The finale of the first season of HBO's The Last of Us left viewers with many questions. The most important of these is this: was the giraffe Joel and Ellie were feeding a real giraffe or what?" Many viewers thought it was CGI (and not very convincing CGI at that), but it turns out that it was indeed 100% flesh and blood.

The giraffe in question appears during a quiet interlude in the episode: Ellie and Joel discover the creature roaming freely in an abandoned building, feed it and marvel at its presence. As Polygon (open in new tab) points out, this scene is an important one in the game and was recreated almost shot-for-shot in the show.

"It's a joyous moment for Ellie and for Joel to finally see a glimpse of the Ellie he once knew after the trauma she faced," Bella Ramsey, who plays Ellie in the series, said in the season finale documentary "Inside the Episode".

"It's not that everything she went through is gone, it's just this moment of beauty. But as I was talking to Craig [showrunner Craig Mazin], I realized it was just living the truth. It was bittersweet, but so beautiful."

(There are spoilers in this video, of course, so proceed with whatever caution you deem appropriate from the giraffe crap onward.)

But for many viewers, that giraffe didn't look right at all; was it CGI?

No, absolutely not. The giraffe is real, just like Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal. He is a 13-year-old male Masai giraffe named Nabo, who calls the Calgary Zoo (open in new tab) home. Ironically, one of the reasons HBO used a real giraffe was to maximize the realism of this scene.

Here is the giraffe!

Many people on Reddit (open in new tab) and social media said they were not sure if the giraffe was real or not, but there were many other CGI effects used in this scene, which may have been deceiving. For example, the enclosure in which Nabo was being held was surrounded by a green screen.

"It's Hollywood magic that Alex [VFX supervisor Alex Wang] separated the giraffes and put them on our set," production designer John Peino told Yahoo! Entertainment. That was probably the most complex piecing together of any VFX stage, scenery, or location I've worked on."

Another factor that caused confusion: who the hell knows what a real giraffe looks like up close?" probably another giraffe.

Humans may not be so sure.

Nabo's presence on the show was actually leaked precisely almost a year ago, but apparently no one noticed or everyone forgot:

HBO announced in January that "The Last of Us" had already been renewed for a second season (opens in new tab ). More recently, showrunner Craig Mazin said that, like the first season, the show will deviate from the game whenever and wherever it needs to, sometimes "radically (opens in new tab)."