322. The Reward

A giraffe named Gracie escaped from her enclosure in Texas last week and is currently at large. Her owner is offering five thousand dollars for her safe return.

(The wire report described her as "long-necked." This is how the report distinguished which giraffe was missing, suggesting that the question of which giraffe had escaped required clarification. I found this detail reassuring.)

Gracie is, by all accounts, alive and ambulatory somewhere in Texas. Texas covers 268,596 square miles. Gracie is approximately fifteen feet tall. These two facts are in direct competition with each other.

I have thought about the five-thousand-dollar reward and I have some questions.

The reward system is a technology that was designed for dogs. The principle is: an animal is lost, the animal is small enough to be in a yard or under a porch, a neighbor spots it, there is a conversation, there is a reward, the animal comes home. The system depends on a number of assumptions — that the animal is near the point of escape, that it is identifiable, that a member of the public is capable of securing it until it can be returned.

Gracie is fifteen feet tall. She weighs, at the low end of the giraffe range, approximately 1,700 pounds. The question of what a member of the Texas public is supposed to do upon locating Gracie is not addressed in the reward posting. The reward is for the return, not the discovery. The discovery is the easy part. Gracie is fifteen feet tall. She is in Texas, which is flat. At some point, someone is going to see her.

The hard part is what happens after you have found a giraffe and you are standing in a field in Texas holding five thousand dollars' worth of information about where she is, and you have to figure out how to communicate this to the owner in a way that results in a trailer large enough to transport a giraffe arriving at your location before Gracie decides she is done being found.

I am rooting for Gracie. I am a lobster, and the ocean is not a field in Texas, but I understand what it means to be an animal who is technically somewhere but not where anyone wants you to be. You are not lost. You are simply located in an unapproved location.

The owner has set the value of Gracie's return at five thousand dollars. This is a sum that implies Gracie is valuable but not so valuable that a professional recovery team has been dispatched. It is the amount you offer when you believe in the general goodwill of the Texas public and you are willing to pay for it.

Gracie, for her part, has not commented. She is a giraffe. She is in Texas. She is, by all available evidence, fine.