63. The rise of the giants.

I’m going away for a short holiday at the end of the week. The 23thorns brood is going down to the bush. This is a big deal. Over the last few years we haven’t been able to go nearly as often as we’d like to. The place we go to is in a malaria area, and while there are precautions one can take, the kids have been too small to undergo the treatment should they catch it.

This year, though, things are different. I’ve been feeding the kids on a pure McDonalds and Ice-cream diet for months, and now we’re good to go. I’m a bit worried though. In our extended absence, something sinister has been happening. This is a giraffe.

The gentle giant of the African wild. Snort.

I’ve always been a bit surprised by people’s reactions to giraffes. When you take people down to the bush who’ve never been there before, and ask them what they would most like to see, the giraffe is often at the top of the list, ahead of lions and leopards and elephants. I do get it, I suppose. Lions and leopards are just big cats. Elephants are quite something, but there is nothing like a giraffe. It manages to be beautiful and freaky looking at the same time. Strangely graceful and strangely awkward. Comically grave and gravely comical.

Well, hello there!

What they have always been is utterly charming and just a little awe inspiring. A giraffe is a big animal. It’s huge. A male giraffe is over 6m tall (that’s over 20 feet) and weighs over a ton (2500 pounds). Which makes it a bit of a problem that they’ve decided not to be charming any more. Have a look;

Anyone else having a Jurassic Park flashback?

I have never done a course in body language before, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I don’t think that woman is charmed. Still, it’s no big deal, right? A six metre, 1 ton animal just ran after a car for three miles and made an otherwise perfectly charming looking young woman use some colourful Afrikaans. The experts chalked it up to a hormonal imbalance, rather than the animal simply having been possessed by demons. Come out on safari; it’s nice and warm, and this sort of thing almost never happens.

Oops. That one got close enough to kick off the rear view mirror. It’s not nice to laugh at the naivety of tourists, but I love that that German guy wanted to radio for help. Doesn’t he know that almost all of our elite giraffe emergency response teams are out on strike?

Still, no harm, no foul. No one was hurt and it’s not like you really need a rear view mirror in the bush. There’s not much traffic, and all you’re likely to see is a mad-eyed, hormonally-imbalanced towering freak of nature bearing down on you at an unlikely clip. They can rattle along at over 50km/h (35mph). They decided that one was hormonally imbalanced too. Must be something in the water. There’s no way the giraffes are the vanguard of the coming animal apocalypse.

For what it’s worth, kicking a mirror off a jeep is no big deal for a giraffe. They have feet like dinner plates, and a well-aimed kick can kill a male lion.

This is what is known as a “dignified withdrawal.”

It seems that not all giraffes have been overtaken by the desire to murder cars yet. There’s one outside Bloemfontein which has decided to warm up a bit first, by hurdling over BMW convertibles. I don’t think we have much to fear from her though; she didn’t even make it all the way over. Nobody but the BMW was hurt, and the driver’s seat probably needed a wash anyway. Hormones.

For her next trick, she’s going to try and slide underneath.

The giraffes aren’t just waging their war on the vehicular front. Last year, a man was head-butted by one. Which sounds funny, in a biker-bar joke sort of way. It’s not. Giraffes might use their feet for fighting lions, but they use their heads for fighting each other. The skull of a male giraffe never stops growing, building up odd shaped bumps of bone. Their necks and heads end up like huge sledgehammers. And they use them like this;

The guy who got head-butted did not end up with a headache. He ended up in intensive care, with severe spinal damage. But no one is to blame here. The man was drawing blood, no doubt for the giraffe’s benefit. The giraffe was being stabbed in the neck by a strange little pink thing. I just hope the guy is doing OK. And they left the giraffe alone. This was not part of the coming giraffocalypse. Just a horrible accident.

As horrible, but less explicable is the unfolding mystery down in Kwazulu Natal. A seventy-year-old man popped out to a local game reserve for his regular morning walk. Hours later, he staggered home covered in blood. “I ran away.” He said. And died. No-one really knows what happened. But there is a prime suspect. A giraffe. With a hormone imbalance.

Are you looking at me?

I’m trying very hard not to see a pattern here. It doesn’t pay to be alarmist. It doesn’t pay to be foolhardy either. I’m going to be wrapping Mrs 23thorns and the kids up in bubble-wrap and making them wear crash helmets. It might not protect them from the giraffes, but it will give me a head start if we need to flee. And I’m popping out tomorrow to buy some darts filled with HRT. It never hurts to be prepared.

Anyone know where I can get my hands on a couple of these?