New Delhi: Giraffe numbers across Africa, and particularly in Kenya, are in decline, AFP reported citing numbers released by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
The number of giraffes in Africa fell by 40% to under 100,000 animals between 1985 and 2015, according to the IUCN. Between 1988 and 2018, the numbers for the reticulated giraffe fell by nearly 60% in Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia while the number of Nubian giraffes fell by 97%. The Kordofan giraffe, in central Africa, has seen an 85% decrease in its population.
While the dwindling population numbers of animals like elephants, lions and rhinos receives widespread global attention, there has been little scrutiny of the decline of giraffe populations.
“The giraffe is a big animal, and you can see it pretty easily in parks and reserves. This may have created a false impression that the species was doing well,” Julian Fennessy, co-chair of the IUCN’s specialist group for giraffes and okapis told AFP.
In 2017, conservationists petitioned the US government to list giraffes as endangered in a bid to prevent the “silent extinction” of the world’s tallest land animal. The listing of the giraffe as an “endangered species” would place significant restrictions on hunting activities by Americans wishing to travel to Africa and bring back a slaughtered giraffe.
Poaching, legal hunting, habitat destruction due to the expansion of cities and agriculture and prolonged conflicts are the primary reasons for the steep rate of decline of the giraffe population in eastern and central Africa.
While the IUCN had designated the species as one of “least concern” on the IUCN red list in 2010, after six years, their decreasing population led them to be designated as “vulnerable”, just one step short of critical.
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In view of the global outcry over the conservation of giraffes, six African countries are lobbying to regulate international trade in giraffes under the UN Convention on Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). The countries advocating for this proposal, including Kenya, seek to classify the giraffe as “a species that, although not necessarily currently threatened with extinction, could become so if trade in their specimens were not closely controlled”.
The proposal would seek to regulate the global legal trade in giraffe parts, including those obtained by trophy hunters on Africa’s legal game reserves. A report in the Guardian last year stated that nearly 40,000 giraffe parts had been imported to the US over the course of the past decade, which is roughly the equivalent of nearly 4,000 individual giraffes.
In April 2019, a report in the New York Times claimed that US federal wildlife officials were considering listing the giraffe as an endangered species.
One of the factors affecting the uncertainty over the reasons for the decline in the giraffe’s population is the lack of reliable data on the species. It was only in 2018 that the IUCN hasdsufficient data to be able to differentiate the threat levels facing many giraffe subspecies.