I could be off in saying this but just interpreting the slides from last years AZA ungulate meetings: the Generic Giraffe SSP is a Green program while the Masai Giraffe SSP is Yellow. And they want to make the move to Masai yet there aren’t enough of them to replace the much larger Generic Giraffe population at this moment. So I think the Generics are filling the void for the meanwhile.
@PossumRoach — Pretty much exactly as @Julio C Castro has stated — the Masai population is not currently large enough to provide giraffe for every facility that wants to exhibit giraffe. While there is a concerted effort and focus to grow the Masai population and to transition the AZA over to primarily Masai, that is going to take a very long time and zoos want to have giraffe. As such, the generic population is still being bred, maintained, and monitored in order to ensure that there is a healthy giraffe population available for zoos that want them while the Masai population continues to grow. As much as we’d all love to have all purebred giraffe, the fact of the matter, is that is not currently possible, and hybrids though they may be, they are still valuable as ambassadors for wild giraffe and wild giraffe conservation.
They are not. They only briefly held one male for a short period of time in 2019 before transferring him to another facility.