together on a scale and learn that it would take 13.5 hours for an African elephant to produce their total weight in poop.
Alcott School students (left to right) Reece McGowan, Aireanna Hernandez, Jacob Almestica and Jovanny Navaretta are amazed as they stand together on a scale and learn that it would take 13.5 hours for an African elephant to produce their total weight in poop. Credit: Kristyna Wentz-Graff
Jim Stingl
In My Opinion
Dec. 21, 2013
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Dec. 21, 2013 0

Cow chips roasting on an open fire? Rudolph the red-nosed dung beetle?

Sorry, there's no way to make the Milwaukee Public Museum's "Scoop on Poop" exhibit sound more Christmassy. It continues its run through the holidays until it's flushed on Jan. 14.

I went last week out of curiosity. About the magic of poop, yes, but mostly I wondered if frugal Milwaukeeans would pay $5 above the usual admission price to learn about it.

The museum can use the money. It's been in deep doo-doo financially on and off, and recently we learned that the museum and other county-owned facilities like the zoo and the parks are going to need a quarter-billion dollars in capital investment in the next five years.

Recently, I spent maybe an hour exploring "The Scoop on Poop," and there were about a dozen other people wandering around. When you enter the second-floor exhibit, you're told there are no restrooms in there, which struck me as mildly ironic.

It's all very sanitary. You experience poop with far more of your senses at the Wisconsin State Fair barns than you do here.

Most people get more than enough crap just by following the news: Pope Francis is a Marxist! Santa Claus is white and that's that! If you like your health care plan, you can keep it!

But the self-proclaimed "#1 exhibit on #2" has plenty of fun facts to go with its scatological wordplay. At least, they sound like real facts.

An African elephant, the grand champion pooper of all land animals, drops 100 or more cantaloupe-sized dung balls a day. This raises the question: How do I make this all about me? So there's a scale you stand on that tells you how many hours it takes that elephant to poop your weight. In my case, it's 10 hours, but that number will go up if I get near too many more holiday buffet tables.

Odors in rhino poop tell other rhinos who it is and where it has been. If you work for the National Security Agency, there might be an unpleasant new spying method in here somewhere.

For true excrement excitement, I watched Patty Baier-Jankowski and her young son, Noah, compete in a dung ball race that involved pretending to be a beetle pushing the organic sphere up a hill.

"Where else can you race doing that?" Patty said. "There's a ton of good stuff to learn here."

Noah's grandmother, Gloria Baier, led me over to her favorite exhibit, which shows the male Sarus crane leaping about and scattering buffalo poop to impress the female. I can't say for sure if this helps us answer the age-old question: What do women want?

I also learned that daisies smell like dung to attract flies to pollinate their flowers. Animals that hibernate can hold it for six months. Dinosaurs pooped, too, and "in 1995, researchers found a very large fossilized turd" from a T. rex. It wasn't discovered in Milwaukee, but a good place to look here would be the turd ward. (Thanks for that line, Larry.)

They have one of those photo spots where you stick your head through a hole. This one makes it look like you're using an outhouse, if that's the photo you've always wanted. And for you budding scientists out there, there's an exhibit about how to examine fecal matter with a microscope. Step one, I'm not kidding, is, "Find some feces."

Mary Bridges, a museum spokeswoman, said the exhibit is doing well, given its somewhat yucky subject matter.

"People who come love it. We didn't project it would be any kind of blockbuster,"' she said.

On my way out, I checked out the visitor book and found most of the entries were done by children.

One kid wanted more steaming piles. "It's fake poop," he or she complained.

"Poop is horbel," someone wrote. I think that means horrible, but maybe herbal.

"I thont it whond be a movie," another said.

Slow down there. I doubt Milwaukee is ready for "Poop: The Movie" on the museum's six-story screen.

New hours. Speaking of the museum, on Jan. 1 it will end its practice of admitting Milwaukee County residents free every Monday. Instead, county residents will get in free the first Thursday of every month. Plus, county residents will get $2 off admission all other days.

Call Jim Stingl at (414) 224-2017 or email at jstingl@jrn.com

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