Let’s talk about giraffes – the tallest animal on earth. These stunning, majestic, proud yet friendly creatures are a sight to behold. But you haven’t seen the best of them. This extremely rare mother and baby giraffe look like their from a different planet, one much better than ours in their absence of color and pattern.
Incredibly rare with what appears to be only a handful sightings in the wild captured on film, a pair of rare white giraffes have been spotted in Kenya, to the delight of local residents and conservationists. White reticulated giraffes are pale in color thanks to a genetic condition called leucism. Unlike albinism, in leucism skin cells don’t produce pigmentation, but soft tissues, like dark eyes, do.
After local residents tipped them off, conservationists found the giraffes in the Ishaqbini Hirola Conservancy in Kenya’s Garissa county. The area is managed by the Hirola Conservation Programme (HCP), an NGO dedicated to preserving the critically endangered hirola antelope, one of the rarest in the world.
So far the white giraffes have been found only in Tanzania and Kenya; the first was reported in January 2016 in Tarangire National park, Tanzania. The two pictured here come from Kenya. According to the HCP, this most recent footage is only the third known sighting of a white giraffe.
