The First Description of Dominance Hierarchy in Captive Giraffe: Not Loose and Egalitarian, but Clear and Linear

Female giraffes can keep their places in a feeding hierarchy for years. At zoo feeding places, repeated encounters revealed a surprisingly consistent order of who displaced whom. A giraffe that stepped aside was not simply ending one disagreement: across many encounters, those withdrawals could reveal an enduring rank.

Edita Horová, Karolína Brandlová and Markéta Gloneková watched Rothschild's giraffes in three Czech zoos. They recorded 1,353 encounters during 240 hours of observation, counting only interactions with a clear winner and a submissive response. Four original herds were studied; after two Prague herds were combined, the resulting herd was followed across three successive years. The team compared rankings with age, sex and time spent in the herd.

Clear linear hierarchies appeared in several herd observations, with older giraffes generally outranking younger ones. Adult females in the combined Prague herd largely retained their relative positions over three years; two exchanged places in the final year. These findings concern captive animals competing around concentrated food, not a demonstrated universal order in wild giraffes. They nevertheless overturn a simple picture of endlessly shifting, socially unstructured groups: under these conditions, female giraffes maintained a measurable and persistent order.