The tallest animal to roam the land, giraffes cast long shadows on the dry savannas and woodlands of sub-Saharan Africa where they live. But their lands are vanishing, with estimates suggesting that 90 percent of their habitat has already been lost; giraffe populations have disappeared entirely from seven West African countries. Meanwhile, the big conservation efforts tend to spotlight species with more high-profile threats, like the elephant and rhino, even though African elephants outnumber giraffes four to one in the wild. In the last 30 years, giraffes in Africa have declined from approximately 155,000 to under 100,000, according to the IUCN Red List assessment. Now certain forward-thinking conservationists, including Susan Reno Myers (MBA 1978), are turning their attention to the special challenges of the gentle giant.

Myers found her way to conservation by way of a sharply winding path: She first visited Kenya in 1972 and saw the animals in the wild, “back before there were 10,000 other tourists, when it was really, truly wild,” she says. She attended HBS not long after, then worked for J.P. Morgan in New York, London, and Frankfurt. Then she and husband Richard Myers (MBA 1984) moved to Texas, where she quickly noticed the social and cultural imperative to understand football. She didn’t. So Myers spent four years studying the sport and a decade as a middle and high school football coach. Her team won a coveted state championship. “Varsity receivers were my specialty,” she says; she eventually wrote the book The Complete Handbook of Coaching Wide Receivers, under the pen name of S. “Chuck” Myers, which the publisher required.

Through it all, animals were always on Myers’s mind. “I wanted to devote the last part of my life to animals, so I got myself on the board of the Dallas Zoo,” she says. Here again, she studied up to understand the issues. While she appreciated the zoo’s work, she felt frustrated by the bureaucratic pace of progress in conservation: “I just thought that I was very old, and I had to move faster.” In 2019, she founded the nonprofit Save Giraffes Now (SGN), in recognition of the fact that giraffes were facing both a silent extinction and a lack of global awareness around the species’ threats.

SGN stands apart from other conservation groups—and lives up to the urgency in its name—by prioritizing immediate, concrete actions over time-intensive research studies. “We try to take a very proactive and entrepreneurial approach,” Myers says, working with teams on the ground in 10 African countries.

Giraffes face two major threats, both of which are human.The greatest near-term challenge is commercial bushmeat poaching. SGN does a lot of work in Kenya, where three of the four species of giraffes live—and all of which are considered endangered or worse. It’s illegal to sell giraffe meat in the markets there, so poachers will snare the animals, mix their meat with that of other species, and sell it in the market as general meat. Terrorist groups and their affiliates are behind many of the organized operations, Myers says, which makes anti-poaching efforts extremely dangerous. SGN approaches the problem from multiple angles, including scout and ranger teams. Trained and equipped to cut the snares and render them inoperable, these teams also help establish informant networks to help prevent poaching and apprehend the poachers when incidents do occur.

“A lot of other species are saved in the process, too, which is great,” Myers says, taking a win where she can find one. Reports of bushmeat poaching have been spreading throughout Tanzania and Botswana, so the issue is only getting worse. The major long-term challenge to giraffe conservation is development: As people build more subdivisions, industrial zones, and roads, and then surround it all with fencing, wild animals get entangled in the infrastructure and cut off from food and water sources. Last December, Kenya Wildlife Service asked SGN to fund an emergency study of an area south of Nairobi where giraffes were getting stuck in fencing and either dying or requiring rescue. Now the two organizations are looking at a larger project together, to work with local homeowners to mitigate fencing and reduce animal fatalities.

SGN also has partnered with the Kenyan government to study animal crossings along the country’s roadways. As more lanes are added to the highway linking the major port of Mombasa to Nairobi, it will cut travel time—but increase risk for the region’s giraffe populations. SGN funds efforts to build water holes on either side of the road, reducing their need to cross. It’s also conducting research to identify the location and frequency of giraffe crossings, map out roadkill hotspots, and understand the factors that influence giraffes to attempt crossing.

The work is not for the faint of heart, Myers says. “I worked on Wall Street. I was a high school football coach—and in Texas that’s a blood sport.” Those experiences toughened her for the formidable challenges of animal conservation, in which your only hope is to believe deeply in the work: “Particularly at my age, you have to really believe in your mission because sitting by the pool with a Bellini sounds good sometimes, too.”

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