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.