Giraffe’s tale has long legs

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/06/2018 (2940 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Now, before you stop and ask yourself why you’re reading a story about a giraffe — one who may be pregnant, but hasn’t even been confirmed to be — you need to travel back to the winter of 2017.

April, the giraffe in question, was then an unknown giraffe, maybe even a little-down-on-her-luck giraffe, having ended up at a roadside zoo in Harpursville, N.Y., a hamlet of 3,500 people about 290 kilometres northwest of New York City, at the age of 15. For the uninitiated, that’s solidly approaching middle age in giraffe-years, and for this story’s purpose, we may guess that the animals share feelings similar to ours about the inexorable march of time, the feelings of futility that recognition sometimes evokes, and the ultimate inevitability that awaits us all.

But the park’s trainers had done April a favour by pairing her with another giraffe, Oliver — at five years old, practically jailbait and, ahem, likely inexperienced. In the wild, the young lad would have been lucky to have had a female giraffe even so much as glance at him. But here they were, two lonely giraffes together at the Animal Adventure Park in this out-of-the-way corner of the Earth, and well, you might be able to surmise what happened next.

April became pregnant with the calf who would be her fourth, and it is safe to say nothing was ever quite the same for her again. After her owners decided to livestream her pregnancy, April became an internet phenom, a YouTube starlet, the latest digital unknown to leap to worldwide fame without ever leaving the bedroom.

There were detractors, of course. But her fame only grew after the feed was briefly taken down in February 2017 by YouTube after some people, suspected to be animal rights activists, complained it displayed nudity and sexual content.

They couldn’t stop the sensation that was April. Millions of people tuned in from around the world to watch her as she paced around her pen, eagerly awaiting the calf’s birth, weathering frustration, boredom, ennui and eventually countless conspiracy theories as she blew past due dates in January, February and March. The BBC, no stranger to the intricacies of the gestation periods of royalty, called it the “most anticipated birth” since Prince George was born to William and Kate.

At its peak, April’s live stream drew more than five million views per day. And the attention raised hopes her fame could translate into a financial boost in Harpursville, where a once-thriving manufacturing sector had seen the harsh realities of the globalized economy in recent years.

Nearby hotels booked packages which included admission to the animal park; signs were installed along the highway by a local business development group. Finally, in her namesake month last year, the giraffe gave birth to Tajiri, now three metres tall at just over a year old.

And this week, April’s trainers said she might be pregnant again.

The act of conceiving is a typically sacred time, and one should give a couple space, to avoid prying and speculating — or worse, rumour-mongering — and wait patiently for the good news. But April lives in public now, to paraphrase the 2009 documentary about early internet livestreaming, and thus everything is perhaps on the table.

It’s certainly online, in the form of Animal Adventure Park’s Giraffe Cam.

Jordan Patch, the owner of the animal park, said in a video published on Facebook this week that another zoo was helping them complete tests to determine whether April was pregnant again.

“We have some exciting news,” he said.

It was not exactly clear what the news was.

“We’ve done a lot of watching, a lot of looking, and we all have our opinions,” another zoo employee said in the video. But she noted they were not 100 per cent sure the giraffe was pregnant.

In a previous era, perhaps the story of an unconfirmed pregnancy of a giraffe, fair as she is, at a small zoo in, respectfully, the middle of nowhere, would have hardly made a splash. Perhaps the editors at places like Fox News, USA Today and the Washington Post would have cast their weary eyes at the subject matter and said firmly, “Next.”

Perhaps you would have moved on, too, saved a click, opened a book, gone outside.

But this is not an era like the ones before it. The livestream continues. The Facebook video got 870,000 views. And here we are.

— Washington Post