New research has thrown a spanner in the works for giraffe conservation, after analyzing the genetics of giraffes kept in human care in North America, and finding that most of those studied are in fact hybrids. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

If we were talking about this prior to August 2025, there wouldn’t necessarily be a problem; before that point, giraffes were considered to be a single species with multiple subspecies. At least, that was the case officially. For around a decade, evidence towards the case for more than one species of giraffe began building up . Then, earlier this year, formal recognition of four distinct giraffe species arrived.

This has raised concerns about the status of giraffes kept in z

See Full Page