By Anthony Wilson-Smith

October 6, 2025

There is something distinctly Canadian in the fact that the late British naturalist Jane Goodall was much better known here than her homegrown counterpart, Anne Innis Dagg. It’s a striking fact because in many ways, they were so similar.

Born a year apart — Innis Dagg in Toronto in 1933, Goodall in London in 1934 — they were both remarkably brave, and both eventually earned recognition and respect for their groundbreaking research and expertise regarding certain species. Goodall specialized in chimpanzees, Dagg in giraffes.

Beginning in the 1950s, each endured considerable physical challenges and risk in Africa – and sexism everywhere – for their efforts. But Goodall became world renowned relatively early, while Dagg was denied tenure at Canadian universities even as her research on giraffes and other species was recognized as seminal by others in the field. Dagg died in 2024 at age 91: Goodall on Oct. 1 at the same age.

All of which, in its way, contributed to making Dagg such a natural candidate for our latest Historica Canada Heritage Minute on her life, released in early October to coincide with Women’s History Month.

Among the Heritage Minutes criteria, we look for Canadians who helped shape important events or discoveries and/or bring us pride through their achievements. We also like to choose people who have lived on the outskirts of fame but remain less known than they deserve to be.

Dagg fits all that – and more. She was a remarkable person from an equally remarkable family. Her father, Harold Innis, was a famed historian and professor at the University of Toronto in the first half of the last century and one of the university’s colleges is named after him. Her mother, Mary Quayle Innis, was both a noted academic and a novelist.

As for Anne, The Canadian Encyclopedia, which our organization also oversees, describes her as a “zoologist, feminist activist and author” and notes that “though better known, two of her contemporaries, Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, followed in her footsteps.” She also became expert in the behavior of other species – and was the first one to demonstrate that homosexual behavior existed among other creatures in the wild – notably penguins.

Smitten with giraffes from age three – when she first saw one at a zoo – Dagg went to Africa for the first time in 1956 at age 23, (a year before Goodall arrived in Kenya) the same year she earned her master’s degree in genetics at the University of Toronto. (Slightly more than a decade later, she received her doctorate from the University of Waterloo in animal behavior.)

Dagg drove a secondhand Ford out to observe the giraffes and spent hours in it as a hiding place in blistering temperatures observing them.

As our Minute shows, when she wrote to the owner of the ranch near South Africa’s Kruger National Park where she hoped to stay, she signed her letters “A. Innis” so he wouldn’t realize ‘she’ was not a ‘he’. Dagg drove a secondhand Ford out to observe the giraffes and spent hours in it as a hiding place in blistering temperatures observing them.

Two years later, she published her observations of the animal in a British scientific journal: the piece was titled The Behavior of the Giraffe, Giraffa Camelopardalis, in the Eastern Transvaal. Almost two decades later, and after repeated trips, she wrote a book (co-authored with a former U. of T. classmate) titled Giraffe: Biology, Behavior and Conservation. It is still considered the definitive work on the species.

Despite her work, Dagg was denied tenure at the University of Guelph, where she was an assistant professor. She was turned away in work applications at universities including Wilfrid Laurier, Western and York. She never gained tenure but worked for 35 years for the University of Waterloo’s independent studies program.

Dagg’s work came to greater public attention relatively late in life thanks in large measure to filmmaker Alison Reid (director of this Minute). Reid read Dagg’s 2006 book Pursuing Giraffe: A 1950s Adventure, and made a documentary on Dagg released in 2018 called The Woman Who Loves Giraffes. Two years later, Dagg was named to the Order of Canada and also awarded the Lawrence J. Burpee Medal by the Royal Canadian Geographic Society.

She continued writing and researching until her death at 91 in 2024. Her daughter, Mary — who also worked on the Minute with us and provides the end voiceover — now runs the Anne Innis Dagg Foundation. Its goal is to promote “the harmonious coexistence of humans and wildlife through the integration of conservation and education.”

There was sad irony in the fact that Goodall’s passing came on the eve of the release of this Minute: it drew further attention to it, and, by extension, the remarkable contributions both women made to the study of wildlife. Neither cared particularly about celebrity other than the potential advantages it provided for fundraising for their causes and enhancing attention to them.

Through challenges and frustration, Dagg remained an optimist: her obituary noted that she was remembered for “her unbreakable spirit, infectious laugh and steadfast determination.”

In lieu of flowers or a formal funeral, her remains after cremation were spread by Mary on the breeding ground of South African giraffes earlier this year. The International Foundation for Animal Welfare (IFAW) reports that in the last three decades, the overall giraffe population has fallen by up to 40 per cent due to factors including “habitat loss, poaching, drought, human-wildlife conflict and civil unrest.”

Far from being a memory put behind us, the impact of Dagg and her work will no doubt loom larger than ever in the years ahead.

Anthony Wilson-Smith is President of Historica Canada and former Editor-in-Chief of Maclean’s magazine.