30 years, making them one of the world’s most
critically endangered large mammals.
The giraffes of Niger are scarcer still, and
yet, from a low point of just 49 individuals in
1996, the population of West African giraffes
has bounced back to more than 600 in the past
two and a half decades. Their return is one of
the greatest conservation success stories on the
continent. It is also one of the most unlikely.
Niger ranks dead last out of 189 countries
on the UN’s Human Development Index—a
measure of life expectancy, schooling, and
national income—and conserving wildlife had
not traditionally been a priority of the country.
In 1996, after a coup d’etat, the new president of
Niger, Ibrahim Baré Maïnassara, sent the army
into the bush to capture a group of animals
to present as gifts to the presidents of nearby
Nigeria and Burkina Faso. Not a single captured
giraffe survived the operation, and the popu-
lation of West African giraffes fell by nearly a
third. Three years later, two more animals died
when the next president tried to send a gift to
the leader of Togo.
The dire situation, and the recognition that the
last West African giraffes were a precious and rare
wildlife resource in a country that has few others,
led Niger in 2011 to craft the first national conser-
vation strategy in Africa for protecting giraffes.
With poaching all but quashed by the govern-
ment and without any natural predators, the
population of giraffes in Koure has been able to
grow. As the population exploded at a rate of more
than 11 percent a year, conflict with farmers and
herders seemed inevitable. It was clear that for
Niger’s giraffe numbers to continue growing and
to remain healthy, a second satellite population
would need to be established in a new location.
A day earlier I’d gone to the nearby village of
Kanaré to speak with the local chief, Hamadou
Yacouba. Sitting under the bushy canopy of a
neem tree to shade us from the midday sun,
he explained that “giraffes are considered like
domesticated animals here. God placed the
giraffes here, so we live with them. The other
countries didn’t get giraffes. We got them.”
Kanaré has benefited from a bit of giraffe
tourism and a local development fund created
by international conservationists. But with Boko
Haram active in the country’s east and al Qaeda
affiliates operating in the country’s north and
west, tourism has slowed to a trickle. The giraffes
were visited by just 1,700 tourists last year, mostlyabout giraffes. Until then, the conventional view
held that all giraffes belonged to a single species,
Giraffa camelopardalis. But genetic analysis now
suggests that giraffes are in fact four distinct
species, actually more different from each other
than the brown bear is from the polar bear. And
those four species can be further classified into
five subspecies, including the rare West African
Giraffa camelopardalis peralta, the pale, spotted
refugees now found only in the Koure region of
Niger. Based on this new taxonomy, all but two
subspecies would be considered vulnerable,
endangered, or critically endangered, and across
Africa, populations have declined by almost
40 percent over the past three decades, leaving
an estimated 110,000 giraffes in the world.
Julian Fennessy, co-director of the Giraffe Con-
servation Foundation (GCF), calls this the “silent
extinction,” because unlike the attention lavished
on the disappearance of elephants and great apes,
most people assume that giraffes are doing just
fine in the wild, perhaps because of their abun-
dance in zoos and as stuffed animals.
And in fact, in some parts of Africa giraffes are
doing fine. In South Africa and Namibia, where
private game farms boost wildlife numbers and
giraffes are hunted legally, populations have
nearly doubled in recent decades. But in East
Africa, the reticulated and Masai species of giraffe
face a much grimmer outlook. “What’s killing
giraffes in southern Kenya is fences. They’re an
even bigger threat than poaching. Giraffes can’t
jump over fences, which means their ranges are
being fragmented,” says Arthur Muneza, the East
Africa coordinator of the GCF. Population growth,
livestock overgrazing, and climate change are
pushing pastoralists and farmers into wildlands
and giraffe habitat. Meanwhile the population
of Nubian giraffes, found mostly in Uganda, has
declined by as much as 97 percent over the past
IN SOUTH AFRICA
AND NAMIBIA, GIRAFFES
ARE DOING FINE.
BUT IN EAST AFRICA, THE
RETICULATED AND MASAI
SPECIES FACE A MUCH
GRIMMER OUTLOOK.98 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC