A full house was on its feet at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema, and zoology pioneer Anne Innis Dagg, so long under the radar — forgotten really — was trying to process this outpouring of newfound adulation.

The woman who is The Woman Who Loves Giraffes made her way to the stage and began answering questions about her life’s passion and the beautifully crafted documentary the audience had just witnessed.

Eventually, someone near the front called out: “Anne, have you been the recipient of the Order of Canada? If not, how can we nominate you?”

That brought another thunderous ovation and an end to the formal presentation from the scientist often referred to as “the Jane Goodall of giraffes.”

Innis Dagg assumed she could then simply walk up the aisle and slip out the exit into her familiar life of anonymity. But that’s when the lineups, and the real love-in, started.

“First there were two, then there were 20,” she recalls of the fans queuing up to tell their own giraffe story, pose for a photo or share a warm embrace. “Some would leave and more would come. I tried to leave but then there’d be 10 more people in the aisle wanting a hug.”

It’s a scene repeated each time the story of her groundbreaking study of giraffes in the 1950s is shown at a film festival.

At 86, Innis Dagg is getting the rock star treatment. One British conservationist compared meeting her to encountering one of the Beatles.

“It just boggles the mind,” Innis Dagg says of the sudden attention and affection.

“The incredible things they’re saying. They’re crying, some of them. Isn’t it weird? I’ve been ignored my whole life, and just to find out now that I’m actually a person and people really think I’m interesting. It’s pretty amazing. I love it.”

Actually a person? It’s an odd phrase but there was a time during the 1970s when Innis Dagg — author, lecturer and feminist — felt so ostracized from Ontario academia that she wondered if she was some lesser being. She believes that she lost the opportunity to be a tenured university professor, and further pursue her giraffe research, because she was a woman in a field dominated by men.

The snub still brings her to tears. “It was just so awful to work so hard and just be told, ‘Oh, we won’t have any women.’ ”

While Innis Dagg’s significance is frequently distilled to the Goodall comparison, it was actually the Toronto native who set the trend. Before Goodall became famous for studying chimpanzees in the wild, Innis Dagg, at 23, went by herself to Africa in 1956. She is credited as the first westerner to do extensive field research there, observing a species in its own environment.

But while the work of Goodall and the later gorilla studies of Dian Fossey have long been celebrated, Innis Dagg faded into relative obscurity.

Now the story of how she has been resurrected as a hero in the giraffe-studies community is touchingly captured by director Alison Reid in the documentary. The tale rivals the drama of her adventures in Africa.

From an academic family — Anne’s father was University of Toronto professor of political economy Harold Innis (one of the school’s colleges is named in his honour) while her mother, Mary Quayle Innis, was an accomplished author, scholar and one-time dean of women at U of T’s University College — she was a toddler when she first saw a giraffe at Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo.

That began a lifelong fascination with the world’s tallest animal.

She hoped to study giraffes when she majored in biology at U of T, but they were never part of the curriculum. She long searched for a comprehensive book about them but, instead, it was Innis Dagg who would eventually write the text considered to be the giraffe bible.

After earning a master’s degree in genetics at U of T, Innis Dagg wrote to the departments overseeing wildlife preservation in 13 African nations. She asked if there was a way she could visit to study giraffes in their habitat. She received 13 rejections, some suggesting this was not something a woman should be doing.

She continued her letter writing campaign and began signing her entreaties as A. Innis, hoping she would be assumed to be male. The strategy worked and a citrus rancher near Kruger National Park in South Africa said that giraffes live on his property, it was “virtually free of malaria” and she was welcome to bunk into accommodation he had for single men.

Innis Dagg, while making the journey, clarified her gender for Alexander Matthew and the rancher wrote back after she’d arrived in Grahamstown, S. A. He said there’s been “a misunderstanding” and it wouldn’t be proper for a 57-year-old man with a wife elsewhere to welcome “a strange young woman into his household without a chaperone.”

