41W
hen I’d arrived in Kenya, I’d assumed that
the primary threat to giraffes was poaching. And peo-
ple do kill giraffes, with guns, bows, and spears. They
snag their legs using circular traps lined with thorns
or metal shards. They strip the wires from vehicle tires
to make snares that they dangle from trees or scatter on the ground.
In Uganda, Ferguson desnared dozens of giraffes just last summer.
“We’ve swept an area and come back literally the next day to
find new snares,” she says. Four of the 11 giraffes the team collared
in Kenya in 2017 were likely poached, “a much higher rate than
anyone suspected,” says Jared Stabach of the Smithsonian Conser-
vation Biology Institute. Unlike elephants, rhinos, and pangolins,
giraffes aren’t poached to supply a big, illegal, international market
in body parts. Instead, in countries like Kenya, people mostly kill
giraffes for their meat—to feed themselves, their families, their
villages. “They’re a shitload of food,” Fennessy says.
Poaching is only one threat among many to giraffes. It’s a signifi-
cant threat, it’s easy to visualize, and it offers an antagonist to focus
on—but there are less direct and dramatic ways of killing a giraffe.
Since the 1970s, Kenya’s human population has more than
quadrupled, and it is projected to double again by 2050. Livestock
populations have also ballooned, and now collectively outnumber
wildlife biomass by a factor of eight. Not coincidentally, wildlife
numbers have declined by about 70 percent. As the human world
expands, the world for wildlife contracts. Giraffes are left with few
resources as more land is dedicated to agriculture and livestock.
Humans’ and other animals’ very presence can make life harder
for giraffes. They flood the landscape with loud noises, divert
water for irrigation, and overgraze the land. “They chop down
trees for charcoal, so there’s nothing to eat,” says Symon Masiaine,
who leads a team called Twiga Walinzi, or “Giraffe Guards.” “The
livestock disturb [giraffes] from grazing. The dogs chase them.”
People block giraffe migration routes with fences and roads.
Growing human populations and the fragmentation of the
landscape are the biggest culprits behind the decline of giraffes.
David O’Connor, who researches population sustainability at San
Diego Zoo Global, points out the problem on three maps. The
first shows where giraffes lived in the 18th century—a broad, con-
tinuous brushstroke sweeping over much of Africa. The second
shows their current whereabouts—a few pathetic splotches total-
ing just 10 percent of their former range. The third superimposes
all of Kenya’s on going and planned development projects onto
that shrunken range, which becomes further fragmented. The pat-
tern reminds me of the one I’ve been staring at for days: the islands
of tawny brown on a giraffe’s hide, separated by un broken white
lines. It’s as if the giraffe’s woes have been etched onto its skin.
“When the land is not open, it reduces the animals’ ability to
be flexible to change,” Fennessy says. And change is certainly upon
them. Kenya’s temperatures are set to rise by an estimated 2 degrees
Celsius by 2060. Giraffes, already confined to the driest regions
that are untouched by agriculture, must now contend with shorter
rainy seasons, more erratic rainfall, and more severe and prolonged
droughts. Pastoralists, who once had free rein of Kenya’s lands, must
deal with the same challenges. Decades of decisions by British colo-
nialists and the post colonial government have severely restricted their
lifestyle. Constrained and marginalized, they now compete with
giraffes for the same dwindling resources, through the same climatic
up heavals. Conflict is inevitable, and the giraffes almost always lose.
“All of these things make the animals immune-compromised
and more susceptible to disease,” says Maureen Kamau, a veteri-
nary fellow with the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute.
Giraffes across East Africa have been known to carry a mysterious
skin disease that causes oozing, crusty lesions on their limbs and
necks. Other species are experiencing similar problems: In Laikipia,
a previously healthy population of wild dogs was all but wiped out
in 2017 by a virus that spread from domestic canines.
These combined stresses are especially costly for giraffes,
which reproduce only a few times in their lives, and gestate for
15 months. “Anything happens during that period and it’ll lose
the young one, and when it’s got all these other threats, it won’t
breed,” Fennessy says.I
f animals cannot move through a fragmented
world, humans may have to move them. In August 2018,
people living along a particular road in northern Uganda
were treated to a peculiar sight: a large green truck with
shrubbery strapped to its sides, five Nubian giraffes peer-
ing out through its open roof. The driver went slowly so as not
to hit any bumps. The giraffes, for their part, were remarkably
calm during the 10-hour drive. “We drove past schools, and kids
would flood out,” Ferguson says. “It was the first time many of
them had seen a giraffe, let alone five driving through their town.”
Nubian giraffes are a subspecies of northern giraffe, and just
2,645 are left in the wild. More than half of those live in Mur-
chison Falls National Park. The Uganda Wildlife Authority has
relocated small groups to other protected areas, and all the popu-
lations are now growing. But this strategy has limits, because the
new and growing populations are still isolated islands in a chang-
ing world. And in some countries, the giraffes have nowhere to
go. Kenya’s national parks and reserves cover just 8 percent of the
country, and most big mammals—including almost all reticulated
giraffes—live outside them. If the giraffes are to survive, they will
have to do so in the presence of people.
The trick is to make the presence of giraffes more valuable to
local communities than either their flesh or their absence. Con-
sider Niger. In the mid-1990s, it was home to the last 49 West
African giraffes, all of which lived outside national parks and on
community-owned lands. Conservation groups supported those
communities by offering loans, building wells, and providing
ecotourism opportunities. Such measures, together with a strict
government- enforced ban on killing, brought the West African
giraffe back from the brink. Today, 600 of them graze the croplands.
In Kenya, many communities have turned their lands into
conservancies—areas where livestock grazing is more care-
fully managed. In exchange for giving wildlife refuge, some
communities receive revenue from ecotourism operators or
development programs run by conservation organizations; the
state-operated Kenya Wildlife Service offers veterinary support
and ranger training. This model, first developed decades ago,
has bloomed exponentially in the past two decades, such that