Dr. Anne Innis Dagg in Kenya in January, 2020.Supplied
In 1956, 23-year-old Anne Innis finished her master’s degree in genetics and boarded a boat alone to South Africa, notebook in hand, to study giraffes. She had loved the animals ever since seeing one at a zoo as a child.
She organized the trip herself without funding or official backing, and once there she spent up to 10 hours a day in the field for several months, observing how a group of 95 giraffes ate, moved and socialized. She stayed at a remote, 62,000-acre ranch, driving around by herself in a beat-up Ford Prefect.
“Anne went out before others did this kind of research. She went out without a university sponsor or mentor. She was on her own,” says Fred Bercovitch, a California-based wildlife conservation biologist who has researched giraffes.
She is believed to be the first Western field researcher to study giraffes or any other wild animal in Africa. It wasn’t until 1960 that Jane Goodall began observing wild chimpanzees in Tanganyika (later Tanzania).
The young giraffe researcher married soon after the trip, becoming Anne Innis Dagg, and completed a PhD. But Dr. Dagg never became a household name like Dr. Goodall and others; her career was severely curtailed because she was denied tenure-track university jobs.
She pivoted to work as a freelance researcher, writer and teacher, and still made an impact.
Dr. Dagg, who died of pneumonia on April 1 at the age of 91, co-wrote what zoologists consider the bible for understanding and caring for giraffes, the 1976 book The Giraffe: Its Biology, Behavior, and Ecology.
Many of the observations and conclusions she made in the book and its updated editions are still considered the gold standard today. (Ecologist J. Bristol Foster, once a classmate, is credited as her co-author, but only on the first two editions of the book.)
“She was one of the first to recognize [that] if you have seen one, you haven’t seen them all,” says Dr. Bercovitch, who notes that Dr. Dagg named her giraffes, as they had distinct personalities.
Her research on how giraffes walked and ran is still definitive.
Dr. Dagg suggested that there was one species and nine subspecies of giraffes. “That was the accepted taxonomy for ages,” says Dr. Bercovitch, who says genetic research has led to different theories of how to organize giraffes, but they’re hotly debated, so many experts still follow her classification.
She published 60 scientific articles and 20 books on a wide range of topics. “People say she was a giraffe person, but she loved all animals,” her daughter, Mary Dagg, says. “She did a book on camels. There were so many things she worked on. And she pushed for women’s rights at the same time.”
Dr. Dagg’s experiences in academia prompted her to shift her gaze from animals to human sexual politics for her books Harems and Other Horrors: Sexual Bias in Behavioral Biology (1983) and Miseducation: Women & Canadian Universities (1988), as well as many articles.
While she was productive, she concluded her 2006 memoir, Pursuing Giraffes, with the line, “I’m grieving because my dream of a lifetime is over at 24. I fear that I will never again visit the giraffe in Africa, and I never have.” (She did return to Africa years later.)
“She was working in a silo, writing her books and sending them out. And she never knew if anyone was listening or if she was making a difference,” Mary says. “She kept doing it. It didn’t stop her.”
Dr. Dagg is believed to be the first Western field researcher to study giraffes or any other wild animal in Africa, doing so in the 1950s.Supplied
Vindication came recently. She was rediscovered by the giraffe and zoology community in 2010 and was the subject of the award-winning 2018 documentary The Woman Who Loved Giraffes. A 2022 picture book also tells her story.
Dr. Dagg received a slew of apologies, awards and honorary degrees in recent years and became widely known as the Giraffe Lady.
The Anne Innis Dagg Foundation, which she founded with Mary in 2020, continues after her death; it supports organizations and people that protect giraffes and their habitats.
Alison Reid, who made the documentary, observed Dr. Dagg’s bittersweet response to her new renown. “She couldn’t get back what was taken away from her. She appreciated everything that happened in recent years. But if she had her druthers, she would have taken the career.”
Over the years, Dr. Dagg never let her disappointment affect her outlook or productivity. “She was always laughing, always pretty happy. She was always optimistic and hoped she could make a difference,” Mary says. “She wrote poetry, she wrote about animals in short stories. She loved to travel and read a zillion books.”
Anne Christine Innis was born on Jan. 25, 1933, in Toronto. Her father was Harold Innis, a distinguished professor of political economy at the University of Toronto; U of T’s Innis College was named in his honour. Her mother, Mary Quayle Innis, was a published writer and served as dean of women at U of T’s University College. Anne had three older siblings: Donald, Mary and Hugh.
Anne saw a giraffe for the first time at age 3 when her mother took her to Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo. She immediately loved the towering creatures and never stopped.