Innis — who’d put a marriage to Ian Dagg on hold for a year — persisted and eventually Matthew agreed to take her into his home. That gave her access to 25,000 hectares of citrus groves and another 8,000 hectares of bush on the farm Matthew called Fleur de Lys. There were 95 giraffes in the area, making it like a private animal reserve for the young scientist.

“I had this tremendous urge to see giraffes roaming free, instead of being cooped up in a zoo,” she told the Star in 1974. Animal studies to that point had chiefly consisted of either capturing animals for dissection, museums or for public display.

Innis spent a year in Africa making detailed observations and meticulous notes about the behaviour of giraffes in the wild watching from the front seat of used green Ford Prefect she purchased for $200. That study would eventually lead to the publication of The Giraffe: Its Biology, Behavior and Ecology, written with Bristol Foster, in 1976, long considered the authoritative giraffe book.

A prolific author with 23 books and almost 40 academic papers to her credit, Innis Dagg would also later write Pursuing Giraffe: A 1950s Adventure, and Smitten by Giraffe: My Life as a Citizen Scientist. (Giraffes or giraffe is an acceptable plural.) She also updated, and made some corrections to, her original scholarly text in 2014.

“I just wanted to know everything about them. Each day was a happy day,” she recalls of her 10-hour stretches observing the giraffes in Africa.

“Apparently, I was the first one in the world to do that, which boggles the mind actually. Why wouldn’t everyone think to do that?”

The biologist used Matthew’s 16-mm camera to record giraffes in colour. That film would become part of her doctoral thesis in which she compared the gaits of various animals.

Innis Dagg returned home and was a part-time university lecturer while working toward that PhD. Her unique expertise as a giraffologist led to an appearance on the popular American TV game show To Tell the Truth in 1965. In 1968, she became an assistant professor in the University of Guelph’s zoology department.

It was there, in 1971, she applied for tenure as a full professor and her life took another twist.

Despite, she believes, more qualifications than the men given the positions, she was rejected by Guelph and then Wilfrid Laurier University, which didn’t even grant her an interview. Any hope of becoming a prof at Waterloo was a non-starter, she says, because she was told the university would not be hiring married women.

“They told us, you can have your PhD but you’ve got to raise children. That’s your job,” Innis Dagg recalls.

It was the rejection by Guelph that Innis Dagg found particularly soul-destroying. She was in her fourth year of probation, a point when a potential professor was either granted tenure or let go. She had published more than 20 peer-reviewed research papers but was told by the promotions committee that, among other issues, her teaching was not up to standard and her papers were not of a “desirable scientific sophistication.”

The rejection letter stated she would be terminated in 1973. She remembers it as being “the end of everything that I’d hoped for,” and she decided to leave immediately.

Sandy Middleton, a new faculty member in the zoology department at the time, says Innis Dagg “ran into the old boys’ network.” He was the only one of the six men holding a vote on the committee who backed her, and he believes it was “grossly unfair” that she wasn’t given the opportunity. He believes the rejection destroyed her career as it was always a black mark against her.

In retrospect he wonders if there was professional jealousy from some of the other committee members because Innis Dagg’s publication record and potential may have better than some of those holding a vote.

“I can imagine how devastated she must have been in that she had produced this seminal work on giraffes, and was an early trailblazer for women in that sense, and she was never allowed to develop that science any further,” says Middleton, who is retired.

“She did go on to do other things, much to her credit, in terms of writing books and various things, and (fighting for) women’s issues within the university, but it was all done without a full-time academic position. She was a very tenacious woman.”

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While shooting the film, Reid interviewed Keith Ronald, the chair of the promotions committee and dean of the College of Biological Sciences, who has since died. He recalled Innis Dagg as “a good teacher” who “had an interesting research program, but it hadn’t been fully developed.”

He added that “tenure is something you just don’t throw to somebody in five years, they have to earn it … if you don’t think they can do it, you don’t give them tenure.”

Earlier this year, Innis Dagg received a letter from Charlotte Yates, Guelph’s provost and vice-president academic, that offered some vindication.

Yates extended “an overdue apology for the ways in which you and other women were treated by the institution.

“I hope that we can learn from past errors and oversights and, indeed, that the University of Guelph becomes a model for other institutions looking to make systematic improvements in gender and equality.”

