Anne Innis Dagg, giraffe research pioneer, 91
Anne Innis Dagg, a Canadian zoologist who broke new ground in animal research while studying giraffes in the wild, and who later campaigned against institutional sexism after she was denied tenure by an all-male committee and told that women belonged in the home instead of the academy, 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, 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, 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. Innis Dagg, he added, was “at the cutting edge” in focusing on animal behavior and ecology.
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 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.”