Canadian was world’s top expert on giraffes
STAUNCH FEMINIST
For decades, Anne Innis Dagg was the world’s leading expert on giraffes and a staunch advocate for gender equality in the face of sexist attitudes that derailed her academic career.
But even as she compiled “binders and binders” of her research and advocacy work, the Waterloo, Ont., zoologist and feminist was never motivated by accolades, her daughter said.
“She was slogging away doing all of these things for no other reason than she thought it was the right thing to do,” Mary Dagg said in an interview Tuesday, three weeks after her mother’s death.
Innis Dagg died on April 1 at age 91, a few years after an award-winning documentary about her career and life — The Woman Who Loves Giraffes — put her accomplishments in the spotlight.
The 2018 film, directed by Alison Reid, revisited Innis Dagg’s solo journey in 1956 to study giraffes in the wild in South Africa. It was a pioneering trip by a western scientist who was just 23 years old and had no institutional backing.
“Mom was there before Jane,” Dagg said, referring to Jane Goodall, the British primatologist who famously studied chimpanzees in Africa, primarily Tanzania.
The documentary also highlighted Innis Dagg’s struggles with sexism in academia and the obstacles she faced despite her groundbreaking research and published work that includes the seminal book Giraffe: Biology, Behaviour and Conservation.
She earned a PHD in animal behaviour from the University of Waterloo and worked as an assistant professor at the University of Guelph’s zoology department but was denied tenure in the 1970s. That was a devastating blow to her career but it inspired her lifelong fight for women’s rights, her daughter said.
Innis Dagg, who was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2019, wrote several books on feminism, including Miseducation: Women and Canadian Universities. She fought against systemic discrimination and wrote letters to various institutions advocating for women’s rights and freedom of choice, Dagg said.
After the release of The Woman Who Loves Giraffes, the University of Guelph formally apologized to Innis Dagg for the discrimination she experienced and established a research scholarship in her honour.