Anne Innis Dagg, who in the 1950s was one of the world’s first biologists to study giraffes in the wild, who spent decades fighting sexism in Canadian universities before finally finding long-overdue acclaim in the 2010s, died on 1 ° April in Kitchener, Ontario, west of Toronto. She was 91 years old.
Alison Reid, who documented Dr Dagg’s life in 2018 movie “The woman who loves giraffes” said the cause of her death, in hospital, was pneumonia.
Dr. Dagg was often called “the Jane Goodall of giraffes,” but in a different world the attribution might have been reversed. Dr. Dagg traveled to Africa in 1956, four years before Dr. Goodall did her first field work with primates; In fact, she is believed to have been the first Western scientist to study African animals of any kind in the wild.
At the time, very little was known about giraffe behavior, especially outside of zoos. Dr Dagg spent more than nine months in the South African bush, watching for 10 hours a day from his battered Ford Prefect as the animals ate, killed, fought and played.
The results, which she first presented in a 1958 article for the Zoological Society of London and later in a 1976 book, “The Giraffe: Its Biology, Behavior, and Ecology,” established her as the world’s leading expert on the clumsy, speckled-legged Giraffa camelopardalis.
This recognition was not enough to overcome the entrenched sexism in academia. She had a promising job as an assistant professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario, and had published significantly more peer-reviewed articles than some of her male colleagues. But in 1971 the president of her department told her that she was unlikely to get the job.
She applied for a similar position at Wilfrid Laurier University, also in Ontario, but was passed over for a less experienced male candidate. You filed a complaint with the Ontario government; the matter dragged on for nearly a decade, but the complaint was ultimately dismissed.
Dr. Dagg spent short periods teaching at other universities before coming to the University of Waterloo as a part-time instructor. He used her free time to write books on biology – she was among the first to study homosexual behavior in mammals – as well as feminism and sexism.
Then, in 2010, a group of zookeepers invited her to attend a conference in Phoenix as an honored guest. A vibrant field, giraffology, had sprouted around her numerous articles and, in particular, her 1976 book.
“Every zookeeper, every scientist, had it on their bookshelf, but nobody knew about it,” director Reid said in a telephone interview.
From there the attention grew: television documentaries, magazine profiles and finally Ms. Reid’s film, which introduced Dr. Dagg to international audiences. She was named a Member of the Order of Canada in 2019, the same year she received an official apology from the University of Guelph.
“I’ve been ignored my whole life, and only now am I finding out that I’m actually a person and people actually think I’m interesting,” he said in an interview with The Guelph Mercury in 2019. “It’s really amazing. I love it.”
Anne Christine Innis was born on January 25, 1933 in Toronto. Her parents were both well-known academics at the University of Toronto. Her mother, Mary Quayle Innis, was a principal and a writer. Her father, Harold Innis, was chairman of the political economy department; one of the university’s constituent colleges was named in her honor.
He saw his first giraffe when he was 3 years old, during a family vacation at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago.
“He was very tall and I was very small” he told CTV News in 2021. “And I remember thinking, ‘This is beautiful. I think this is wonderful.’ And from there he moved on.”
He earned an honors bachelor’s degree in biology in 1955 and a master’s degree in genetics a year later, both from the University of Toronto. She has always focused on giraffes.
His honors degree came with a small cash award, and with that money he looked for a way to enter the field. But she has been rejected by more than a dozen African governments and foundations, with the thinly veiled message that women don’t belong in that line of research.
He changed tactics and began giving his name simply as “A. Innis”, with better results. A 62,000-acre South African rancher, home to about 95 giraffes, said she could stay with him. When she revealed his gender, she hesitated, but eventually went along with it.
After nearly a year in Africa, he returned to Canada and academia, earning his doctorate in animal behavior from the University of Waterloo in 1967. His thesis became the basis of his 1976 book, which he wrote with J. Bristol Foster – the first comprehensive scientific text on giraffes and, for years, the only one.
She married Ian Dagg in 1957. He died in 1993. She is survived by their children, Mary, Hugh and Ian Dagg; her brother, Hugh; and a grandson.
Dr. Dagg’s many published works include a memoir, “Pursuing Giraffe” (2006), in which she recounts her time spent in Africa. The book, written in the present tense, ends on a bittersweet note, lamenting the fact that she would most likely never return there.
“I am heartbroken that my lifelong dream ended at 24,” she wrote. “I fear I will never visit the giraffe in Africa again, and I never have.”
The book caught the attention of Ms. Reid, who first considered it for a feature film, then decided on a documentary. As part of the filming, she arranged for Dr. Dagg to return to the South African ranch where she had first worked, some 60 years before her, and to visit the giraffes where she thought she would never see them again .