The Woman Who Loves Giraffes

In 1956, four years before Jane Goodall ventured into the world of chimpanzees and seven years before Dian Fossey left to work with mountain gorillas, 23-year-old Canadian biologist Anne Innis Dagg made an unprecedented solo journey to South Africa to become the first person in the world to study animal behavior in the wild on that continent. When she returned home a year later, armed with ground-breaking research, the insurmountable barriers she faced as a female scientist proved much harder to overcome.

In 1972, having published 20 research papers as an assistant professor of zoology at University of Guelph, the Dean of the university denied her tenure. She couldn’t apply to the University of Waterloo because the Dean there told Anne he would never give tenure to a married woman. This was the catalyst that transformed Anne into a feminist activist.

In THE WOMAN WHO LOVES GIRAFFES, an older, wiser Anne takes us on her first expedition back to Africa to retrace where her trail-blazing journey began more than half a century ago. By retracing her original steps, and with letters and stunning, original 16mm film footage, Anne offers an intimate window into her life as a young woman, juxtaposed with a firsthand look at the devastating reality giraffes face today.