The world’s tallest animal is on a “silent slide toward extinction,” Giraffe Conservation Foundation says
More than one million giraffes used to roam sub-Saharan Africa, but just a century later their population is down to under 100,000.
The animals are now extinct in 7 of the 28 countries they have historically thrived in, according to the United Nations’ Convention on the Conservation on Migratory Species, which met last week.
And those that remain live in scattered, isolated populations, experts say.
The nations where giraffes are extinct include: Burkina Faso, Eritrea, Guinea, Mali, Mauritania, Nigeria, and Senegal.
Infrastructure developments like roads, railways, power lines, and pipelines have created barriers to migration, fragmenting giraffe populations, delegates to the CMS meeting said.
The animals have also lost habitat to livestock, human development and wildfire, they said.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature added 7 out of 9 giraffe species to its Red List of Threatened Species last spring.
The listing was largely ignored by the mainstream media.