Q&A | Our experts answer your wildlife questions

What’s with the saggy skin?

Leon Venter from Kimberley writes: I saw this herd of giraffe in Mokala National Park in the Northern Cape. A few of them had very loose skin. Is this caused by a nutritional deficiency due to the long drought?

Wildlife expert LD van Essen says: It’s hard to give a definitive answer to this question. If the reader had taken photos of the giraffes over a long period of time, we would have been able to tell whether the skin folds changed in size and/or position, and it would have been easier to explain.