Watch These Giraffes Duke It out on Film, and Other New Year Reflections

A new video currently making its way around the internet is making me rethink one of my favorite passages in 20th Century American literature.

That passage, like the video, is about giraffes. It comes from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. In it, Vonnegut describes a dream of the novel’s protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, a gentle soul whose mind has become somewhat unhinged after bearing witness to the horrors of the Dresden bombings in World War II.

Under morphine, Billy had a dream of giraffes in a garden. The giraffes were following gravel paths, were pausing to munch sugar pears from treetops. Billy was a giraffe, too. He ate a pear. It was a hard one. It fought back against his grinding teeth. It snapped in juicy protest.

The giraffes accepted Billy as one of their own, as a harmless creature as preposterously specialized as themselves. Two approached him from opposite sides, leaned against him. They had long, muscular upper lips which they could shape like the bells of bugles. They kissed him with these. They were female giraffes—cream and lemon yellow. They had horns like doorknobs. The knobs were covered with velvet.

Why?

Perhaps a dozen years after first encountering this passage, it moves me still. Poor Billy! Life and its horrible absurdities had tried to destroy him, yet he bumbled sweetly along, as we all must. Poor Kurt Vonnegut! Like his protagonist, he had witnessed the bombing of Dresden, in which an entire city was reduced to rubble.  In which, as he writes, “I myself have seen the bodies of schoolgirls who were boiled alive in a water tower by my own countrymen, who were proud of fighting evil at the time.” It was less than a year after Vonnegut’s mother committed suicide.

I suppose I wanted to believe there could be such a thing as a peaceful animal in the world, whose only visible defenses were as absurdly useless as their necks were graceful. How lovely to think that that the gently swaying, chimerical vegetarians described by Vonnegut might represent some sort of unselfish offering by nature—a bit of free beauty that asked for nothing but to be admired?

But the giraffe, as we see in this stunning video—a preview from Africa, an upcoming documentary series on the Discovery Channel, premiering Jan. 8.—has more pressing concerns than the fanciful admiration of humans. In the video, the narrator describes a dry, desert river basin in Namibia, in which the giraffe survives by grazing tall trees that draw water from sources 90 feet underground. A female appears on the scene. In fierce competition for mating rights, two male giraffes begin fighting it out, swinging their six-foot-long, 500-pound necks like sledgehammers.

“It is extremely rare to catch a giraffe fight on film,” the narrator says. “Most of the time, they are gentle vegetarians.”

Fighting giraffe footage this beautiful is certainly rare, though plenty of lesser-quality clips can be found with a simple YouTube search. Turns out giraffes are tough creatures. Darwin knew this. In The Descent of Man, he notes that Vonnegut’s velvet-covered horns are used “in a curious manner; for, with his long neck he swings his head to either side, almost upside down, with such force that I have seen a hard plank deeply indented by a single blow.”

Violent they may be, but giraffe battles are not deadly, it seems. “It’s a bit of a dance,” said Dave Salmoni, Animal Planet's apex predator expert and host of several Animal Planet and Discovery Channel shows, in a television interview with ABC News. He emphasized that there was no reason to fear for the giraffes in the video. “The males know exactly where to stand, how to stand, and what the rules are.”

Giraffes struggle, like all of nature, but they know the rules. Perhaps there is something wise about the giraffe after all.

And in lieu of the peacenik giraffes of Billy Pilgrim’s dreams, perhaps the idea of universal struggle is comforting in its own way. We can look, again, to Darwin’s, who writes about the “struggle for existence” in The Origin of Species:

We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, we often see superabundance of food; we do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life; or we forget how largely these songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by birds and beasts of prey; we do not always bear in mind that though food may be now superabundant, it is not so at all seasons of each recurring year.

Life, death, renewal. Rinse and repeat. Happy New Year, everyone.