The Forgotten Ones — The Giraffe’s Silent Extinction
A long, patterned neck stretches out into the prickly foliage of an umbrella acacia tree. Regally crowned with furry ossicones, her long eyelashes bat in the sun as she gracefully walks to a branch and tears the leaves and buds from their thorny stems.
Their place in the ‘charismatic megafauna’ group has ensured they’ve received a lot of attention from society, in culture and art to children’s books and zoos. Their omnipresence in society has perhaps ironically distracted the world from examining the state of their real existence in the wild until recently.
The giraffe are currently heading towards extinction, with populations having fallen by nearly 40% over the last 30 years, from approximately 160,000 in 1985 to about 97,500 in 2015 due to widespread habitat loss, poaching for bushmeat and trophy hunting.
Last year, the IUCN Red List classification for the giraffe changed from ‘least concern’, skipped ‘near threatened’ status and moved to ‘vulnerable’. Currently, only 1 species of giraffe is recognised, along with 9 subspecies. However, mounting evidence has shown that there are in fact 4 different species of giraffe: the southern, the Maasai, the reticulated and the northern giraffe. It was revealed that they are genetically disparate and none of these species can interbreed in the wild. If IUCN classifies them as such, 3 out of 4 of these species would be given a graver conservation status.
They are but one of many species that are undergoing a decline, and a very stark reminder that the world is undergoing a global extinction crisis: the worst the world has seen in about 65 million years. According to WWF’s Living Planet Index, within about 40 years, the total population of vertebrate species has more than halved.
During the meantime, these imperiled creatures continue to move elegantly and silently through Africa, amidst all that threatens their existence. Their heads held up tall and high, and now, more than ever, truly a limited edition.
As featured on Huffington Post Australia.
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