Canadian zoologist fought sexism as pioneering giraffe researcher
Anne Innis Dagg
January 25, 1933 d April 1, 2024
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 on April 1 at a hospital in Kitchener, Ontario. She was 91.
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, 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 behaviour and ecology, doing research that entered the mainstream only in the 1960s.
For about nine hours a day over an eight-month span, Innis Dagg took notes on the way the world’s tallest land animals moved, ate, fought, socialised and cared for their young. She kept track of about 95 giraffes, using a 16mm 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 78 metres.
For the most part, she tried to stay out of the way, observing giraffes from inside her car, a rickety Ford Prefect that she called Camelo, after camelopardalis, part of the scientific name for the giraffe.
Innis Dagg summarised 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, Behaviour, and Ecology was considered a landmark in the field, pulling together virtually everything that was known about the animals.
But by the time Dr Innis Dagg published The Giraffe, her academic career had been “sidetracked,” as she put it, “by the institutional sexism that was rampant in academia”.
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 peerreviewed research papers were not of a “desirable scientific sophistication”.
Innis Dagg unsuccessfully appealed the decision, making headlines in Canadian newspapers after she accused the university of sexism. She noted that around the same time, two other women who had been briefly employed as zoology professors were denied tenure, in what she believed was a way for the department “to save money, having many large classes taught by academics hired at the lowest rate, then replaced by others also beginning at the salary floor”.
Over the next few years, she tried and failed to secure another academic posting near her family in Toronto. She later said that a dean at the University of Waterloo “told me he would never give a married woman tenure because she had a husband to support her”.
When she was passed over for a teaching position at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo and learned that the position went to a man with less experience, she filed a discrimination claim with the Ontario Human Rights Commission. The case didn’t go anywhere, she said, and she turned down part-time positions that she believed the university had offered in an attempt at “conciliation”.
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 Innis Dagg on her first return trip to South Africa in almost 60 years.
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 honour. 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”.
The youngest of four children, Anne Christine Innis was born in Toronto on January 25, 1933. Her mother, Mary Quayle Innis, was an American-born writer and historian who also served as dean of women at the University of Toronto’s University College. Her father, Harold Innis, was a communication theorist who became the head of the political economy department at the University of Toronto; he also helped inspire her love of nature, once making a canoe trip to the Arctic to see beavers and bears.
After graduating from the Bishop Strachan School, a Toronto prep school, Innis Dagg studied at the University of Toronto, receiving a bachelor’s degree in biology in 1955 and a master’s degree in genetics in 1956.
On her way back home to Canada from South Africa in 1957, she stopped in England and married her fiancé, Canadian scientist Ian Ralph Dagg. He chaired the physics department at the University of Waterloo before his death in 1993. Survivors include their three children, Hugh, Ian and Mary; a brother; and a grandson.
Innis Dagg received a PhD in animal behaviour from the University of Waterloo in 1967, and was able to conduct field work in the Sahara during the summer of 1973, when she studied camels.
“The Jeep I hired broke down in the desert,” she told the Star the next year, recalling her journey home. “I stayed with some nomads until I got a lift in a truck to the railway station. Then our train got derailed in a sandstorm.
“Apart from that, it was quite uneventful.”