Wildlife personnel pull
a dead giraffe from a
poacher’s snare
in Amboseli, Kenya. A
single animal can yield
650 pounds of valu-
able meat. Sometimes
giraffes are killed only for
their tails—status sym-
bols in some cultures.
BRENT STIRTONgiraffe. He estimates the animal at about 1,500
pounds, sets the pressure in his rifle to 12 bar for
a 100-foot shot, and turns the safety off. It’s 1 p.m.,
and the temperature has just hit 100°F.
“I’ve never had this sort of situation where you
can walk right up to a giraffe. Normally, you’re
in a pickup, shooting them from a distance,”
Morkel tells me. But these are strange creatures,
not least because they live on community land,
far from any game reserve or national park, and
spend their days crossing paths with farmers and
herders. At night they bust their heads through
the walls of the locals’ elevated beehive-shaped
granaries and eat the cowpea leaves that villag-
ers store for their livestock, as well as their man-
goes and pumpkins. Fortunately for everyone,
the one food they mysteriously have no taste for
is millet, the nutritious local cereal staple.
Morkel raises the gun to his shoulder and pulls
the trigger, sending his etorphine-laden dart sail-
ing into the animal’s left shoulder, a direct hit, but
it will take several minutes for the drug to kick in.
The sedation of wild giraffes is a relatively new
practice that has been refined over the past 30
years and carries major risks. The animal can
stop breathing from a lethal dose of opioid. It
can fall headfirst and crack its skull, or break
its long back or spindly legs. It can regurgitate
partly digested food and inhale it into its lungs,
leading to pneumonia. And it can overheat while
lying on the scorching sand. During a 2017 trans-
location in Uganda, three animals died from
stresses related to being captured, and another
died while it was being moved.
While we wait for the drug to kick in, Morkel
and I walk back to a waiting pickup truck filled
with a team of rangers and researchers. “This is a
hard species to work with,” Morkel says. “There’s
a long way to fall, and a lot of unique anatomy.”
Everything about this creature’s anatomy
indeed seems to be uniquely stretched to the
extreme. There’s its famous neck, of course, but
also its outrageously long eyelashes, its legs (the
longest of any animal), its eyes (the widest of
any land mammal), its elongated skull, and
especially its purple-black prehensile tongue,
which can extend over a foot and a half from its
mouth and nimbly strip bare an acacia stem so
thorny you wouldn’t want to grab it with your
bare hand. Even its heart, which pumps blood
over a greater vertical span than any other land
mammal, can be more than two feet long, with
ventricle walls more than three inches thick.IN EAST AFRICA, FENCES
ARE AN EVEN BIGGER
THREAT THAN POACHING.
GIRAFFES CAN’T JUMP OVER
THEM, WHICH MEANS
THEIR RANGES ARE
BEING FRAGMENTED.
GIRAFFES 101