Giraffes Need Endangered Species Act Protection, U.S. Officials Say

A new proposal would restrict the import of hunting trophies, pelts, bone carvings and other items.

The tallest land animals in the world are declining so precipitously that they should be protected under the United States Endangered Species Act, federal wildlife officials said Wednesday.

While giraffes are found in Africa, the proposal would restrict the import of their parts into the United States and would increase conservation funding to help the animals survive.

In 2022, the last year for which international data was available, thousands of giraffe parts entered the United States: trophies, skins, feet, bones, bone carvings and leather pieces. Although trade is not the main reason for giraffes’ population losses, officials say it could add pressure on their numbers. The proposal would prohibit such imports without special permits.

“This action supports giraffe conservation while ensuring the United States does not contribute further to their decline,” Martha Williams, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said in a statement.

About 117,000 wild giraffes are left worldwide, according to the Giraffe Conservation Foundation, down almost 30 percent from the 1980s.

Northern giraffes have declined an estimated 77 percent since 1985, the wildlife service noted, to 5,919 animals from 25,653. The animals have vanished completely from numerous countries in West Africa.

It’s unclear what the election of Donald J. Trump would mean for the proposal, which will be open for public comment for 90 days and is supposed to be finalized within a year. It was during the last Trump administration that federal officials decided to consider listing giraffes as threatened or endangered, in response to a petition by advocacy groups.

The wildlife service attributed plummeting giraffe populations to habitat loss, as people take over land for urbanization and agriculture, poaching and the impacts of drought fueled by climate change. Without addressing these main drivers, conservationists say, little progress can be made.

Scientists do not entirely agree on the number of species and subspecies of giraffes. In its proposal, the agency recognized three subspecies of Northern giraffes, all of which it said should be listed as endangered. Two other varieties, reticulated and Masai giraffes, would be considered threatened, a less acute category. Two more subspecies, the Angolan and South African giraffe, were not found to be threatened but would be treated as such because they are so similar to the imperiled species that it would be all but impossible for law enforcement to tell them apart.

Advocacy groups petitioned for federal protections in 2017, after the scientific authority on the status of species, the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List, determined that giraffes were threatened with extinction. (It considered giraffes as a single species.)

“We actually realized that there are fewer giraffes in Africa than elephants,” said Tanya Sanerib, international legal director with the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the groups that petitioned the federal government. “The species had been undergoing a silent extinction.”

There is a split among conservationists over whether trophy hunting helps or hurts threatened species. Supporters say the practice creates important economic incentives to sustain them. Opponents call it cruel and say it can exert problematic pressure on populations because hunters tend to target the largest and most impressive looking animals. Each side accuses the other of perpetuating a colonialist mind-set.

The planet’s biodiversity is experiencing declines that are unparalleled in human history, an intergovernmental panel of scientists found in 2019. The main driver on land: humans taking up so much of the planet for agriculture and other development. At sea, it’s overfishing. Climate change is an increasing threat.

Countries around the world have agreed to a set of ambitious targets to halt and reverse biodiversity loss, but recent talks ended without an agreement on how to mobilize and distribute funds necessary for the effort.

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