Bad Things Come In Threes

It's been a rough month for the Giants of the Savanna team at the Dallas Zoo.  Three giraffes have passed away in the span of a month.  Two of them were adult animals, and may be linked by a possible medical issue, such as a contaminant.  The third was a calf, whose death was the result of an accident.  It's hard losing one giraffe - let alone three - and I'm very sorry that the staff is having to deal with this.

In recent years, zoos have adopted a much more open manner of discussing animal comings and goings with the public.  It used to be that all births were kept quiet at first in case the neonate didn't survive.  Deaths were quietly ignored, lest thy generate bad press.  Today, there's an emphasis on being completely honest with the public and sharing all news.  It helps members of the community know that nothing is being kept hidden from them and that the animals are receiving the best possible care, even when things go wrong.  In situations like this, it also enables the public to join the staff in mourning the loss.

The downside of this, of course, is that everyone hears about all of the deaths, which leads some members of the public to decide that they're going to play Sherlock Holmes and try solving mysteries, even when there weren't any.  Excluding Dallas, there was a spate of giraffe deaths earlier this year across the country.  There was no connection between any of them - some were age related, some medical, some accidental, in one case a fire - and they took place at zoos spread over thousands of miles.  Still, I saw lots of people going on about "What's going on with giraffes all the sudden?" and trying to prove some sort of link between them all, as if there were a giraffe-killing conspiracy underway.  The fact is, there are just a lot of giraffes in zoos in this country, which means that there's always a few that are getting ready to pass.  Sometimes, a few of them just happen to go in rapid succession and, unlike when you were younger, now we're actually telling you what's going on. 

Best wishes to the Dallas team during this hard time.  It'll get better, but in the meantime know that a lot of us are thinking of you.