THE GIRAFFE 
of narrow white lines; and although there is a slight approximation to 
this scheme of colouration in the typical form of the northern giraffe, 
the latter is not nearly so striking in appearance as the first-named species, 
which is generally considered to be the handsomest of all the giraffes. 
Old male giraffes are usually said to attain to a standing height of from 
18 ft to 19 ft, and they may occasionally do so, but personally I do not 
believe that such measurements represent the average height of these 
animals. Writing of the northern giraffe in “ The Great and Small Game 
of Africa,” my old friend, the late Mr A. H. Neumann, put the average 
height of full-grown males at 16 ft and that of cows at 14 ft, and he further 
says: “And though I have not found these dimensions exceeded respec- 
tively in any of the southern specimens of either sex I have myself killed 
anywhere, I have read in the accounts of other hunters of considerably 
taller animals being obtained in parts of South Africa.” Unfortunately, I 
only took the height of two male giraffes in Southern Africa. They were 
both old bulls, and, I thought, big ones, but the measurement with a 
tape line between two stakes, the one placed at the top of the horns and 
the other at the base of the forefoot, only gave 16 ft 6 in. in the one case 
and 17 ft in the other. Two years ago I measured a fine old giraffe bull of 
the so-called five -horned species on the Gwas N’gishu plateau in East 
Africa. This animal must have stood, according to my measurement, 
16 ft 5 in. Another, which was certainly a larger animal — the length of 
its forefoot was 12| in. — was measured by a friend who made it 17 ft 8 in.; 
but as this measurement was taken in two sections, and was not, therefore, 
in a straight line, the animal’s standing height must have been some 
inches less than this. 
In South Africa some 120 years ago the giraffe was still plentiful imme- 
diately north of the Orange River, in Great Namaqualand, and from there 
it ranged without a break northwards through Bechuanaland and the 
Kalahari, to the province of Angola, as well as throughout the wooded 
country in the north and east of the Transvaal, and from thence eastwards 
as far as the Lundi river, and northwards through Western Matabeleland 
to the neighbourhood of the Victoria Falls. Many decades of hunting, first 
by mounted Europeans, and later by natives, both well mounted and 
armed with breech -loading rifles, have very much curtailed the range of 
the giraffe in this part of the continent ; but it is quite a mistake to think 
that the indiscriminate slaughter of these most interesting animals is 
still going on in those regions, and that the species in that part of Africa 
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