Safety Gear for Small Animals – Bill Burns www.safetygearforsmallanimals.com
The Museum of Safety Gear for Small Animals Bill Burns
The Museum of Safety Gear for Small Animals is the largest museum of safety gear for small animals in the world. It is an itinerant museum in three parts: the safety gear collection, the multi-media programme, and the publishing house. Central to the museum’s collection are 19 pieces of scale model safety and rescue gear. The total weight of the safety gear collection is 944 grams. The pressure of the vacuum table used to produce the safety gear is 84 kilograms per square centimetre. If all the materials from the collection were unraveled in a line one micrometre thick, it would stretch around the Earth’s equator two and three-quarter times. 43 different fasteners are used in the construction of the safety and rescue gear. There are 2,750 machine stitches and 234 hand stitches in the museum’s safety gear collection. Since its inception, tens of thousands of people have visited the museum in New York, Paris, London, Seoul, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Toronto, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Havana, Copenhagen, Marseilles and Montreal. If each of these visitors were represented by a copy of the Sunday New York Times a stack of forest the size of Hong Kong would have to be pulped. If all the users of our toll-free telephone service,
1-877-ECOSFEAR, were placed head-to-toe in a row they would stretch from Mumbai to Poona and back again. The museum’s conservation division contains 315 highly detailed scale model reptiles, birds, mammals, insects, and fish – all of which could fit into two bread boxes. They have never been exhibited. Our website provides access to sponsorship of life insurance and annuities for 11 species of fauna on 5 continents. Since 1994 the museum has received support from more than a dozen governments and private sponsors in France, Argentina, Cuba, Korea, USA, Brazil, Australia, Canada, and the UK. Upwards of 30% of the proceeds from sales of the museum’s guide books, postcards and trading cards, has been reinvested in our publication programme in the past 17 years.