The Curious, Extraordinary Life Of Anne Innis Dagg

Why the Canadian woman who was first in the world to study giraffes in the wild — and is still considered one of the planet’s foremost experts on the species — is only now getting her due

- Alanna Mitchell

THE FIRST TIME I spotted her, Anne Innis Dagg was sitting alone on a small settee in the middle of a springtime party at a posh downtown Toronto hotel, oblivious to the glittering swirl surrounding her. While many of the other guests were in silks and heels, Innis Dagg wore slacks, sensible shoes and a short-sleeved yellow T-shirt decorated with giraffes. Rather than nibbling on canapés, schmoozing and sipping good wine, she was absorbed in a tattered newspaper.

That’s Innis Dagg in a nutshell: she marches to her own beat. And that has led her to a curious life of extraordinary scientific firsts and extraordinary obscurity. Widely considered the founder of giraffe science, she was the first to study the giraffe in the wild; the first zoologist to study any African animal in the wild; an inventor of the scientific discipline of behavioural biology; and, more than six decades and copious academic papers and books later, still one of the world’s leading experts on the giraffe, Giraffa camelopardalis.

“You can’t be a giraffe researcher unless you’ve read her book,” says Fred Bercovitch, a zoologist who is executive director of the Texas-based group Save the Giraffes.

But partly because she has been in the vanguard — and partly because she chose to study an eccentric ungulate rather than a cuddly primate — those accomplishments have not brought her decades of fame. While generations of zoologists have relied on her scientific work and quoted her in their publications, the woman herself has lived resolutely out of the limelight in Waterloo, Ont. She has languished in part-time academic jobs with no tenure, applying her bacon-slicer of a mind to studies on everything from feminism to literature to camels to animal rights.