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The Colombian government has announced a raft of measures to control its growing population of invasive hippos—descendants of animals introduced to the country by the notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar. Hippos are native to Africa, but in the 1980s, Escobar smuggled four of the animals into Colombia, keeping them at his luxurious country estate, Hacienda Nápoles, in the municipality of Puerto Triunfo—located east of Medellin—which featured a private zoo. As well as the hippos, the zoo housed numerous exotic creatures, including elephants, ostriches, rhinos, giraffes and zebras. Following the death of Escobar, who was killed by Colombian police during a...

Trizer Mwakinya, head of communications at the Kenya Wildlife Service, said Monday that workers from the Kenya Power and Lighting Company “were on site” to rectify the problem. But conservationist Paula Kahumbu in tweets addressed to the power company and the wildlife agency said the power lines have been killing giraffes, vultures and flamingos. Close to 1,400 Rothschild’s giraffes remain in the wild in the world and according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature the species is not considered endangered anymore but is now in the near-threatened category.

The giraffe—nicknamed “Gimli,” in honor of the dwarf character from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings—had short legs but a typically proportioned neck, making it basically the corgi version of a giraffe. Three years later, the team found another male giraffe named “Nigel” with similar proportions on a private farm in Namibia. By carefully analyzing photos of these two giraffes, Brown and his colleagues measured the dimensions of the unusual giraffes’ limbs and necks, comparing them with those of other giraffes in their respective populations. The researchers think the giraffes have skeletal dysplasia, which is any number of disorders that impact...

Two individuals spotted in the wild seem to have classic long necks but unusually short, stubby legs A photo of two giraffes standing in an open space surrounded by shrubs. The giraffe on the right has dwarfism, and it is significantly shorter than the taller giraffe on the left.This is the first time that dwarfism has been documented in captive or wild giraffes. (Emma Wells / Giraffe Conservation Foundation)In 2015, a team of conservation biologists were conducting regular surveys in Uganda’s Murchison Falls National Park when they came across an adult Nubian giraffe that didn't quite fit a typical giraffe's...

Kenya’s only female white giraffe and her calf have been killed by poachers, conservationists have said, in a major blow to conservation of the rare animals found nowhere else in the world. The bodies of the two giraffes were found “in a skeletal state after being killed by armed poachers” in Garissa in eastern Kenya, the Ishaqbini Hirola Community Conservancy said in a statement. Their deaths leave one surviving white giraffe – a lone male borne by the same slaughtered female, the conservancy said. “We are the only community in the world who are custodians of the white giraffe,” said...

While already known that giraffes display preferred choices of companion within their social group, until now it has not been clear what drives these and whether these choices are just some, or all of the time. University of Bristol researcher Zoe Muller and her colleagues from Switzerland, Kenya, Brazil and the United Kingdom aimed to explore what factors drive specific interactions in giraffes, and whether behavioral state or disturbance by humans and predators had any effect on social relationships “The dynamic nature of animal societies often hides multiple layers of complexity,” Muller said.“Our work highlights the complex and dynamic nature...

COPENHAGEN (The Global Edition) – The Copenhagen Zoo has killed several of its staff members early this morning in order to create four new job openings, the Zoo public relations sector reported. Officials of the Zoo say that the four members of the staff were humanely executed after being put to sleep with a lethal injection, and then skinned and chopped up while visitors crowded around and the meat was fed to the lion population.

A kindergarten in Sweden has prohibited teachers to use words that would indicate a child’s gender. Since “he” and “she” can’t be used, children must be defined by the neutral gender. Completely making a mockery of both grammar and common sense, Sweden has taken political correctness to a new level of absurdity. Almost from infancy, young Swedes begin to be educated in “tolerance toward homosexuals, lesbians, bisexuals and transsexuals.” Schools choose books based on this worldview. For example, Snow White and Thumbelina are banned because they are “full of traditional gender stereotypes.” But other types of literature are available in...

Giraffes And Frogs Provide More Evidence Of New Species Hidden In Plain SightGenetic subdivision in the giraffe based on microsatellites alleles. (Credit: David M Brown et al., Courtesy BMC Biology) ScienceDaily (Jan. 2, 2008) — Two new articles provide further evidence that we have hugely underestimated the number of species with which we share our planet. Today sophisticated genetic techniques mean that superficially identical animals previously classed as members of a single species, including the frogs and giraffes in these studies, could in fact come from several distinct 'cryptic' species. In the Upper Amazon, Kathryn Elmer and Stephen Lougheed working...

Richard Gere has won Plain English Campaign's Foot in Mouth award for the year's most baffling celebrity quote. Gere won the 2002 award after telling a Sunday newspaper: "I know who I am. No one else knows who I am. If I was a giraffe and somebody said I was a snake, I'd think 'No, actually I am a giraffe.''Funny, I always thought he was a gerbil - Ivan Among the 10 winners of the Golden Bull award for outrageous gobbledygook include Halifax Insurance, Marconi, the Scottish Parliament and Waitrose. The 'honours' are part of a ceremony to mark Plain...