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The Woman Who Loves Giraffes
Jan. 25th, 2019 10:43 am I went to see this film with a couple of friends yesterday, and, wow, I was not expecting to be as emotionally affected by it as I ended up being! 'Let's go see an interesting documentary about a giraffe scientist!' we thought, and then we got a much better documentary about a giraffe scientist losing to a sexist system but still managing to inspire a field.
It's a documentary about Anne Innis Dagg, a Canadian biologist that I am ashamed to admit I had never heard of, though watching this documentary went some way towards explaining why I hadn't. She went to study giraffes in South Africa in the 1950s - on her own, causing great consternation among everyone - and conducted possibly the first, and definitely among the earliest, detailed observations of an animal in their natural habitat, spending almost two years (I think, I lost track of the timeline a little) watching a giraffe population near Hoedspruit and taking notes on their behaviour. She then went back to Canada, published a heap of papers on this research, earned her PhD, taught at Guelph University, and then she ran up hard against the Old Boy's Club of academia, and was consistently refused tenure and ended up out of a job for being a woman. She then spent the next thirty odd years fighting the system, publishing more of her research, writing the book - literally - on giraffes, and writing a lot about women in academia, as well as about Canadian wildlife, her citizen science research, all sorts of things.
( The rest of this is going under a cut because I got very longwinded apparently )
It's a documentary about Anne Innis Dagg, a Canadian biologist that I am ashamed to admit I had never heard of, though watching this documentary went some way towards explaining why I hadn't. She went to study giraffes in South Africa in the 1950s - on her own, causing great consternation among everyone - and conducted possibly the first, and definitely among the earliest, detailed observations of an animal in their natural habitat, spending almost two years (I think, I lost track of the timeline a little) watching a giraffe population near Hoedspruit and taking notes on their behaviour. She then went back to Canada, published a heap of papers on this research, earned her PhD, taught at Guelph University, and then she ran up hard against the Old Boy's Club of academia, and was consistently refused tenure and ended up out of a job for being a woman. She then spent the next thirty odd years fighting the system, publishing more of her research, writing the book - literally - on giraffes, and writing a lot about women in academia, as well as about Canadian wildlife, her citizen science research, all sorts of things.
( The rest of this is going under a cut because I got very longwinded apparently )
