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.”
Two varieties are especially threatened. The Rothschild’s giraffe, named for Lord Walter Rothschild, the British zoologist, is distinguished by its legs. They are creamy and spotless, as if the animal had on kneesocks. There are fewer than six hundred and seventy of this subspecies in the world, according to the Rothschild’s Giraffe Project. The rarest subspecies is the West African giraffe, which has the lightest patches. There are fewer than three hundred of them, largely in Niger.
More than a million giraffes roamed the earth two centuries ago, conservationists estimate. Today, there are fewer than eighty thousand, spread among nine subspecies. The smaller the subspecies, the less variety of DNA, and the less fit the next generation. If their numbers continue to plunge, the Rothschild’s and West African giraffes could eventually breed themselves out of existence.
Like lions and elephants, giraffes are targeted in trophy hunting. After Cecil the Lion was shot, an American huntress from Idaho, Sabrina Corgatelli, defiantly posted photos online of the trophy giraffe she shot near South Africa’s Kruger National Park last month.* “I got a amazing old Giraffe,” she wrote on her Facebook page, on July 25th. “Such a amazing animal!! I couldn’t be any happier!! My emotion after getting him was a feeling I will never forget!!!” A picture showed the dead animal’s neck encircling her.
Giraffes have long been popular bush meat. They are shot, trapped with snares, and attacked with machetes. A single animal can produce more than six hundred pounds of meat. Poachers sell their spotted skins—each giraffe has a distinctive pattern, like a fingerprint—for tourist crafts and export. In Tanzania, which has some of the richest game parks in the world, giraffes have also become a target because of the myth that their brain tissue and bone marrow can be used to cure H.I.V.-AIDS. “It’s a ludicrous allegation. Unfortunately, some believe it,” Peter LaFontaine of the International Fund for Animal Welfare told me. “People assume there are still vast herds of giraffes, but there aren’t anymore.”
The same is true of some twenty-two thousand other species, Animal Welfare officials told me this week. “Between 1970 and 2010, populations of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish around the globe dropped 52 percent,” the World Wildlife Fund reported in December. “What’s not complicated are the clear trends we’re seeing—39 percent of terrestrial wildlife gone, 39 percent of marine wildlife gone, 76 percent of freshwater wildlife gone—all in the past forty years,” Jon Hoekstra, the W.W.F.’s chief scientist, said.
Tigers are now extremely endangered, too. The global population has declined ninety-seven per cent in about a century. Just over three thousand are left. Tigers are poached and farmed commercially for their skins but even more for their bones, which are marinated in wine for years and passed off for medicinal use. There are more tigers in captivity than in the wild, LaFontaine said.
The “charismatic megafauna,” the elephant, lion, and rhino élite of the animal world, get the most public attention—a fact conservationists tolerate but lament. “We use them as symbols,” Shawna Moos, of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, told me. “People don’t understand if we say twenty-two thousand are endangered, but they do if we say elephants are being killed for their ivory.” Pictures of famous endangered species were projected on the side of the Empire State Building last weekend. Ty Inc., the plush-toy company, announced Monday that it has just created a Cecil the Lion Beanie Baby.
Poachers killed more than a hundred thousand elephants in just three years, between 2010 and 2012, National Geographic reported. The kill rate now outstrips the birth rate. The numbers of forest elephants—which are smaller than savannah elephants, have straighter tusks, and live in the countries of the Congo basin—have plunged by two-thirds over the past decade, Will Gartshore, of the World Wildlife Fund, told me. “Forest elephants could be wiped out in a decade if poaching rates continue as they are now,” he said. (Peter Canby has written about the plight of forest elephants in The New Yorker.)
In Tanzania, famed for its game parks, the elephant population has declined by sixty per cent in the past five years, Gartshore said.* The death of a northern white rhino last week leaves only four—one at the San Diego Zoo and three at a Kenya reserve. Their extinction is inevitable. Poaching of other African rhino varieties has soared in recent years, because of the belief, spread especially in Vietnam, that ground rhino-horn powder can cure cancer. Asian tea shops import and sell it as a cure for problems ranging from hangovers to impotence. “It’s part status,” LaFontaine said. “It’s expensive, and people want to be seen to consume it or be known as able to afford it.”
But pity the other species, particularly the pangolin, or scaly anteater, which is the world’s most hunted mammal. According to the International Fund for Animal Welfare, almost a million were poached over the past decade. Pangolin, which means “something that rolls up” in Malay, are little creatures covered in overlapping scales of keratin, the same protein as human nails and hair. They look a little like miniatures of prehistoric species from the dinosaur age. Their babies ride on their long tails.
“The pangolin is a great animal,” LaFontaine said. “They are not afraid of humans. They shuffle around people, which make them easy targets.”
Britain’s Prince William teamed up with Angry Birds last year to create a game to save the creatures. “The Pangolin runs the risk of becoming extinct before most people have even heard of them,” he said in a YouTube video message for United for Wildlife. “We have created an Angry Birds Friends tournament for the pangolins, so you can have some fun while learning more about them and the wider issue of poaching.”
Will Gartshore put it this way: “We’re denuding the forest and savannahs of our fellow-travellers, our fellow-creatures. Wildlife is losing its battle with humans.”
*A previous version of this sentence misidentified the species that has seen its population decline by sixty per cent.
*The initial post misidentified the location where Sabrina Corgatelli shot a giraffe.
