I did not know this when I moved here, but Santa Barbara is the giraffe equivalent of a rabbit nest. In the last four years, five giraffes have been born at the small zoo here. One more is due this summer.
At one point, I thought this was adorable. I rallied my children to the zoo to ooh and ahh over the latest six-foot-tall newborn. But this summer, Betty Lou will receive no baby shower gifts from me, even though she’s been pregnant for nearly 15 months. Now that I know what I know about giraffes, I will knit no more blue or pink hats for young giraffes, with little holes for the ossicones they’re born with. (They’re one of the few animals that comes out of the womb with horns. Maybe that should have been a clue to their nefarious ways.)
First, we must discuss the inappropriateness of their tongues. They average 20 inches long, and are so flexible they can wrap all the way around a leafy branch and pull it in like a fleshy tractor beam. Male giraffes even use their tongues to test a female’s pee to see if she’s ovulating. If you want moral turpitude, there it is.
These tongues are purple. (At least at our zoo. They can also be black, or blue.) Is there no more reason to be afraid? (In fact, this is a protective tongue sunscreen. Remember the purple sunblock you used in the 80s? Imagine it on your tongue, and you will experience the horror that I unwittingly placed in front of my children as they fed leaves to these creatures during a zoo feeding program.) The nearby trees should certainly be afraid: giraffes can eat as much as 75 pounds of leaves a day.
Then there are the giraffe’s eyes. We worry about drones invading our privacy from above, but we should really be legislating against giraffes, those giant eyes in the sky. They have the largest eyes of land animals, and these eyes hover 18 feet in the air. Silently, except for a few snorts and grunts. (They’re probably just laughing at how short we are.)
Or perhaps not as silently as we’d hoped. In December 2015, researchers published the results of eight years of giraffe recordings at three European zoos. They found that giraffes make a low-frequency humming sound at night. The one thing more deadly than silence: humming at a time when most people are asleep.
The giraffes’ sounds even stupefied the researchers. They had to go through 900-plus hours of spectrograms of the sound recordings, looking for visual records of this hum. “As expected, exploring giraffe vocal communication turned out to be time consuming, tedious and very challenging,” the researchers write. Their personality evaluation of this extremely tall creature: “compared to other social-living mammals, giraffes seem very taciturn.”
Maybe giraffes are not taciturn enough. The males wield their necks in a circular dance that resembles the beginning of a thumb war—feinting here, circling there. If the battle proceeds, these swirling necks turn violent. Their necks can weigh 600 pounds—the crack of a giraffe skull against a competitor can be heard a hundred meters away. A hit to the back of the skull can cause a giraffe TKO by blocking the giraffe’s blood supply (which has to travel up its six-foot neck to its brain).
And please, do not tell a giraffe that he is tedious to his face (if you can get that high). You might find yourself in the same situation this YouTube user experienced. At first he worries that the giraffe will eat him. Then, while filming the giraffe’s legs at very close range, he is attacked. From now on, I will take the critical advice he gives at the end of his video: “Don’t get too close to the giraffes.”
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Top image by David Blackwell, Flickr/Creative Commons license
Middle image by Alex Dizon, Flickr/Creative Commons license
Bottom image by Paul Domenick, Flickr/Creative Commons license