Baby giraffe at Calgary Zoo dies days after birth
The Calgary Zoo says a baby giraffe died Saturday just two days after its birth.
“It is with heavy hearts that we announce that a giraffe calf has passed away shortly after birth,” the Calgary Zoo said in a post on its website Tuesday.
The male calf was born to sixyear-old Masai giraffe Emara on Dec. 28.
“When it quickly became clear he wasn’t nursing and was failing to thrive, the animal care and veterinary teams worked intensely to help the calf, including intervening by tube to feed him,” the post said.
“Sadly, the calf passed away just 48 hours after birth.”
The zoo said initial necropsy results show a possible congenital issue. Further results are pending.
Colleen Baird, general curator with the Calgary Zoo, said staff were expecting the baby giraffe to arrive around the holidays.
The birth was successful, but the male calf took quite a while to stand up and was not nursing.
By the second day, Baird said animal care and vet staff needed to intervene, doing a health check and tube-feeding the giraffe, hoping it would then nurse, but the animal died that evening.
Baird described it as a sad loss for the zoo. “We’re all sad about this,” she said. “But we do understand that sometimes there’s factors in place that are out of our hands, and although we have a lot of expertise in how to care for animals and step in when we need to, there’s also factors that we won’t know and we can’t fix, and I think that this is one of those times.”
The calf’s mother was brought to Calgary in the summer of 2016 from the San Diego Zoo as part of a breeding program, Baird said.
There are three females and one male giraffe at the Calgary Zoo.
The last calf, Moshi, was born in 2015.