Originally published 2019-01-24.
In June 2018 a photo of Kentucky hunter Tess Thompson Talley kneeling beside a dark-coated giraffe she had shot in South Africa spread around the world and drew a wave of anger. The hunt itself was legal and had taken place the year before, in 2017. What turned a year-old Facebook post into a global argument was a single tweet, and the story says as much about trophy hunting and online outrage as it does about one hunter.
Talley's own photos from the 2017 hunt, posted on Facebook roughly a year before they went viral. The giraffe was an older bull whose coat had darkened with age.
What happened and why it went viral
Talley travelled to South Africa in 2017 on what she called a dream hunt for a dark giraffe bull. In her original caption she wrote that she had spotted this rare black giraffe bull and stalked him for quite a while
, describing an animal of more than 18 years and about 4,000 lb, from which she said around 2,000 lb of meat was taken.
The pictures sat quietly on her page until 16 June 2018, when the account AfricaDigest (@africlandpost) reposted them with an insulting caption and a call to share. Within days the images had been picked up by news outlets in the United States, Britain, New Zealand and across Africa.
White american savage who is partly a neanderthal comes to Africa and shoot down a very rare black giraffe coutrsey of South Africa stupidity. Her name is Tess Thompson Talley. Please share pic.twitter.com/hSK93DOOaz
— AfricaDigest (@africlandpost) June 16, 2018
The tweet framed the kill as a foreigner taking a rare animal from Africa with official blessing. That framing struck a nerve: it combined anger at hunting with long-running frustration about wealthy visitors paying to shoot African wildlife. Many replies were personal and abusive, which also became part of the story.
Was it really a rare black giraffe?
Not in the sense most readers assumed. There is no separate "black giraffe" species or type. Male giraffes simply grow darker as they age, so an old bull can look almost black next to younger animals. The colour told people the animal was old, not that it was unusual.
That does not make giraffes safe. The IUCN moved the giraffe to Vulnerable in 2016, after numbers fell from about 155,000 in 1985 to roughly 97,500 by 2016, a drop of more than a third. Some populations in East and Central Africa are endangered or critically endangered. In 2019 giraffes were added to CITES Appendix II, which means international trade in their parts now needs permits.
Southern Africa is the exception. The giraffes of South Africa, Botswana and neighbouring countries belong to a population that has been comparatively stable, with tens of thousands living on reserves and private game farms. Habitat loss and poaching for bushmeat, rather than licensed hunts, are the main drivers of decline elsewhere on the continent.
How Talley and her critics responded
Talley defended the hunt. Several outlets reported that she called it conservation, the argument hunters often make: that removing an old bull past his prime helps the herd, and that the fees paid for hunts fund land and anti-poaching work. She reportedly said much of the meat was eaten or given away, and added in a later post: Hunting may not be for everyone, but it's MY passion!
Critics were not persuaded. Actress Debra Messing was among the public figures who condemned her, reportedly calling her a disgusting, vile, amoral, heartless, selfish murderer
. Others pointed out that a giraffe is not a dangerous predator or a pest, and that posing with its body for a photo looked more like celebration than wildlife management.
A mounted giraffe head shared alongside the story. Trophy displays like this, more than the hunt itself, are what most often turn hunting stories into online controversies.
Between those two camps sat many people who were uneasy for a simpler reason. The hunt was legal, the hunter was named and pictured, and she quickly received threats. Public anger at a practice can easily slide into harassment of one person, and the tone of the original tweet showed how fast that happens.
Trophy hunting in numbers
An analysis by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) of the CITES trade database, published in 2016, found that about 1.7 million hunting trophies were traded internationally between 2004 and 2014. Around 200,000 of those came from species listed as threatened.
The United States was by far the largest importer, bringing in more than 1.2 million trophies between 2005 and 2014, many of them from Canada. American black bears were among the most common, but African species such as impala, wildebeest, kudu and gemsbok also featured heavily. Lions, elephants and leopards make up a small share of the total but draw most of the attention.
South Africa has one of the largest hunting industries on the continent, built on thousands of private game farms. Officials there have cited hunting revenue of around R1.1 billion for a single season (2010), and the government has consistently treated regulated hunting as a legitimate use of wildlife.
Does hunting help or harm conservation?
This is the core of the debate, and the evidence cuts both ways.
The case made by supporters
- Hunting fees can give landowners and communities a reason to keep wild land wild instead of turning it into farmland.
- Tanzania's wildlife authorities have credited hunting revenue with supporting lion populations, and one study found hunting incentives roughly doubled the area under conservation compared with national parks alone.
- The IUCN accepts that well-managed hunting can create real conservation incentives.
The case made by critics
- IFAW and others argue that hunting revenue is tiny next to photographic tourism; one study across eight African countries put it at under one percent of tourism income.
- Corruption can keep fees from ever reaching conservation, as reported in Zimbabwe's elephant hunting.
- Selective killing of large, older males can disturb social groups and remove strong breeding animals.
The honest answer is that results depend heavily on how a country regulates hunting and where the money goes. A licence fee does not automatically become a protected acre.
Bans, restrictions and where things stand
Several countries have chosen to restrict or end trophy hunting. Kenya has banned sport hunting since the 1970s, and India's 1972 wildlife law largely ended hunting of wild animals there. Costa Rica banned sport hunting in 2012. Botswana suspended trophy hunting in 2014 but lifted the ban in 2019, saying elephant numbers and conflict with farmers had grown.
Importing countries have acted too. After the killing of Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe in 2015, Australia, France and the Netherlands moved to stop imports of lion trophies, and several major airlines refused to carry hunting trophies at all. The United Kingdom has debated an import ban on trophies from endangered species for years.
In South Africa, opinion remains split. Some citizens want an outright ban; others are sceptical that a government struggling with poverty and crime will make wildlife a priority, and many rural communities depend on the hunting economy for jobs.
What the Talley case teaches
- Check the claim behind the picture. "Rare black giraffe" was a description of an old bull's coat, not a scientific category.
- Legal is not the same as accepted. The hunt broke no law, yet it collided with how many people now feel about killing large animals for display.
- Focus on systems, not individuals. Questions about permits, quotas and where hunting money goes matter far more for giraffes than one viral photo.
- Know the real threats. For most giraffe populations, habitat loss and poaching do far more damage than licensed hunting.
If the story moved you, supporting groups that protect giraffe habitat, or choosing photographic safaris over hunts, does more for the species than another round of sharing.
Sources: KTVU / Fox: American hunter's images of her black giraffe trophy kill spark outrage (July 2018); Stuff / Newshub (July 2018); AfricaDigest tweet, 16 June 2018; Giraffe (Wikipedia); Trophy hunting (Wikipedia, incl. IFAW 2016 figures).
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