Anne Innis Dagg, who pioneered work in the 1950s as one of the world’s first biologists to study giraffes in the wild, then spent decades fighting sexism at Canadian universities before finally winning wide acclaim in the 2010s, died on April 1 in Kitchener, Ontario, west of Toronto. She was 91.
Alison Reid, who chronicled the life of Dr. Documented in the 2018 film “The Woman Who Loves Giraffes,” Dagg said the cause of her death in a hospital was pneumonia.
Dr. Dagg was often called “the Jane Goodall of giraffes,” but in another world the attribution might have been reversed. Dr. Dagg traveled to Africa in 1956, four years before Dr. Goodall did her first fieldwork with primates; In fact, it is believed that she was the first Western scientist to study African animals of any type in the wild.
At the time, very little was known about giraffe behavior, especially outside zoos. Dr. Dagg spent more than nine months in the South African bush, watching the animals eat, mate, fight and play from her worn-out Ford Prefect for ten hours a day.
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,” made her the world’s leading expert on the field of the lanky, spotted Giraffa camelopardalis.
That recognition was not enough to overcome the deep-seated sexism within academia. She had a promising job as an assistant professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario, and she had published significantly more peer-reviewed articles than some of her male colleagues. But her department chair told her in 1971 that she was unlikely to achieve tenure.
She applied for a similar position at Wilfrid Laurier University, also in Ontario, but was passed over for a less talented male candidate. She filed a complaint with the Ontario government; The issue dragged on for almost a decade, but the complaint was eventually dismissed.
Dr. Dagg taught for short periods at other universities before starting as a part-time instructor at the University of Waterloo. She used her spare time to write books on biology – she was one of the first to study homosexual behavior in mammals – and on feminism and sexism.
Then in 2010, a group of zookeepers invited her to attend a conference in Phoenix as a guest of honor. A vibrant field of study, giraffelogy, had emerged around her many articles and especially her 1976 book.
“Every zookeeper, every scientist had it on their bookshelf, but no one knew her,” filmmaker Ms. 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 was introduced to an international audience. She was appointed to 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 to just now find out that I’m actually a person and that people actually find me interesting,” she said in an interview with The Guelph Mercury in 2019. “It’s pretty 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 both a dean and a novelist. Her father, Harold Innis, chaired the political economy department; one of the university’s constituent colleges was named after him.
She saw her first giraffe when she was three, during a family vacation to the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago.
“He was very tall and I was very short,” she told CTV News in 2021. “And I remember thinking, ‘This is beautiful. I think this is wonderful.’ And it went on from there.”
She received a bachelor’s degree with honors in biology in 1955 and a master’s degree in genetics a year later, both from the University of Toronto. The whole time she focused on giraffes.
Her honorary doctorate came with a small cash prize, and with that money she looked for a way to get into the field. But it was rejected by more than a dozen African governments and foundations, with the thinly veiled message that women do not belong in that line of research.
She changed tactics and started calling her name simply ‘A. Innis”, with better results. A rancher in 62,000 hectares of South Africa, home to about 95 giraffes, said she could stay with him. When she revealed her gender, he was hesitant, but ultimately welcomed her.
After almost a year in Africa, she returned to Canada and to academia, earning her PhD in animal behavior from the University of Waterloo in 1967. Her thesis became the basis of her 1976 book, which she wrote with J. Bristol Foster – the first complete scientific text on giraffes and for many 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.
Among the many published works of Dr. Dagg’s credits include a memoir, “Pursuing Giraffe” (2006), in which she talked about her time in Africa. Written in present tense, the book ends on a bittersweet note, lamenting the fact that she would most likely never return there.
“I’m grieving because my dream of a lifetime is over 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 and then decided on a documentary. As part of the filming, she arranged for Dr. Dagg would return to the South African ranch where she first worked some 60 years ago – and visit the giraffes she thought she would never see again.