Being a romantic Italian guy, Ron Barbaro knew just how to surprise his wife on her 51st birthday. He’d name a giraffe after her.

As the chairman of the Metro Toronto Zoo, Barbaro had some sway in naming the newborn giraffe, the first ever born on Canadian soil, in the summer of 1983, born days before his wife’s birthday.

He kept the name secret until the morning of his wife’s birthday, when he brought her a cup of coffee and a copy of the Toronto Star in bed. There on the front page was a photo of the knobby-kneed giraffe with its new name.

“I just cried,” said Ginetta Barbaro, now 81, over the phone. “I was so flattered.”

“I got so many points for doing that I think I’m still using them,” joked Ron, 82.

Ginetta the giraffe died Monday, at the age of 30, in the care of her keepers at the Toronto Zoo. The zoo phoned the Barbaros to break the news earlier this week.

“I was quite upset,” said Ginetta, who said she considered the giraffe a friend. “She was a beautiful, beautiful animal.”

The body of the female Masai giraffe will undergo a post-mortem examination in the next few days, a standard protocol when any zoo animal dies. The zoo said that Ginetta, who loved onions, lived longer than wild giraffes, which have life spans of 20 to 25 years.

Ron and Ginetta Barbaro shared a special bond with the giraffe, having watched her grow from a clumsy newborn to a 30-year-old great-grandmother of seven. Once, on a trip to Mexico, the pair bought a six-foot giraffe statue that captured her majesty.

The Barbaro clan spent nearly every weekend at the zoo in the years Ron served as chairman, from 1975 to 1985. Ginetta would often bring a book with her and wander over to the grassy giraffe enclosure.

Standing beside the fence, Ginetta would whisper questions to her long-necked namesake. She’d start with polite banter (“How are you? How’s your day?”) and would occasionally delve into more private giraffe business.

“How do you sit down? How do you kneel down? It was all these little things,” Ginetta said over the phone with a laugh. “I sound crazy, but it was fun.”

The giraffe isn’t the only Barbaro with an eponymous zoo animal. A silverback gorilla was named Kathleen, after the couple’s daughter.

“I was spending so much time at the zoo I had to qualify it somehow,” Ron Barbaro said.

Indeed, Barbaro was influential in making the Toronto Zoo a world-class facility. He stickhandled the transportation of Canada’s first pandas in 1985, even flying to China to help oversee the move.

The last time the Barbaros saw Ginetta was at a special welcome event last May for the zoo’s new resident pandas. At one point the couple stepped away from Er Shun and Da Mao to say hello to their old, long-necked buddy.

“I don’t know how they’re going to replace her. I don’t know how many giraffes they have now,” Ginetta said.

Ginetta the giraffe gave birth to five calves over the course of her life, and went on to have 10 grandchildren. It was a significant contribution to an inter-zoo “species survival plan,”

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the zoo said. The program attempts to retain genetic diversity among captive giraffes over at least 10 generations.

Still, the couple sees Ginetta the giraffe as one of a kind.

“She really was special, at least to us,” Ginetta said.