Who Would Kill a Giraffe?
Several years ago, I arranged for Neil
Armstrong and his wife, Carol, to get a behind-the-scenes tour of the National
Zoo. We stopped first to commune with Jana, the newborn giraffe. The zoo showed
us a video of her being born. Giraffes give birth standing up, and Jana dropped
some six feet to the ground as she slipped from her mother’s womb. The mother
licked her calf, and in minutes the newborn got up on wobbly legs. Neil
Armstrong was enthralled. You’d think he’d never seen anything interesting
before.
Whatever the conservation merits, I’ve
always hated to think of any animal confined behind the bars or walls of zoos,
the equivalent of jail cells for animals. It seems particularly unfair for the
world’s tallest creatures, the gentle vegetarians with flirty lashes and
cinnamon spots. I lived in Africa for seven years, and few sights were as
magnificent, or calming, as a herd of giraffes loping gracefully across the
savannah. Giraffes seem the most harmless of beasts.
But giraffes are increasingly
vulnerable in the wild. The world’s giraffe population has plummeted, by more
than forty per cent, over the past fifteen years. “It’s a silent extinction,”
Julian Fennessy, the executive director of the Giraffe Conservation Foundation,
told me this week. “Already, giraffes have become extinct in more than seven
African countries. Unfortunately, it’s not fully hit the attention of the
world, including many governments and major conservation organizations.” Read on ...
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