So bear with me. This is about ill-fated giraffes and me tumbling down the rabbit hole of giraffe-y headlines — news, lots of news, most of it rotten. Weird, I know.

I have no special interest in giraffes, though I’m attuned to animal happenings, especially awful ones, like the fact that two giraffes died yesterday in a barn fire at a Virginia zoo. (Not heartbreaking enough? One of them was named Waffles.) 

A little shattered, I recalled another recent giraffe calamity involving a calf and its mother. That triggered another one, and another, before I went down the hole, doing research that snowballed into a litany of tragedies befalling the vertically endowed beast. 

While no giraffe aficionado, I happen to think the elongated animals are fascinating. With their noodly necks, liquid lope, crazy-quilt patterns, nubby horns and serpentine tongues, giraffes make an irresistibly bizarre creature possibly slapped together by aliens. They’re both equine and avian, a kind of lurching mammalian ostrich. 

And they have cruddy luck, at least lately. There was yesterday’s zoo blaze — I shudder — and so much more: 

• In January a newborn giraffe at the Nashville Zoo was accidentally stepped on by its mother and died. It happened just hours after the zoo shared news of the calf’s birth to the public. The cause was “trauma to the neck.”

• Five days ago at the Maryland Zoo, an 8-year-old giraffe named Anuli died unexpectedly. The animal had suffered stomach ailments.  

• Hasina the giraffe died a week ago at the Los Angeles Zoo following an anesthetized procedure to remove her calf, which was in an “abnormal breech position within the womb.”

• Three rare giraffes were electrocuted in February when they walked into low-hanging power lines within a conservation area in western Kenya. All three died.

• Two extremely rare all-white giraffes were killed by poachers in Kenya. (This happened a year ago today.)

• Last month a trophy hunter posted several gruesome photographs on Facebook showing her posing with the body of a 17-year-old bull giraffe she had shot and killed in a South African game park. The hunter is seen smiling while she hugs the giraffe’s corpse and poses next to his dead body. In one photo, she holds up the big bloody heart of the animal, smiling like a slavering psychopath.  

But with death springs renewal. Just this year four zoos — in Tennessee, Texas, California and South Carolina — welcomed newborn giraffes to their menageries. It’s so very “Lion King,” the circle of life and what have you. 

But what of all that magnificent doom, packed into such a snug stretch of time? How did the zany giraffe — a creature that exists and looks as if it doesn’t, a sage notes — so earn the wrath of the cosmos? It can’t be the way it contorts into a nimble tripod when it drinks from a pool. Or how this vegetarian swirls its 27-inch-long tongue around sky-scraping leaves and branches.

Can’t be all that, since these are things of beauty and wonder. The gracefully gangly giraffe, that evolutionary whatsit, is apparently just having a terrifically bad year. I hope it tapers off, because the more time I’ve spent with the animals the more my affection has grown. They’re goofy, gentle, surreal and almost mythical. Wrote a poet: “The man who believes in giraffes would swallow anything.” That sound you hear is me gulping.