The South African giraffeGiraffa camelopardalis giraffa: a conservation success story

Half of South Africa's giraffes were estimated to live on private land. Game ranches and other private properties had become a substantial part of the animals' national refuge, alongside national parks and provincial reserves. Understanding that recovery required looking beyond protected-area counts to animals dispersed among many separate owners.

Francois Deacon and Andy Tutchings gathered information from wildlife managers, provincial authorities and private landowners between 2014 and 2016. They received responses from 241 of 1,383 registered game farms in five provinces. To estimate animals on unsurveyed properties, they compared two approaches: scaling counts by available natural habitat, and multiplying registered farms by the average number reported on responding farms. They combined those estimates with public-reserve figures.

The resulting national estimate was roughly 21,000–27,000 giraffes, with around half on privately owned land. Private holdings had expanded greatly from the small numbers reported in the early 1980s. These were extrapolations from incomplete, voluntary responses, not a census of every giraffe; they also could not prove which incentives caused the increase. Nevertheless, the distribution changes what conservation involves. Maintaining South Africa's giraffes means coordinating many populations and their movements between properties, including attention to genetic diversity, rather than managing national parks alone.