Pursuing Giraffe: A 1950s Adventure by Anne Innis Dagg (2006)

As a toddler Anne Innis sees her first giraffe in the Brookline Zoo in Chicago and she falls in love with them. At age 24, with a degree in zoology from the University of Toronto she sails to England and on to South Africa to study giraffe. It is 1956, she is the first person to actually study live animals in their habitat. She had great difficulty in being accepted in places in southern or east Africa where she could carry out her research because she was a woman. She finally settled on a farm in the Transvaal run by Owen Matthews who hopes to turn it into a reserve to protect animals from poachers.

Anne has purchased a car, both for transportation and for viewing giraffe, she had been told they wouldn’t notice it, but would scatter if she moved about, which proved to be true. For nine months she tracks the animals noting what and when they eat, interaction with each other and their gait among other things. Having nothing to follow she establishes her own methods of keeping research notes on a five minute cycle and on what areas. One interesting fact she recorded was homosexual behaviour among the male giraffe, she later learns it occurs among rhino and about 100 mammals.

After nine months she travels to Tanganyika and to Kenya to meet with people she had corresponded with but was unsuccessful in finding a place to carry on her research. There are nine races of giraffe scattered across southern and east Africa. She does climb Mount Kilimanjaro and observes giraffe as a tourist. She continues her research for a number of months on the farm before returning to Canada.

There are interesting sections on apartheid and politics in South Africa and Tanganyika. She is bothered and appalled by it but also realizes how easy it is to accept the life style. She fights for women’s rights in academic institutions where in the 1960 - 1970’s women are denied tenure, a situation she personally experienced.

A documentary was done based on this book in 2008, “The Woman Who Loves Giraffe” finally making her work know to the general public. She will receive the Order of Canada in 2020, at age 87.

I saw the film and immediately ordered this book. She was and still is an amazing woman!
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ ( )

In 1956, Canadian Anne Innis Dagg set sail for Africa, pursuing her dream to study giraffe. One of the first zoologists to study African mammals in Africa, Dagg broke many stereotypes undertaking behavioural research – years before Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey began their better-known studies.

For Pursuing Giraffe: a 1950s Adventure, Dagg has compiled her journals and letters home to create a moving story of woman’s pursuit of knowledge in a new field. As Dagg shares, women did not normally enter science programs at University, were still expected to wear skirts to school and did not have the opportunities to apply for field research like their male classmates. It is from these limitations that Dagg struck out into new territory, traveling alone when she was only twenty-three years old and finding a location in South Africa willing to host a female researcher.

Readers may be tempted, with 21st century viewpoints, to denigrate Dagg for her apparent naïveté in journeying to Africa with no knowledge of the political climate. However, it is precisely this unbiased naïveté that presents a compelling picture of the world Dagg entered. Assuredly, it is only a narrow window into a complex situation but an important one. With a scientist’s eye, Dagg chronicles every reaction, including her own biases, her idealized notions of Africans, and her utter bewilderment at the political mire she has encountered. This honest reporting allows readers to arrive at their own conclusions.

Dagg set out with enough money for approximately a year in Africa and a host who may have turned her away after discovering she was a woman. Her research included hours of footage on the animals grazing and male giraffe sparing, studies of the plants preferred by the giraffe in the dry and wet seasons and her groundbreaking discovery of homosexual behaviour among male giraffes.

Her daring nature coloured her pursuit of the giraffe, and in the end, she managed to study the animals in both Southern and Eastern Africa, leaving just as the Group Areas Act goes into effect and apartheid is implemented as we understand it today. Pursuing Giraffe: a 1950s Adventure is as much a story about women’s roles in the world as it is about scientific research and personal growth. ( )