While Taronga's four giraffes have plenty to eat during the day, they get especially tasty leaves during the keeper talk. All four of them therefore come over to share in the bounty although the shyest of the four (Zarrafa, nearest to camera) departed before the talk was over as the keeper predicted she would.

On one of my galleries there is a guest comment, which was actually made by a then close friend of mine who was obsessed with safari trips to Africa to see the Big Critters.

("But I can see that!", I hear you say if you're on my PBase galleries as you view this. Maybe so, but out here in October 2022 I'm standardising the metadata on my photos so that the content can be ported from one site to another. PBase won't last forever.)

It read in part: "one of these giraffes is blind...and those horns can kill you". I wouldn't dispute the last part since she had been to Africa often enough to know. The horns look relatively blunt but attached to a neck of that size they'd probably inflict some pretty nasty blunt force, like a club being swung at you by a very, very large caveman.

However I think she may have been mistaken on the first part.

There WAS indeed a blind giraffe living at the zoo. Her name was Hope, and her blindness is believed to have been caused by excessive inbreeding. It started about 12 years before her death, but she was still able to find her way around the giraffe enclosure. Giraffes normally live from 20 to 25 years old and Hope was a 24 year old mother of 3 when she died. However that was in December of 2007, 2.5 years before I took these shots (and she wrote her comment) in May 2010. Just as sadly, my friend died just shy of 3 years after writing that comment.

I think it's safe to say that Hope was not one of the giraffes in this shot.