Giraffes (Giraffa camelopardalis) possess specialized locomotor morphology, namely elongate and gracile distal limbs. While this contributes to their overall height and enhances feeding behavior, we propose that the combination of long limb segments and modest muscle lever arms results in low effective mechanical advantage (EMA, the ratio of in-lever to out-lever moment arms), when compared with other cursorial mammals. To test this, we used a combination of experimentally measured kinematics and ground reaction forces (GRFs), musculoskeletal modeling, and inverse dynamics