How Poop Could Save the Giraffe

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IIt’s a bit like a Hershey’s kiss,” says Jenna Stacy-Dawes.

She talks about giraffe droppings. The droppings are surprisingly small for an animal that can reach the height of two stacked basketball hoops as an adult. The best samples are at the top of the pile, she explains to the team of researchers gathered before her at a field camp in Kenya. This preserves the outermost layer, the part that rubs against the animal’s intestines.

Stacy-Dawes teaches researchers a radical new method of tracking vulnerable giraffes. We know surprisingly little about giraffes, Stacy-Dawes tells me later, and these tiny droppings can reveal a lot. “What can we learn from feces data? Everything,” she says. What food they eat, their habitat preferences, what species they belong to and perhaps, eventually, what subspecies. This information would be particularly useful because some giraffe subspecies are critically endangered.

“Giraffes just haven’t been studied,” says Stacy-Dawes, a wildlife population sustainability expert based at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance (SDZWA). “There’s a strange perception of: ‘well, I see them everywhere’ – in documentaries, zoos or on safaris – ‘so they must be good.’ Unfortunately, this is not the case. There is only one giraffe for every four elephants in Africa. Little is known about the giraffe’s basic biology, behavior and diet, she says.

Traditional methods of tracking these long-necked creatures over long distances are complicated, expensive and even dangerous. They consist of equipping each giraffe with trackers, which are generally hung around the animal’s tail. Trackers can provide precise geolocation information over a period of months and sometimes years. But this requires immobilizing large animals using tranquilizers. Collecting and analyzing feces is a much cheaper, more efficient and more humane way to track their movements.

“Giraffes react very badly to the drugs used to kill them. [Veterinarians] I don’t know why,” says Stacy-Dawes. After receiving the medicine, “the giraffe ran away. They break into a real sprint and have this starry look in their eyes. They don’t really pay attention to where they’re going,” says Stacy-Dawes. The result is dangerous both for the animals and for the grounds crew, who lower the drugged giraffe to the ground using ropes.

“Equipping giraffes with trackers is very, very complicated,” agrees Mrinalini Erkenswick Watsa, a colleague of Stacy-Dawes from the SDZWA. “Whereas you literally can’t walk more than 10 feet in the savannah without tripping over giraffe feces. It’s ubiquitous and it’s easier on the animal. It’s also considerably cheaper for us.”

Erkenswick Watsa is a geneticist developing the molecular toolkit for analyzing fecal samples. The work mainly involves adapting existing technology to the four recently reclassified giraffe species, but Erkenswick Watsa also wants to make it practical to use a genetic kit directly in the field. “I would ideally like us to move toward something like a COVID test,” says Erkenswick Watsa, “that can be done overnight by a veterinarian with minimal laboratory training.”

“What can we get from feces data? Everything.”

Giraffes can travel thousands of miles, but some choose to stay local, while others gather in groups of hundreds of individuals, Stacy-Dawes says. So-called “fission-fusion” groups have been observed, in which unrelated individuals choose to come together, sometimes an unrelated adult and juvenile. “There’s so much about social structure that we don’t know. Do we see bulls sticking around? How common are fission-fusion groups? We have no idea,” says Stacy-Dawes.

The reclassification of the giraffe is recent, officially announced by the IUCN in August 2025, grouping what was once considered a single species into four distinct species: the Masai, Reticulated, Southern and Northern giraffe species, divided into a total of seven subspecies. (Scientists, including Stacy-Dawes, had been working on this classification for a few years before the IUCN’s official announcement.) But even experts can’t tell them apart visually. “The coat pattern, or what they call ‘coat,’ is not a good tool for distinguishing between different flavors of giraffe,” says Julian Fennesssy, director of the Giraffe Conservation Foundation. Stacy-Dawes says the similarities in appearance hide species as different as “a polar bear is from a grizzly bear.”

“Over the last 300 years, the range of giraffes has declined by 90 percent across Africa,” says Fennessy, a figure that matches what the Giraffe Conservation Foundation estimates they have lost in terms of giraffe population. “They have lost most of their habitat due to human population growth, associated agriculture, [landscape] fragmentation, etc. Humans do what they do,” says Fennessy.

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Currently, the four species face different levels of threat. “The conservation status on the Red List is obsolete because [giraffe] “Now that they have been recognized as four species, the IUCN will be re-evaluating each of those four species, but we know that some of them are critically endangered, others are endangered and others are likely to be listed as ‘least concern’, such as the southern African giraffe,” Fennessy said.

Where there is famine, civil war, or both, giraffes are consumed as food. “It’s often called ‘war fodder,’” says Fennessy. “Because if [militants] they take ivory or horns, and they make money from it, well, they don’t eat these animals. They prefer to eat giraffe, they call it sweet meat,” Fennessy explains. “A ball brings a lot of food to people. They were used to feed the armies.

In other countries, such as South Africa, giraffe populations have been actively managed for conservation purposes, with individuals translocated either to bolster populations in national parks or rescued from conflict zones. Some of the historical translocations were carried out without recognizing the differences between species, says Stacy-Dawes. This means that some animals live in territory that is unfamiliar to them.

“Over the past 300 years, the range of giraffes has declined by 90 percent across Africa.”

“Fecal tests [which confirm species ID through genetics] let us say, no, we shouldn’t move this individual to this part of the country because it wouldn’t have been there originally,” says Stacy-Dawes. The Giraffe Conservation Foundation is considering reversing some of the translocations that have moved the animals to the wrong habitat.

In 2019, with Fennessy and colleagues from Germany, the United States, Zambia, and Namibia, Stacy-Dawes published research updating geographic distribution maps of the four giraffe species in sub-Saharan Africa. The study, which updated data from a few decades ago, Stacy-Dawes said, was based primarily on aerial and ground observations of giraffes, including marked individuals. Stacy-Dawes believes this dataset can benefit from additional data points and more precise species identification.

“There are areas in southern Ethiopia or western Somalia where there might be giraffes, but people just don’t go there. And even in the places we can go, it’s expensive to collect data on the ground.” Fecal studies can complement, and in some cases replace, direct observation and handling of animals, says Stacy-Dawes.

After their training, the field research team went looking for the giraffe. They returned late in the evening, looking exhausted but satisfied. In 12 hours, they managed to track down 24 animals, tracking each one until it shed a new sample of feces. The scats were compared to individuals, which were carefully photographed and identified in the field. Knowing the sex and estimated age of the giraffe will help understand genetics. Dusty and sunny, the team called back the prospectors who had spent a successful day searching for rare minerals.

“Poop is gold,” says Erkenswick Watsa. “It’s the most valuable thing we can get.”

Main image: EcoPrint / Shutterstock

• Elena Kazamia

  Published on February 26, 2026

  Elena Kazamia is a Greek science writer. She holds an MSc in Conservation from University College London and a Ph.D. in Plant Science from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom