Anne Innis Dagg

Listen to the interview here.

I was the youngest of four children, born to Mary Quayle Innis, an author, and Harold Adams Innis, a professor of economic history at the University of Toronto. Because I always wanted to study the behavior of the giraffe, I enrolled in honours biology at the University of Toronto, graduating with the gold medal in 1955. I had no yet figured out a way to get to Africa, so I spent the next year there earning a master’s degree in genetics. I was finally able to sail to South Africa in 1956, where I studied giraffe at a ranch in the eastern Transvaal and visited East Africa briefly in the unfulfilled hope of doing the same there. (See entry on Dagg as Zoologist). I returned to Canada in 1957 where I lived for two years in Ottawa with my new husband Ian Ralph Dagg, a physicist. In 1959 we moved to Waterloo, Ontario, where Ian became a professor at the University of Waterloo. Our children, Hugh, Ian and Mary, were born there in the 1960s.

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During this decade I continued my research on giraffe, taught sessional courses at Wilfrid Laurier University (then called Waterloo College) and earned a PhD from the University of Waterloo with a thesis on the comparative gaits of large mammals. From 1968 to 1972 I was a full-time faculty member at the University of Guelph but was denied tenure, despite having a good research and teaching record. Other women in the same position agreed that we were experiencing sexual discrimination. (See entry on Dagg as Feminist). From then on I continued to do research, writing academic papers and books on giraffe and other zoological subjects as well as on feminist issues. (See my CV and several articles on this website). In 1978 I was hired by students of the Integrated Studies program at UW as a part-time resource person. I remain attached to this program, now called Independent Studies, having served variously as a part-time academic advisor and part-time academic director. My husband died in 1993 of a massive heart attack following our tri-weekly game of tennis mixed doubles. Since 1999 I have lived with Canadian political scientist Alan C. Cairns, who taught at the University of British Columbia for 35 years and now has an office at the University of Waterloo

Dagg As a Zoologist

Dagg As a Feminist

Big Jolt: A Historical Look at the Sudden Production of Activists

A Critical Snapshot in Time of Canadian Universities -1994

Puppylove: A Novella by Dagg and Alan C. Cairns

History of Mammalogy in Canada to 1990 by Dagg and A.W. Frank Banfield

Defining Species and Naming Bears: An Episode in the History of Taxonomy

Dagg’s Curriculum Vitae and Awards

How to Order Dagg’s Recent Books

Anne INNIS Dagg is the tenth recipient of The Bishop Strachan School’s Distinguished Old Girl Award (DOGA) in the year 2011. It was given at a banquet on May 11, 2011, at The Bishop Strachan School.

Her citation reads:
Anne INNIS Dagg ‘51 PhD is a renowned author, scholar, animal rights’ advocate and wildlife photographer. As a child she loved animals which inspired her to become a zoologist. At age 23 she went alone to Africa to do pioneering research on giraffe. She has written 14 books and many articles about the behaviour of animals, and campaigned against their cruel use in experimental medical research. She has also championed women’s rights in academia since being denied the opportunity to become a professor 35 years ago.

“Animals need people to fight for them, so writing about them is important. I hope my books and articles will help increase people’s understanding of animals and draw attention to the cruelty that many suffer at human hands.”

Dagg’s short speech in May 2011 on the awarding of the DOGA is as follows:

My mother always laughed at the term “old girl.” What an oxymoron! And how much more so when the girl graduated 60 years ago! But I am thrilled to be here as an “old girl.”

Thank you to BSS for arranging this honour and to all the BSS friends and others who have come to this wonderful event. I think this school is close to the heart of everyone here. I certainly remember my years at BSS with huge pleasure and gratitude.

I’d like to talk briefly about Bias, which has interested me for many years. It was also addressed by my father Harold Innis in his book The Bias of Communication.
He explained that with light-weight methods of government communication such as papyrus, early civilizations could spread out and govern huge areas.
By contrast, empires with solid commitments such as pyramids and writings in stone were likely to last a long time.
Space and time.

I’ll talk about past bias against academic women briefly (= me really, and = prejudice), and then past bias in research dealing with animal behavior, my field of study.

I. Bias against Women
A. In 1972 when I had 20 refereed papers and a PhD on my CV I applied to various universities for teaching positions. One science dean said I could never have a permanent job because I had a husband to support me. I could do research, but use my own money of course. How helpful! I have always had to do this. Having three young children did not help of course.

Another university denied me even an interview, but instead gave two jobs to male friends with far fewer publications. They had never held interviews! I asked the Ontario Human Rights Commission to fight for me, but four anxious years later my case was dropped.

Finally I was hired by students in 1978 as a part-time resource person in a small UW program, and have been there ever since. Being part-time, I have had lots of time to write both articles and books.

To counteract sexism against academic women. I wrote several papers and co-authored a book in 1988: MisEducation in Canadian Universities. Things are better now for university women.

B. By 1985 I had written ten books but with no help from the Canada Council, which was set up in part to give out our tax money for cultural purposes. I decided to look into how it worked. I found most of the jury members were men, who gave most of the money to men. For writers, only about one-third went to women compared to men.

