A reminder of the slow extinction of the giraffe

Giraffes seem like an ubiquitous creature; you see them in movies, especially animations like Madagascar. In wildlife documentaries, you will almost always spot them featuring in the background, a tower going about its day, strolling nonchalantly into the frame focusing on other wildlife. Or maybe you’ve seen them as a travel and tours logo, their frame silhouetted against a background that will likely feature an acacia tree and the setting African sun. 

You see all these and you may think but life is breezy for these giants, but as recent events show, these giants are living a precarious life.

The Hirola conservancy in Kenya recently announced that a mother and daughter pair of reticulated giraffes had been killed, possibly by armed poachers.

These were white giraffes, due to the condition known as leucism; in a tower of otherwise brown giraffes, they stood out. When they were first revealed in 2017, they resulted in a greater interest in the conservancy, with an attendant boost to tourism to see these rare gems.

Yet barely three years later, the adult female and her offspring are now gone; at the moment, only one lone leucistic bull remains.

The fate that has befallen these giraffes speaks to a much larger problem giraffes face, a continuous decline in their population that has been described in the recent past as a silent extinction.

According to estimates, over one and a half centuries ago, the giraffe population was in the millions.

The hunting spree during the colonial era contributed to a significant drop, as the big animals of the savanna were bagged as trophy collections. By 2015, the population was estimated at less than 100,000, as per the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

It is estimated that between 1985 and 2015, the population of giraffes fell by 40%.

The decline was uneven across the nine recognized subspecies of giraffe; some declined by 97%, others, while others seemed largely unaffected.

The reticulated giraffe declined by 60%.

The IUCN estimates the current population of giraffes at 68,293, and decreasing. The reticulated giraffe has 11,048 adults as per IUCN. They have lost a member.

Consider the African elephant.

It once numbered in the millions, but was poached and its population decimated. Concern over the possible extinction of these land giants has resulted in focused conservation efforts. What do you think their population is? Lower or higher than the giraffe’s? They have ivory after all, sought after for all the wrong reasons.

As of 2018, the population of elephants was estimated at 415,000.

That would be nearly 6 times as many elephants as there are giraffes. Yet giraffes do not have two year gestation periods like elephants.

It’s just that their plight has been effectively ignored.

It would be wise to focus on the giraffe’s declining population before the towers vanish from the savanna.