Gracie the missing giraffe found in Texas after 2-week search

REAL COUNTY, Texas —

A giraffe who eluded Texas authorities for weeks has finally been found.

Gracie, who is about 3 years old, had been missing since June 12 after escaping her enclosure at Cedar Hollow Ranch in the Texas Hill Country, said Vic Jones, who owns the remote property about 100 miles west of San Antonio.

On Friday, after a two-week search, Gracie was located – alive and well – about four miles south of the ranch she disappeared from.

Now, veterinarians are working to safely capture Gracie and bring her back home.

Finding Gracie has been an ordeal. Jones sent up helicopters to look for Gracie, offering a $5,000 reward for her capture.

But a big mystery remains: How did the giraffe, which stands roughly the height of a tree, elude officials for more than two weeks?

The ranch is in rural Real County, where its roughly 2,700 residents were put on alert to be on the lookout for a missing giraffe. Jones said the search area is extremely remote, and the likelihood of Gracie encountering any humans is low.

“People are not in danger of her because she’s not around people,” Jones said amid the search for Gracie. ‘She’s out in very, very rough, heavily wooded lands.”

The Texas Hill Country has one of the largest concentrations of exotic captive animals in the country. Real County Sheriff Nathan Johnson said the mild climate and rugged terrain seem to serve as a good stand-in for most of the animals’ native African environments.

He rattled off a list of animals that have gone missing over the years, especially after floods, but said this was his first giraffe.

“I’ve had wildebeests, I’ve had water buffalo, I’ve had monkeys, I’ve had zebras, all go missing,” Johnson said. “Sometimes we recover them, and sometimes we don’t.”

While the middle of Texas is not a giraffe’s native environment, Jones said Gracie should be able to find plenty of leaves and other vegetation to eat. He said other animals were not likely to bother her.