Men argued that women didn’t get grant money because few of them wrote. I knew this wasn’t true, and later wrote an Encyclopedia which included nearly 500 women who were Anglo-Canadian authors or who wrote in English about Canada. It was called The Feminine Gaze. (This didn’t get a grant either.)
Now the grants awarded seem about equal for men and women in the arts, thanks perhaps in part to my book.

II. Three Biases in Animal Behavioral Research: Sexism, Homosexuality and Aggression
This is a new field of research which I helped to pioneer with my study of the giraffe in South Africa in the mid 1950s. I wrote about this in my book Pursuing Giraffe.

One wants to think of science as a neutral, unbiased process, but don’t bet on it.

A. Sexual Bias. Many male researchers of animal behavior, especially men, brought their ideas of human behavior to their field studies —
a) they knew that men were more important than women,
b) they observed animals and reported in their published papers that female animals were less dominant, less active and less important than male animals because that is what they expected to see, and
c) from such reports readers would know that since male animals were more dominant and important than female animals, men must be more important and dominant to women. It was nature and nature knew best.

For example, in 1956 Michael Chance wrote up research on rhesus monkey behavior at the London Zoo. He labeled the males D1, D2 and D3 etc (D for dominance). The females were more numerous but had no names or numbers. If several females gathered around a male, this was documented for the male but not the females who were nameless. He watched what the animals did and concluded in part that males were dominant to females, needless to say.

Another example. In 1978, zoologist Shirley Strum was at a conference on baboons and reported that from her many years of observations she found that male yellow baboons did not have a dominance hierarchy, although the females did.
Dominance hierarchies are often present in groups because they enable each individual to know where it stands in respect to the other animals, like a pecking order in hens. Occasionally there is a fight as an individual challenges one above him or her in the ranking to try to gain a higher status. Having such a system is useful because there is not constant squabbling about food or resting places.
Most of the men present were furious at Strum’s comment. They said she must have missed it, or needed more data, or was incompetent. She was correct, but it took a few more years before some men would accept this.
(There is less need of a dominance hierarchy when food is spread out as it is for baboons [grass, bulbs, insects] and therefore there is little competition for it.)

In reality an animal is in general dominant if it is larger and therefore stronger than another. For example for hares, hawks, hamsters and hyenas (4 Hs), females are larger than males and are dominant to them.

I wrote a book about this sexism called Harems and Other Horrors which I had to publish myself, as my ideas were so radical.

B. Homosexual Bias
This subject interested me because in my part time job at UW I worked with lesbians who were bullied because their sexual orientation was “unnatural.”
This really bothered me because I had seen many male giraffe mounting other males in the wild. When I published a paper based on my giraffe observations, I had described such behavior (although I had never mentioned it to any one as this topic was taboo in the 1950s). I was apparently the first to mention homosexuality being present in wild animals. It had been observed in zoos, but was thought to be caused by the abnormal conditions of captivity.

My aunt read the paper and was horrified. I heard her telling my uncle “They shouldn’t allow young girls to see such things.” When I am bored, I sometimes imagine who “they” might be. While watching giraffe I sat in my Ford Prefect in the middle of nowhere making notes on what each animal did.
- would “they” be zoologists vetting giraffe? - tagging along with me to hurry giraffe out of sight if they looked randy?
- or wardens ready to distract me? - at an appropriate moment when I sat in my car watching males?

Other scientists did not report homosexual behavior among “their” animals – justifying this by thinking maybe they had been mistaken, or maybe the animals involved were sick, or perhaps they themselves would be thought kinky or gay for mentioning it.

Valerius Geist, a Canadian who studied mountain sheep in the Rockies, observed males mounting each other but described this behavior as “aggressosexual.” I remember reading his paper and trying to figure out what on earth he was talking about.
He later wrote a book about the sheep (1975) and admitted he had been ridiculous. He wrote that he made up the term “aggressosexual” because admitting that these “magnificent beasts” (his words) had evolved a homosexual society was emotionally beyond him at the time. Luckily he had since smartened up.

On behalf of my lesbian students, in the early 1980s I did the first literature review of homosexual behavior in mammals and birds and found it in over 70 species. Now it has been documented in over 400 species.

So homosexual behavior is natural, but harassment of gays and lesbians still occurs around the world. I wrote about this in my book “Love of Shopping” is Not a Gene, castigating the ease with which many people assume our behavior comes from our genes.

C. Bias toward Aggression in Human Evolution
The final bias is against the presumption that our early ancestors were aggressive and therefore it is natural for men to be aggressive too. Wars are our heritage.
A colleague and I have just finished writing a book about this. Dozens of best sellers by men state that our ancestors were fierce hunters and killers:

i.e. Ardrey “… for “millions upon millions of evolving years we killed for a living”

But the fossil evidence is against this.
- fossil Lucy and her friends (Australopithecus) from 3.2 million years ago had males and females of similar size.
- both less than four feet high, so “hunters” is surely a misnomer. They were scavengers and mostly vegetarians.
- males and females had canine teeth of about the same size which indicates the males were not especially aggressive
- signs of murder by human beings only 20,000 years ago, less than 1% of human evolutionary history.
Our book sees our ancestors as peaceable monogamous couples and clans living on the savannas of east Africa for five million years.
We need a publisher for this book so any suggestions would be welcome!

Thank you.