Anne Innis Dagg, pioneering giraffe researcher, dies

Anne Innis Dagg, a Canadian zoologist who broke new ground in animal research while studying giraffes in the wild, died April 1 at a hospital in Kitchener, Ontario. She was 91.

The cause was complications from pneumonia, said Paul Zimic, the executive producer of “The Woman Who Loves Giraffes,” a 2018 documentary about her life.

An exuberant researcher who seemed as comfortable in the field as she was in the lecture hall, Dr. Innis Dagg had a lifelong fascination with giraffes that began when she was 3, when she encountered the long-necked animals for the first time during a visit to the Brookfield Zoo outside Chicago. She later told CBC Radio that when she asked for a book about giraffes, she was told one did not exist.

“So I thought, ‘Well, I’ll learn about giraffes and then I’ll write one.’”

A few years before Jane Goodall began her field studies on chimpanzees in Tanzania, and a decade before Dian Fossey started her research on mountain gorillas in Rwanda, Dr. Innis Dagg went to South Africa to study giraffes in the bush near Kruger National Park. She was only 23 when she arrived in 1956, and was considered the first scientist to study giraffes in the wild – and one of only a few researchers at the time to study any animal in its natural habitat.

“If you wanted to know about the species, you would watch it in the zoo or you’d study it by looking at the bones or looking at museum specimens, trying to figure out the taxonomy,” said Fred Bercovitch, a comparative wildlife biologist on the board of the Anne Innis Dagg Foundation, a conservation and education group. Dr. Innis Dagg, he added, was “at the cutting edge” in focusing on animal behavior and ecology, doing research that entered the mainstream only in the 1960s.

For about nine hours a day over an eight-month span, Dr. Innis Dagg took notes on the way the world’s tallest land animals moved, ate, fought, socialized and cared for their young. She kept track of about 95 giraffes, using a 16-millimeter camera to film the peculiar way they walked and galloped. When one of the animals was killed, she conducted an autopsy of sorts, drying the intestines and measuring them at 256 feet.

For the most part, she tried to stay out of the way, observing giraffes from inside her car, a rickety Ford Prefect – bought for 200 pounds – that she called Camelo, after camelopardalis, a scientific name for the giraffe.

Dr. Innis Dagg summarized her findings in a 1958 scientific article, published in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, that laid the groundwork for the book she had long dreamed of writing. Published in 1976 with co-author J. Bristol Foster, “The Giraffe: Its Biology, Behavior, and Ecology” was considered a landmark in the field, pulling together virtually everything that was known about the animals.

“Without her pioneering work, the study of giraffes would not have been as complete,” said Graham Mitchell, a zoologist and physiologist who drew on her research for his 2021 book “How Giraffes Work.” He called Dr. Innis Dagg “the doyenne of giraffe researchers,” adding in an email that through her research and writing, she “did much to make the world aware of these remarkable and threatened animals.”

She was working as an assistant zoology professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario, teaching, publishing and conducting research while raising three children with her husband, when she was denied tenure in 1971 and told that she would have to leave her job.

The school’s tenure committee said that her teaching was “not up to standard” and alleged that her more than 20 peer-reviewed research papers were not of a “desirable scientific sophistication.”

Dr. Innis Dagg unsuccessfully appealed the decision.

Looking for ways to finance her research, she took a part-time job in 1978 at the University of Waterloo, where she became an academic adviser in the independent studies program. The job helped her continue to work as an independent scholar – she conducted research on homosexuality in animals, the locomotion of camels and the impact of human development on Canadian wildlife – even as she branched into other fields, calling out sexism in books including “Harems and Other Horrors: Sexual Bias in Behavioral Biology” (1983) and “MisEducation: Women & Canadian Universities” (1988).

With few exceptions, like an appearance on the American game show “To Tell the Truth” in 1965, she was largely overlooked by the general public until 2014, when the CBC broadcast an hour-long radio documentary about her work. The feature inspired Alison Reid to make a documentary film, “The Woman Who Loves Giraffes,” which followed Dr. Innis Dagg on her first return trip to South Africa in almost 60 years.

Dr. Innis Dagg, by then in her 80s, became increasingly in-demand on the academic circuit, attending conferences, accepting honorary doctorates and giving interviews in which she sought to promote science education, especially for women and girls. She also championed conservation efforts for giraffes, which have faced dramatic population declines in recent decades amid habitat loss and poaching.

In 2019, she was appointed a member of the Order of Canada. Earlier that year she had returned to the University of Guelph, where her academic ambitions had first been thwarted, for a screening of the documentary.

The dean of the university’s College of Biological Science announced that a research scholarship for women had been created in her honor. A letter was also read from the school’s provost and vice president, Charlotte Yates, who wrote that she was extending “an overdue apology for the ways in which you and other women were treated by the institution.”

“Isn’t it weird?”

Innis Dagg told the Star, marveling at the crowds that lined up to shake her hand or give her a hug after screenings. “I’ve been ignored my whole life, and just to find out now that I’m actually a person and people really think I’m interesting – it’s pretty amazing.”