These Rare Giraffes Were Killed Just for Their Tails (Exclusive Video) | National Geographic

[Music] Seeing these giraffes from the air was really exciting. Seeing them anywhere is exciting, 'cause there's so few of them left. But this was my first shot, and there's a giraffe standing in this small clearing by a small tree. And then the next thing I know, there's three.

The next morning, I was informed that about 12 hours after we had seen these giraffes, there was a ranger Patrol in the area that heard 10 gunshots. It was too late for them to follow the shots to find out where they were. They waited till the next morning. They went in the direction of the shots and, lo and behold, they found three dead giraffe in the area that we had been in. Okay, here's one [Applause], the carcass. That was horrible. It was horrible for them, it was horrible for me and the team, and the crushing realization that it's most likely it was these guys, these ones that we'd seen. Um, and now there's three less; now there's 37. It was really awful.

I was working in a very remote iconic National Park called Gamba National Park. Gamba is a park that is run by ICCM, the Congolese government, in association with African Parks, an organization that's responsible for the management of the park and the wildlife. It's a very challenging environment on the Congolese and Sudan border. The first thing you have to do is secure the perimeter. This is the front lines of the poaching crisis with a terrorist network and highly militarized forces surrounding us in every direction.

This is a tough environment with how high this grass is. Patrolling these grounds, you're always at risk of an ambush. When you approach these animals through the tall grass, even though you can't see them yet, you know you're getting close to the carcasses because the sound of the flies just starts growing and growing, and [Music] growing. What an eff salute way! Sadly, in my career, I've seen poached elephants before, at multiple stages of decay, but I'd never seen a giraffe.

Who kills a giraffe? You know, um, it was awful. Because of their size and their exquisite form, they take a particularly grotesque appearance when they're lying down, contorted on the ground. This is a bo. You walk over to that carcass; that's a lot smaller carcass. Go and see what that is; that might be a female. [Music]

This is a tragedy of epic proportions for this species, the Cordan giraffe, a unique subspecies. These are the last ones left in the entire region. Sad pod; this is a female. Every single female that we lose is a breeding female that can produce more. On further examination, there are also some things you notice immediately, which is they didn't take any of the meat. All that they did take is the tail.

We can now clearly see what happened. I think they were probably all shot at the same time; the first one in the brain, the other one dropped right next to the first one, and this one was shot multiple times as it was running away. You can see some shots next to the spine on the left and some shots from behind under the tail. This giraffe carcass is only 36 to 48 hours old. What happened here was the poachers. You can see where somebody cut this open with a knife, so the poachers cut this open to give access to the vultures so that the vultures can finish this carcass within two days and we can't detect the carcass from the vultures. The longer the vultures stay around, the longer we have to detect it.

So this one was the one that was CED. This was a giraffe that had a satellite collar on. That was crushing for the African Parks and Gamba team that was with us because this is critical data that they've now lost. Just our normal anti-poaching strategy is obviously not working. This giraffe bull was collared; we've got collars on all of our giraffe groups to know where these groups are at all times so that we can follow them, we can shadow them, and we can protect them, and we're still failing.

We've got five groups of poachers coming in here, unidentified helicopters. We've got guys coming from the north, the L, who are only after elephants. They need to fund their war, but then we've got the North Sudanese, the Janjaweed, the South Sudanese, who have got a market for bushmeat. They've got a bunch of refugee camps. Um, they are protein-starved, and they would take the meat. The Congolese people don't touch the meat; they believe they get leprosy from eating giraffe meat. They only cut the tail and will use that tail as a dairy to the bride's father if they want to ask for the hand of a bride.

So, having the tails cut only probably indicates that these were Congolese boys. Just the very little tip of it—the long black hairs that are used as a fly swatter—it's worth thousands of US dollars. The sad part about the history of Gamba is that we've lost the northern white rhino and we are now about to lose the last giraffe if we don't get our act together and stop this poaching.

Here is a pure military task. We're not after groups of two to three guys ducking in by night, taking R and getting out again. We're after heavily militarized, heavily armed groups with a specific directive: come in, take resources, get out. I think, as a conservationist and as somebody that's dedicated his life to conservation in whatever form, um, this is distinct. This is ripping out your soul.

Yeah, every one of these we find is just one more incentive, one more push, just to go a little bit harder, a bit further, and it never ceases to move me to tears when I was out there. It brought me to tears again sitting here. It's really forcing me to reflect on this experience. I'll never forget it. I'll never stop being angry. I'll never stop feeling a duty to continue, but I also feel tremendously obligated to bring it back and try and utilize the resources and the awareness that only National Geographic can provide.

You have to turn tragedy into a galvanizing force. We have to turn tragedy into activism, alert the world to the tragedy of what happened that day, and find a new way to let it live on as a source of energy and momentum for all of us. The Kenya police reservists, they're armed with automatic rifles. Their training is very high. [Music]

Standard. We've set up a dog section, highly trained attack, tracker, patrol dog units.