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Chris Knipp
09-23-2019, 05:56 PM
ALISON REID: THE WOMAN WHO LOVES GIRAFFES (2018)

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STILL FROM A FILM CLIP OF ANNE INNIS DAGG IN AFRICA IN THE FIFTIES

Tears and hugs for a pioneering Canadian woman scientist who got the shaft from male chauvinists

This is an eye-opening tale that will make you angry and give you a lump in the throat. Anne Innis Dagg is perhaps the great pioneer of giraffe studies. She's more than that: one of the first ever even to conduct scientific study of animals in the wild. You can call her the Jane Goodall of giraffe studies, but that will conceal a world of hurt: she was earlier, and she was more wronged.

Anne Dagg recounts falling in love with giraffes at the age of three. She had an eminent background. Her father, Harold Innis, was a professor of political economy at the University of Toronto and her mother, Mary Quayle Innis, was an author of short stories and books about history. She never doubted her plan: to study giraffes. In 1956-57, when she was a bold and callow twenty-three, persuading a friendly farmer near Kruger National Park to let her stay with him, Dagg spent a year in South Africa and did the work on which her many books and articles were based. Hers became the pioneering writing in the field that remained that for decades.

[FOR the rest of this review wait till the theatrical release next week.]