There’s an escaped giraffe on the run in Texas. Why was she there at all?

In mid-June, a giraffe named Gracie escaped from a ranch in Texas located about 100 miles west of San Antonio. An intensive search — including helicopters and drones — is still underway in Texas Hill Country, and a $5,000 award awaits whoever finds her.

Like many charismatic animals who’ve escaped their confines, Gracie has gone viral. But the attention paid to her escape is largely lighthearted. Social media users are sharing AI-generated images about what Gracie might be doing on her “vacation” from the ranch (eating pizza, visiting downtown San Antonio), while local and national news outlets are publishing frequent updates on the search, sometimes in whimsical, quirky language.

I get it. A giraffe. On the run. In Texas? It’s a captivating story. But if you look a little closer at the life from which Gracie escaped, the story becomes less lighthearted.

Much the same can be said for other viral animal moments in recent memory, like Moo Deng, the pygmy hippo, and Punch the monkey. Both are adorably cute animals, yet they live in small, unnatural enclosures — an uncomfortable fact that the internet has been all too eager to collectively set aside for a moment of entertainment. Gracie’s story isn’t so different.

Gracie is a reticulated giraffe — an endangered African species — who otherwise lives at Cedar Hollow Ranch in Leakey, Texas. It isn’t a ranch in the traditional sense, but, rather, an exotic animal breeding operation. Cedar Hollow breeds giraffes, as well as a variety of other ungulates — hooved animals — native to Africa and Asia, like the barasingha (a deer species), bongos (an antelope species), and aoudads (a type of sheep), several of which are endangered, threatened, or vulnerable in the wild.

When I asked Cedar Hollow’s manager Vick Jones why they breed giraffes, he said that they sell them to people who “enjoy having wildlife” (of which there are a huge number in Texas alone. Some 5,000 ranches or large landholders there have exotic animals). They have also sold giraffes to zoos. Jones didn’t say which ones, but there are a number of small exotic zoos in the area that allow visitors to hand-feed giraffes and interact directly with various other wild animals.

In other words, these wild species are captively bred for lives far from their native ecosystems and sold for vast sums of money — upward of hundreds of thousands of dollars — to be kept essentially as wild pets or as entertainment in zoos, which confine animals in enclosures a tiny fraction of their natural range and which are poorly regulated.

But Cedar Hollow’s giraffes may be the relatively lucky ones. Of the ungulates bred there, many are destined for other ranches — not as high-priced pets, but as hunted game. According to a report from Wildlife Partners, a company that works with ranchers on exotic wildlife breeding, Texas has some 500 ranches open to the public to hunt exotic animals — and approximately 2,500 additional private ranches where at least some exotic hunting is done. And all of those animals have to come from somewhere.

It’s legal and actually somewhat straightforward to breed and sell non-native, “exotic livestock” in Texas, like giraffes and other ungulates — even some that are endangered in the wild. And it’s a big business in the state, with more than two million exotic animals across 135 species, valued at $1.5 billion annually.

When I asked Jones if the other animals at Cedar Hollow — the exotic antelopes, deer, and sheep — are raised for hunting, he said, “No, we don’t raise any for hunting. … If they go someplace, and they wind up in that situation, that’s not on us.” However, Cedar Hollow’s owner said, in 2018, that these animals are bred for collectors and for hunting ranches.

Inside the US canned hunting industry

A hunting ranch may sound somewhat quaint, but they operate a particularly cruel type of hunt called a captive or “canned hunt.”

“The canned hunting experience allows people to basically get a guaranteed kill,” Devan Schowe, a campaigns manager at the wildlife protection nonprofit Born Free USA, explained to me. “They lure the animals to these feeding stations that they feed them at every day for their whole lives, and it’s enclosed, so the humans on the hunt and the animals are all in a fenced-in area.”

These fenced-in areas can be large, Schowe said, so, sometimes, there is a chase element. But, “the animals cannot escape, so they’re being hunted in their own enclosures.”

Customers pay thousands of dollars to go on these hunts and take home a “trophy” body part, like antlers and horns. One famous Texas ranch, which has been described as the “Disneyland for exotic game hunters,” lets you shoot a zebra for $6,500 or an emu for $1,000. While many of its clients go on “safari” style hunts, traversing large ranches with a guide, they can also hang out in air-conditioned “blinds” — small towers — drinking and playing cards until a surveillance system sets off an alarm to let them know an animal is nearby for them to shoot.

Texas dominates the US canned hunting industry, and its roots can be found in the middle of the 20th century, when ranch owners began buying up “excess” exotic animals from zoos. While canned hunt opportunities aren’t hard to find in other states — from Pennsylvania, to Florida, to Ohio — around 26 states have fully or partially banned them. A lot of Americans are uncomfortable with the practice, though; a recent hunting industry survey found that 50 percent disapprove of canned hunts and only 30 percent approve.

While endangered and threatened species like some of these ungulates are protected by the Endangered Species Act, a loophole in federal law that was created by a Texas lawmaker exempts three commonly hunted endangered species, allowing them to be legally hunted. In Texas, it’s illegal to hunt exotic animals considered to be dangerous, like lions and tigers, but there are no limits on how exotic animals deemed non-dangerous are killed, or how many, so long as they’re killed on private property; you just need a hunting license and the landowner’s permission.

The conservation question

Cedar Hollow Ranch says its breeding work contributes to the greater good of conservation.

“How else are you going to help save a species, help preserve a species, if we don’t have ranches in Texas and ranches in other parts of the United States now that have room and people to protect these animals?” Jones proposed to me.

It’s a pervasive argument in the exotic breeding and canned hunting industry, and there are a handful of examples of exotic animals bred in Texas that have been shipped off to their native lands in an effort to rebound their wild populations. But animal advocates suggest that the conservation message is used to shield their true motive: profit.

Indeed, it is hard to follow how raising endangered, exotic species to be kept as pets, shot in enclosed areas, or offered up in pens to zoo visitors constitutes “protecting” them, or how it meaningfully helps vulnerable populations in Africa and Asia, where their threats are largely habitat loss for agriculture (especially cattle grazing), poaching, and climate change.

Instead, animal advocates argue, these activities normalize the idea that we can do what we want to animals.

I asked Jones whether the company asks its buyers why they’re purchasing these wild animals, and he said he doesn’t. “Why should I?” he asked me. “They have a right to own those animals. And once they’re their animals, sir, they have a right to whatever.”

The story of Gracie the giraffe is a reminder that there’s often a darker side to the viral animal moment of the month — one that those who stand to profit from that darkness would rather not have come to light. That much was evident when I called Cedar Hollow Ranch. Jones repeatedly said I was being disrespectful by asking questions about its breeding practices, and who it sells its animals to, and what they’re used for.

“You’re the only person that has had this kind of questioning,” Jones said about the many journalists whose calls he’s answered while Gracie has been on the run. “I’m sorry I answered your phone call.”