Amazing Animals: The Giraffe

Amazing Animals: The Giraffe

Bible Blast: Read Genesis 1:1-25

God made all sorts of wild animals, livestock, and small animals, each able to produce offspring of the same kind. And God saw that it was good. Genesis 1:25

When my family went on safari in Kruger National Park, we were told that we got to go on two “game drives”—or adventures to spot animals—each day. We got up at the crack of dawn to go on our first drive, and—oh!—what animals we saw! Our first sight was a big, furry-headed male lion. We were only ten feet away from him in our open-topped Land Rover. Next, we drove up right beside some elephants munching tall African grass. There were impalas, zebras, warthogs, rhinos, and more. God’s creativity was all around us. And our capable game ranger told us all about each animal. As he did, I could not help but be certain that God created these wonders. It was most apparent when the game ranger told us about the giraffe.

“Giraffes are the tallest animals on the planet,” said the ranger, as we watched them grazing nearby. “A giraffe’s heart weighs about twenty-four pounds and is two feet in length. That makes it bigger than two basketballs and as heavy as a small suitcase. It has to be that big to pump hard enough to get blood all the way up to that tiny little head. It’s pumping so hard that without special walls in the giraffe’s blood vessels, the arteries and veins would explode!”

“Wow,” we said.

“There’s one really big challenge for a heart like that,” said the ranger. “If it kept pumping like that when the giraffe lowered its head to drink water, the poor animal would literally blow its mind. So God created these creatures with a special valve to slow things down. This actually saves their lives.”

God created the giraffe so carefully. Only an intelligent God could account for the miraculous, well-thought plan of a giraffe’s specialty heart-and-blood system.

Everywhere we look in nature, we can be reminded that God created what we see. That day on the safari in Africa, a giraffe reminded me.

Girl Gab: Daughter, pick one of your favorite strange animals—like a zebra, giraffe, aardvark, or platypus. Ask your mom to help you look the animal up online and find something cool to thank God about as you study how it was created.