She excelled in her studies at Toronto’s Bishop Strachan School, and completed a bachelor’s degree in biology at U of T in 1955, winning the Gold Medal and $500. After her master’s – her thesis was on mouse genetics – she used that money to fund her trip overseas.
After numerous rejections by governments and foundations in her quest to get to Africa, she began signing her letters with the gender-non-specific “A. Innis.” A rancher in South Africa finally agreed to host her; when he found out she was a young woman, he hesitated, but agreed to her visit.
In the field, with pencil and paper, she wrote down her observations of the wild giraffes living on the ranch. She even collected the trees they ate from, to understand their diet.
Upon her return in 1957, she married her fiancé, physicist Ian Dagg, and they moved to Waterloo, Ont., where he took a job at the University of Waterloo and she worked on her PhD in animal behaviour. The family grew to include children Hugh, Ian and Mary.
The spirit of inquiry filled the household. Mary recalls they found a dead duck, and her mother hung it up on the porch. “Every day we’d go out and see how long it took the maggots to work their way through the feathers.”
Dr. Dagg finished her PhD in 1967 and took a job as assistant professor in the Zoology Department at the University of Guelph a year later. She attended conferences and published articles – 20 in four years – but was not awarded tenure. “They kept putting her off, saying, ‘You’re almost there,’” Mary says. By 1972, the university formally denied her tenure. She had to either resign or be fired, so she left.
“My career was sidetracked by the institutional sexism that was rampant in academia,” Dr. Dagg told an audience at the University of Toronto in 2023, calling the experience “demoralizing” in her Snider Lecture.
In 1974, she filed a human-rights complaint after Wilfrid Laurier University refused to interview her for a job in its biology department and instead hired a man with less experience; she was not successful in her claim. Starting in 1978 she took on part-time roles at Waterloo’s Integrated Studies department (later called Independent Studies).
She wrote and published books – some under her own imprint, Otter Press – and articles about camels, animal friendships and sexism in academia, among others. She published frequently on giraffes, including two memoirs and a picture book.
Ian Dagg died in 1993 after a heart attack on the tennis court, but Anne Dagg kept on working and hoping she was making a difference, but having little contact with mainstream biologists or zookeepers. (Later in life, she reconnected with an old friend, political science professor Alan Cairns, and they were partners until his death in 2018.)
Dr. Dagg was named a member of the Order of Canada, an honorary member of the Canadian Society of Zoologists and an honorary lifetime member of the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution.Supplied
In 2010, an animal scientist from California invited her to the first ever conference of the International Association of Giraffe Care Professionals in Arizona, honouring her there with a pioneer award that was later renamed for her.
Suddenly, giraffe researchers and zookeepers – many of whom keep a dog-eared copy of The Giraffe close at hand while they care for these animals – put a face to the name, and invited her to conferences and events.
Dr. Bercovitch recalls meeting her when she had recently learned that her assertion that giraffes don’t have strong social bonds had been disproven. “She apologized to everyone about how wrong she had been. She was a very self-effacing person. We had to convince her that she wasn’t wrong, she just made a conclusion based on the information she had at the time.”
Ms. Reid began filming her documentary around this time. In 2014, Dr. Dagg updated her book, now titled Giraffe: Biology, Behavior and Conservation, to include the latest data from her new-found community and address conservation issues.
Once the documentary came out and Dr. Dagg appeared regularly at screenings – always wearing something with the image of a giraffe on it, in particular a favourite yellow T-shirt – the apologies and accolades started pouring in.
She was named a member of the Order of Canada, an honorary member of the Canadian Society of Zoologists and an honorary lifetime member of the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution. She earned the Lawrence J. Burpee Medal from the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and the lifetime achievement award from the International Giraffid Conference.
Dr. Dagg was also granted honorary degrees from the University of Waterloo, University of Toronto, McMaster University and Mount Saint Vincent University.
In 2019, at a screening at the University of Guelph, the school issued her a formal apology and announced the creation of a summer research scholarship in her name.
Ms. Reid says a woman in the audience who had studied at Guelph decades before stood up and said, “I feel so ripped off!”
The documentarian says that Dr. Dagg’s professional disappointment at Guelph ultimately affected numerous female students who were denied the opportunity to learn from her. A tenured position there also would have given Dr. Dagg the ability to do more to understand and protect giraffes and other animals. “There were so many levels that this decision affected,” Ms. Reid says of the university’s choice not to grant her tenure.
And while many now know about the Giraffe Lady because of the documentary and other attention she belatedly received, Dr. Bercovitch believes her legacy could have been more substantial. “Had she a solid academic backing and position, she would have been much better known. She’d be recognized among non-giraffe people as a critical scientist and pioneer.”
Dr. Dagg leaves her three children, their spouses, and a grandchild.
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