KENYA | A DAY WITH GIRAFFES.

Betty Leslie-Melville, who has died in Baltimore aged 78, was, with her husband Jock, responsible for founding Giraffe Manor, a conservation centre and guesthouse near Nairobi, Kenya, which helped to ensure the preservation of Rothschild’s giraffe. Distinguished by its deep brown patterned coat, white legs and the male’s five skin-covered “horns”, Giraffa camelopardalis rothschildi was named for the zoologist Walter Rothschild. For years the giraffe was a favourite target for hunters in Kenya, eastern Uganda and southern Sudan.By the time that Jock and Betty Leslie-Melville bought their stone manor house at Langata – which had been built as a horse-breeding farm for the toffee magnate Sir David Duncan in 1932 – the population of Rothschild’s giraffe had dwindled to some 120 animals. The Leslie-Melvilles often found giraffes from a nearby national park wandering on to their 120 acres. “I’d wake up, and they’d have their heads in the second-floor window looking for me,” Betty remembered.An American by birth, Betty Leslie-Melville set up the African Fund for Endangered Wildlife USA in 1972; her husband created an equivalent Kenyan organisation. They adopted Daisy, the first and best-known of their giraffes, and two years later, five baby Rothschild’s giraffe were moved from western Kenya to their estate. In 1983, they established the Giraffe Centre. After Jock Leslie-Melville’s death in 1984, Betty opened their house to travellers, with the profits going to the education centre attached to the estate. There are now between 300 and 400 Rothschild’s giraffe in Kenya, and perhaps some 500 altogether. The Leslie-Melvilles are thought to be the only people ever to have raised wild giraffe.

Article via The Telegraph