How the Giraffe Got Its Neck

It’s difficult to know what to make of the giraffe. It shuffles like a camel (right legs forward, then left legs) but runs like a rabbit (hind legs forward, then front legs). Its distinctive aroma repulses many ticks but enchants certain people. It bellows, hisses, and moans in the wild, and in captivity it hums in the dark. It naps with its head aloft but sleeps like a swan, with its head on its haunches. Had Aristotle ever seen a giraffe, he might have said that it was the product of an interspecies dalliance at the watering hole, which he thought of as a kind of zoological swingers’ club—a place where “bastard animals are born to heterogeneous pairs.” Centuries of further guesswork failed to clarify the giraffe’s essential nature. Simone Sigoli, a Renaissance traveller, wrote that it had the body of an ostrich, only with fine white wool instead of feathers, and that it ate bread. “It is quite a deformed thing to see,” he concluded. Sigoli’s contemporary Sir John Mandeville (likely the pseudonym of a travel-averse plagiarist) described the “gerfaunts” of Arabia as deer-rumped horses. For the eunuch general Zheng Hi, who brought a giraffe home to Beijing, in 1415, it was a mythical qílín incarnate. Not until the seventeenth century did the English, who fixated on the giraffe’s camel-ish shape and leopard-ish coloring, stop calling it a camelopard. Today, of course, we recognize the giraffe as a distinct species, though the misapprehensions of the past endure in the animal’s Linnaean name: Giraffa camelopardalis.