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See all of our Hansa Stuffed Animals at the index page.
Giraffes are well-known as the tallest land animal. Even a new-born giraffe is nearly six feet tall. They're browsing herbivores, eating leaves and twigs. Giraffe's great reach is their edge in the competition for food among all the other grazers and browsers in the African plains. Any trees around are pruned below the height of the tallest giraffe. The shape of the trees tells you the size of the animals that browse on them. This picture shows Ivan, the tallest giraffe at the San Diego Wild Animal Park, pruning any leaves below about 20 feet.
Giraffe are not just tall, they are all-around BIG animals, with heads the size of your body and a massively strong neck to hold the head up. Their very long legs give them an awkward gait that is deceptively fast. The San Diego Wild Animal Park offer photo safaris that take you out into their animal enclosures in a truck. The safari carries treats for the more calm and predictable animals, like giraffe, so they come up to the truck for treats. Even when a person is standing on the bed of a truck, the giraffe still have to bend down to get close.
To go along with their great height and large heads, giraffe have surprisingly long tongues. The one in this picture isn't really stretching for that cookie at all. When foraging they can wrap their tongue around branches overhead and rip off the branch, even with thorny acacia branches. Their versatile tongue gives them an extra six to nine inches of effective reach. Actually, giraffe are so much taller than anything else except elephants that their great height probably evolved while there were other now-extinct large browsers around driving the advantage of reaching ever-higher branches.
Hansa produce an assortment of quality plush animal figures designed to capture each animal's beauty and character. Hansa use high-quality synthetic plush, often custom produced for their specific requirements of color, pattern and texture. The Hansa designers use complex cutting patterns with as many different plush variations as needed to get the right appearance for their animals. The fabrics are hand-cut to match each animal's design. Eyes, noses and paws are individually sewn to give each animal its realistic and individual appearance. Many of the animals get air-brushed accents to highlight body or facial details. Then the animals are hand-stuffed creating the unique poses and looks that are distinctively Hansa.
Hansa also make a series of life-size large animal plush which include a structural metal frame that is light-weight but capable of being "ridden" by children and even adults up to 250 pounds in weight. Stuffe & Nonsense cannot stock the large animals, but you can check their full collection at the Hansa Toys USA web site. If you see something interesting there, contact us and we can get it for you.
