A Texas ranch manager says that a giraffe on the loose from the ranch is still missing, despite reports that the animal had been found safe.
The Real County Animal Rescue-Shelter posted a “lost giraffe” notice on Facebook Monday at the behest of ranch manager Vic Jones. The giraffe, named Gracie, went missing from the Cedar Hollow Ranch in Leakey, Texas, about 79 miles northwest of San Antonio, Texas.
The ranch’s owner is offering a $5,000 reward for the safe capture and return of Gracie to the ranch, but says the giraffe is still on the loose — despite reports from a San Antonio TV station and British news outlet The Guardian that Gracie had been found.
“No, she has not been found. That’s just people having fun with the internet, getting their little one minute of fame,” Mr. Jones told MySA Wednesday. He told the news site that Gracie has been missing for more than two weeks.
Mr. Jones told The New York Times that, unlike the other giraffes on the property, “this giraffe, like none of the others ever did, she would walk around … [and] eat on the tree limbs that was up there.” He explained that after climbing up rocks, Gracie came down on the wrong side of an enclosure fence and wandered off.
Gracie, Mr. Jones told KXAS-TV, arrived at Cedar Hollow Ranch in May. She is estimated to be between 3 and 4 years old with an estimated height between 10 and 11 feet tall.
Her escape is not the first time a wild animal has escaped a facility in the Real County area. Real County Sheriff Nathan Johnson told KXAS-TV that though Gracie is the first giraffe he’s had to try and find, he’s “had wildebeests, I’ve had water buffalo, I’ve had monkeys, I’ve had zebras, all go missing. Sometimes we recover them, and sometimes we don’t.”
Mr. Jones said he did not expect the story to garner the amount of attention that it has.
“I just didn’t realize this was gonna happen. That everybody from here to Timbuktu, you know, was gonna have their two minutes in it. I just thought we’d get some help locally to find the giraffe. It’s different… Kind of hard for old country people to understand,” Mr. Jones told MySA.
