What Happened To Gracie The Giraffe And How She Made It Home Safely

Gracie the Giraffe is back home at Cedar Hollow Ranch after the two-week search made national headlines.

“I felt like she’d be fine,” said Ranch Manager Vick Jones, who wasn’t scared – just worried. “I needed to find her. When I found her on that Friday, I’d been looking for her for two weeks.”

Gracie was found only four miles from Cedar Hollow Ranch on private property.

“The nice thing about it was she was on a place that no one lived on,” Jones said. “There were no workers. The absentee owner would just come up on weekends.”

On top of that, she was up against a high fence ranch. “She wasn’t going any further that way,” Jones added. “If she was going anywhere off of that place, she’d come back toward us.”

But Jones said Gracie had no reason to go anywhere. “She had all the water she wanted,” he said. “She had all the food she wanted.”

Jones was in the helicopter with Jeff Hill, who has Concho Aviation out of Sterling City when they found Gracie. Besides business associates, Jones said they are good friends.

“Jeff was actually the first one to see her,” Jones said. “He told me, ‘Vick, I got her. She’s right underneath the helicopter.’”

After circling the helicopter around, Jones saw Gracie. “That was a big relief moment,” Jones said.

Since they found Gracie on a Friday, they had the weekend to make plans to get her on Monday morning. Jones said he called Dr. Pat O’Neill, his veterinarian and owner of Pedernales Veterinary Center, to help.

Finding Gracie was hard but so was bringing her back home.

“The problem of it is she’s four miles, as the crow flies,” Jones said. For those who are not familiar with that idiom, it means taking the shortest, most direct route between two points in a straight line.

“Because there were no roads from us to where she was at, there were no means of getting from point A to point B,” Jones explained.

It took 38 miles to get Gracie back to Leakey, Texas. Jones said they took Highway 83 south for 20 miles to get to another road that took them 11 miles back north.

“That’s where they had to park the big giraffe trailer, because we couldn’t get it any further in,” he said.

After three miles on a one-lane asphalt road, Jones said it took four more miles on another road to get to the ranch where Gracie was located. They were able to tranquilize her from the helicopter.

“She actually went down about 20 yards in front of me,” Jones said. “They got her up, got the harnesses on and got her into the trailer that Dr. O’Neill had specifically made to haul her out of the pasture with.”

Then they headed back to Cedar Hollow Ranch “It was quite a trip just to go four miles,” Jones said.

Gracie’s story began on May 7 when Jones brought her to Cedar Hollow Ranch. After talking to his veterinarian Dr. O’Neill, he decided to keep her for about two and a half weeks before releasing her into the ranch.

“In keeping her up, she learned where the feed is, where she can come and get produce, because we feed the giraffes every day,” Jones said. “The giraffes get carrots, sweet potatoes and apples to go along with their other food every day.”

Gracie also learned where to find the water. After two and a half weeks, Jones said they released her out into the ranch.

“There’s been giraffes on this property for over 30 years, but what she (Gracie) would do is, she’d go up and feed in an area that none of the other giraffes had ever gone to,” Jones said. “It is up on the side of a rock hill.”

To get up on that hill, Jones said there’s a road. There’s also a gate they call the giraffe gate to keep the giraffes from walking up the road. He never worried about the hill, because the giraffes didn’t go that way and walk around the rocky hill.

When Gracie found the rocky hill, she always found her way back to the regular feed station in the pens, Jones explained. The day Gracie got out, she came down the rock hill a different way.

“It was accidental,” he said. “It wasn’t like she was looking for a way out or was trying to go someplace.”

She simply came down on the wrong side of that gate. “She’s standing on that road, and she couldn’t come back in,” Jones said. “Being an animal, she just started walking the way of least resistance.”

Gracie walked and ate along the road. She ended up just four miles from her home.

During those two weeks before they found her in the helicopter, Jones said they looked for Gracie on the ground with the game warden and by helicopter two other times.

“Each time we flew, because of all the rains that we’ve had this year, I knew there was a lot of water out there,” Jones said. “Wherever she was, she had plenty of water.”

Being in the Hill Country there was always plenty of food because there is every kind of tree: oak trees, hackberries, mesquite trees and sycamores. “She had plenty to eat,” he said. “It was just a matter of us searching in the right place, and we wound up doing that.”

Jones would like to thank everyone who helped get Gracie back home, including the ranch owners and the Caprock Ranch foreman.

“In Texas, we are very protective of private property rights,” Jones said. “I wouldn’t go onto people’s property, looking for her till I got permission from those people. We didn’t fly over them without getting permission to fly over their property.”

To make sure Gracie doesn’t get out again, Jones hired Fermin Venegas, who has a fence company in Fort Stockton.

“His crew has already come in and put a fence up on the side of the mountain,” Jones said. “If she decides to go up there and feed again, she’ll come to a place on it and then Gracie will run into a fence and can’t go any further.”