The Woman Who Loves Giraffes

Announcer: What is your name, please?

My name is Anne dagg.

My name is Anne dagg.

My name is Anne dagg.

Announcer: I, Anne dagg, am a university lecturer in zoology

and an expert on the giraffe.

I gained my knowledge of the world's tallest animal

at first-hand by studying the giraffe in its natural habitat.

The London zoological society published my findings

as a unique scientific record of the behaviour of the giraffe.

Can these young ladies all claim to be Anne dagg, giraffe expert?

And we'll start this cross-examination, if we may,

with Peggy cass.

Uh, number one, how come you decided to study the giraffe?

I always liked animals and the giraffes fascinated me

when I was a child and went to the zoo.

Number two, where did you study the giraffe?

In Stockholm.

Man: Number three, is the giraffe monogamous?

Does the male giraffe look around at the lady giraffes,

or does he settle down?

Uh, no, he's not monogamous.

He's not monogamous? This gets good, oh!

Announcer: Take your ballets and Mark them, if you will please,

for number one, number two or number three.

Man: Anne actually went to South Africa

to begin her studies of giraffe

before Jane goodall got to Africa

to study the chimpanzees.

She wasn't only a pioneering scientist

looking at animals in the wild,

but she was fighting all kinds of odds as a woman.

It takes an explorer's heart

to be willing to set off like that,

to go and study animals in Africa, in the 1950s,

as a single woman travelling the continent herself

in her little rickety car.

This was a different world then.

There wasn't the infrastructure, there were no mobile phones,

there was nothing.

She did the ground-breaking stuff.

But ironically, Anne has slipped under the radar

and doesn't attract the attention that she deserves.

Male panel member: I voted for number one.

Well, I voted for number one.

Man: Well, I voted for number one as well.

Woman: I voted for one.

I think she looks like the scholarly type.

Show announcer: Let's find out at once

which one of these ladies, in truth, is the giraffe expert.

Will the real Anne dagg please stand up?

Anne: If you'd never seen a giraffe before, I guess,

and came upon your first one, you'd be amazed,

because it doesn't look like any other animal in the whole world.

It has this lovely long, long neck, and a long black tongue,

a lovely long tail and then this beautiful head,

and two little ossicones, they're called,

but people call them horns.

Aren't they curious?

Other animals aren't curious like that.

Woman: We're at brookfield zoo

for the international giraffid conference.

The importance of being here is that this is where Anne dagg

first started her interest in giraffe.

Man: If you're working on giraffes, she was the pioneer.

Anne wrote the textbook.

Especially when I was doing my masters.

She was essential reading.

But outside our tight community of giraffe conservationists,

giraffe researchers, her work is very little known.

Anne was the first person to go to Africa

to study the behaviour of a wild animal.

In fact, with the exception of a red deer study in Scotland,

she was the first person to study the behaviour

of a wild animal anywhere in the world.

Anne's own inspiration was here at the brookfield zoo.

Anne: When I was about three,

my mother took me to the brookfield zoo in Chicago

and there were giraffe there.

I was very small, obviously, and they were very tall,

and I just thought, "these are magnificent.”

"I love these animals."

My love affair began right then, age three.

Young Anne: "August 2nd, 1956."

"Dear mommy,

today was my first sight and feel of Africa."

"When I stepped on the immortal soil,

I felt just as excited as when I saw my first giraffe."

"It shows what a great moment it was."

Here's this 20-something year-old girl

who gets out of college and goes by herself

to South Africa at the beginning of the apartheid,

in a time when women didn't do anything like that

and didn't care what the society accepted things were,

and she just pushed through,

and she was gonna do it because she wanted to.

Young Anne: "As we drove, I could hardly believe

I was about to see my first wild giraffe."

"This was the moment I'd been waiting for my whole life."

Lisa: Oh, giraffe!

John: Wow.

Anne: Oh, heavens, that's great. You forget how tall they are.

John: He's the first one

that I learned to recognize individually.

Lisa: Oh, really?

How funny that he should be the first one we see.

Yeah.

Oh.

Oh, look at him standing there, the way he's posing.

John: Yeah.

Anne: Oh, he's so beautiful.

John: Anne, if you look with your camera now,

at the base of his neck, you can see the trident, yeah.

A trident looking like what? Like a toasting fork.

Okay. Oh. That's how he gets his nickname.

John: So, they each have a nickname and a real name.

The nickname just helps us remember.

Young Anne: "August 25th, 1956."

"Life is as wonderful as ever,

and I am only a little apprehensive about snakes."

"When stalking giraffe,

I will have to decide between walking loudly

to scare off the snakes and walking softly

to not scare the giraffe."

"In this case,

I think the interest of the giraffe will come second.”

John: You see, he has no tail. It was bitten off by a lion.

Anne: Well, he's got a tail. It's just missing the tassel.

John: Yes, that's right. You know when they run,

especially when they run from a predator,

they coil the tail up over their backs.

Anne: Yeah, yeah.

I'm sure it's to avoid just that, you know?

Anne: Oh, dear. As you know,

they're supposed to live for maybe 25 years, aren't they?

Which is pretty rare.

In the wild. Yeah.

John: Yes, we're always worried that he's died, aren't we?

Man: Yeah.

John: Because he's so old.

Anne: It would be sad to be a lonely male, no friends.

I don't know. I quite enjoy it.

Anne: When I went to school,

if there were a chance to give a little speech,

I would be talking about giraffe and how they lived in Africa.

I'd asked my parents for a book about the giraffe,

and they said, well, there wasn't such a thing.

When I got to university, I thought,

"well, at last, now we'll maybe learn about giraffe,"

but we never learned about giraffe there, either,

because, actually, there was very little known about them.

When I was graduating, I knew I wanted to go to Africa now

and see giraffe in their wild place.

I was 23 and I'd been thinking for 20 years about going,

and I just had to do it.

Young man: "July 10th, 1956."

"Dear Anne,

I received your letter today and I am answering it immediately.”

"Certainly, you have Africa in your blood now

and you won't be satisfied until you see it,

but I still mean what I said by riverdale zoo."

Anne: I met LAN at the tennis courts.

He... he played tennis and I played tennis,

that's how we got together.

I said I was going to go to Africa for the year and he said,

"why don't we get married instead?"

I didn't know, really, what to do,

but I went to my mother and she said,

"you've always wanted to see giraffe."

"If you got married now, you probably never would."

And I agreed with her, so I told LAN we'd have to wait,

and if he waited, then we could get married.

And if he didn't wait, then we wouldn't.

Ian: "Dear Anne, it probably is wise to follow advice

and put off marriage thoughts for a while."

"Let's think on it and hope that you get to Africa and back."

"Such a dream to visit should not go unsatisfied."

"Love, LAN.”

To go to Africa, I'd have to play... find a place to stay

and somewhere near where there were giraffe

that I could watch every day

'cause I was interested in their behaviour.

So I started to write to people, anyone I could think of.

I would write to the wildlife department

in each of the countries that I knew had giraffe.

I wrote to l.S.B. Leakey,

who eventually helped Jane goodall study the chimpanzees.

He was very kind.

He actually sent me three different letters.

And there just wasn't really a place in Kenya

that I could study giraffe.

Altogether, I'd have wrote 13 letters to wildlife departments

in each of the countries that I knew had giraffe.

All of them came back and said,

"I'm afraid there is no such place.”

"No one is interested."

One of them said, "well, I think this wouldn't be good

for a young woman to be alone."

I thought, "oh, maybe it's 'cause I'm a woman

that they're saying all this."