Saving the neck of Rothschild’s giraffe

TO A FOREIGN tourist, a giraffe is an extraordinary and elegant beast. To locals it is, too often, a larder on legs. A giraffe can weigh as much as a tonne and a half. Only two African animals, the elephant and the white rhino, are heavier. And bush meat fetches high prices. So, even though giraffe have no tusks to steal and their stubby horns, known as ossicones, command no premium in the market for Chinese folk medicine, poachers take a deadly interest in them. Add to that the effects of human encroachment on their habitat and the result is a rapid drop in population. According to a report published in 2016, by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, giraffe numbers fell from between 152,000 and 163,000 in 1985 to fewer than 98,000 in 2015.Murchison Falls National Park, in Uganda, is home to about 1,250 of those that survive, but that 1.3% is disproportionately important because it constitutes three-quarters of the remaining population of a particular subspecies, Rothschild’s giraffe. In the view of conservationists, that is a lot of eggs in a single basket. Hence a project, begun in 2015 by the Ugandan Wildlife Authority and the Giraffe Conservation Foundation, a charity based in Namibia, to extract groups of these animals from the park and take them to places that look like prime giraffe habitat, but which currently have no giraffe in them.