Most people love seeing giraffes in the wild, but many tend to think that these animals have no particularly interesting attributes. How wrong they are. There are many fascinating things to learn about giraffes – did you know that they can gallop at up to 50 kilometres per hour, that their tongues can be as long as 53 centimetres, that an adult’s heart can weigh up to 11 kilograms, and that their horns are called ossicones? These are just the basics – the more we know about giraffes the more we realise how much more we still have to discover. Good conservation is based on detailed knowledge of the species we want to conserve. Yet startlingly little is known about the giraffe, despite its status as an iconic animal that tops the must-see list of many visitors to the African continent. Furthermore, conservationists only recently realised that many giraffe populations throughout Africa are in trouble: there are only about 111,000 giraffes remaining in the wild – only a quarter of the number of African elephants. Yet the plight of the giraffe has gone largely unnoticed by the general public. Until now. It all began in 1999 while Julian Fennessy was doing his PhD research on the desert-dwelling Angolan giraffe in the remote catchment area of the Hoanib River in north-western Namibia. His research prompted further questions that had not been answered by other scientists, revealing just how under-studied giraffes are compared to other large mammal species. During this time, the plight of giraffes in other parts of Africa was slowly coming to light, prompting urgent conservation action. Dr Julian and Stephanie Fennessy therefore established the Giraffe Conservation Foundation (GCF) - the only organisation in the world that concentrates solely on the conservation and management of giraffes in the wild throughout Africa. Currently working in 15 countries with all four species of giraffe, their goal is simple: to secure a sustainable future for all giraffe populations in the wild.