Giraffes are used as gifts and show strength

As early as 2,500 BC, ancient Egyptian kings captured deer and paraded them in front of the people. Considered a very impressive and luxurious animal, giraffes were gradually used as gifts and to show the power of those in power. Julius Caesar, a famous king of ancient Egypt, once received a gift of giraffes and brought them to be paraded in Rome. The giraffe was then brought into a circus ring and fed to the lions to show the strength of Julius Caesar.

Many Roman emperors turned to importing a lot of giraffes to use as props in circus games where the animals were murdered by being fed to ravenous lions in the centuries that followed. Giraffe populations began to decline sharply before the end of the Roman Empire before being extinct in Europe for centuries. The giraffe made a comeback in Europe in 1486, when the Florentine noble who was in charge of Florence at the time acquired Lorenzo de' Medici. The gorgeous Lorenzo received a female giraffe as a gift from the tower's Egyptian sultan Qait bay. Numerous reports claim that the giraffe was well-treated and given a stable by the citizens of Florence.

The giraffe made its way back to Europe more than three centuries later, in 1827, when Egyptian ruler Mohamed Ali Pasha granted three giraffes to France, Austria, and Britain at the request of Bernardino Droviti, the French consul in Cairo, in an effort to halt these nations' support for the Greek rebels and mend some of the relations that had been damaged by the Turkish massacres.