The Great September Revolution, Rothschild is without a giraffe!

Photo: Petr Hamerník, Prague Zoo

Thanks to the team led by Julian Fennessy, our understanding of giraffes is changing almost daily. Instead of one species, DNA analysis has managed to distinguish four, which are as distinct from one another as the differences between brown and polar bears. Of the nine existing subspecies of a single species of giraffe, some have formally ceased to exist, others have remained and the rest have been promoted to a species.

Naturally this change is not about the fact that after 113 years Baron L. W. Rothschild has lost ‘his’ giraffe. The important thing is that there is less confusion as concerns giraffes.

Nine giraffe subspecies was a construct of the 19th century explorers and not only was it difficult to understand, above all, nobody really trusted it. This hindered the protection of giraffes because it was not always clear where to categorize a certain population and how to treat it.

However, this change in the way we view giraffes entails another important aspect.

This hitherto single species has the lowest status of ‘least concern’ in the IUCN Red Book. This is a very optimistic assessment because in nature there are only about ninety thousand giraffes, much less than, say, African elephants. But now...

Instead of one species of giraffe, we now have four, each one of them is thus much worse off. These new findings about giraffe species puts two species at a numerical size of under ten thousand individuals, which certainly deserves inclusion among the species that are vulnerable or even endangered.

When we baptize our female giraffe on 28 September, she will have a sign with the inscription North Nubian Giraffe stating that there are just five thousand of them living in Africa and just over two thousand of the subspecies. Our giraffe won’t give a fig, notwithstanding, Fennessy and his team have done some excellent work. Now the IUCN experts should take their publication and start making changes to the Red Book.

For a start.