Guelph also established the Dr. Anne Innis Dagg Summer Research Scholarship, which annually makes $8,000 available to a woman studying wildlife.

“I thought it was nice,” Innis Dagg says of Guelph’s attempt to right the past, noting that she’d also like the other two universities to say “we’re really sorry and then other girls can see maybe things are going to be different. It was just so bad what they did.”

Innis Dagg and her daughter Mary recently met administrators at Laurier, and Mary Dagg says the school was very open to making amends for her mother’s treatment. It would now like Innis Dagg to come up with suggestions as to what that might entail. Any grievance with Waterloo is trickier, says Mary Dagg, because it is based on her mom’s memory of what she was told. Understanding that she wouldn’t be hired anyway, Innis Dagg never did apply to be a professor there.

Her treatment through that time — she even took her case against Laurier unsuccessfully to the Ontario Human Rights Commission — shaped Innis Dagg’s work. In addition to papers and books on wildlife, she promoted feminism and took on inequality, particularly in science and the education system.

“I just want to make the point that women are equal to men and they have to be given that status,” she says. “I think if we don’t keep noticing what’s happening, it might drift back.”

Anne Dagg worked part time for the University of Waterloo from 1978 until six years ago, largely as the senior academic adviser in the school’s independent studies program, while she continued to publish academic papers and texts.

It was important work but hardly in the spotlight. At least until a chain of fortuitous events brought her a measure of unexpected fame.

Documentary maker Sandy Bourque was culling her books at her Stratford home when she came upon Pursuing Giraffe. She read the book and then, gripped by the story, produced a thoughtful look at Innis Dagg that aired on CBC radio’s Ideas in 2014. Reid heard the show, found it captivating, and also read Pursuing Giraffe. She believed the story had potential for a scripted movie.

Reid visited the octogenarian at her home in Waterloo and secured the rights to the book and her life story. However, before she could move ahead with the film, she learned Innis Dagg was returning to Africa for the first time in almost 60 years to attend a conference of giraffe conservationists near Fleur de Lys. Reid, a longtime stunt performer and stunt co-ordinator in TV and film, asked if she could tag along with a film crew.

“I hadn’t made a documentary before, I just thought this is historic,” says Reid. “We have to capture it. That’s how it started.”

Reid had no idea Innis Dagg also planned on attending another conference at the Brookfield Zoo, where she’d first encountered giraffes. There it was announced that an award had been created in her name to be presented at each future conference to an individual doing stellar work with giraffes.

When Innis Dagg turned over a treasure trove of letters she sent and received — correspondence with her mother and future husband — while in Africa and the canisters of film, the ingredients were there for the dramatic telling of Innis Dagg’s story.

So why did Innis Dagg keep that film for six decades?

“Just sloppiness. We’d just put it in the attic and nobody cared until Ali came up and fainted,” she jokes, recalling the moment she handed the film over to Reid.

“I didn’t think it was worth anything. It was just giraffe walking for my PhD thesis. I never thought of it as having any other use.”

It wasn’t, however, just shots of giraffes. Matthew, the citrus farmer, has filmed Innis Dagg doing her field work and other moments at the South African farm. Reid was able to edit that film together with current footage of Innis Dagg in the same locations to stunning dramatic effect.

Mary Dagg says the giraffe community’s rediscovery of her mother has had an incredible impact on the zoologist. It started in 2010 when a giraffe keeper at the Oakland Zoo, not even sure if Innis Dagg was alive, searched her out and invited her to a conference of experts at which she was given a pioneer award.

“She was, like, what the heck?” says Mary Dagg. “She had no idea there even was a community.”

“When she went back, she was kind of vindicated if you will. All those years of doing all that research, then she found all these people who were actually using that research and studying it and living off it. She had no idea all this was going on. So to finally get some credit for the work she’d done so many years ago was just huge.”

Then came the radio and film documentaries.

“I don’t think we’ve had one screening of the documentary where people did not get up on their feet and clap for her,” says Reid. “She still doesn’t quite believe it. But I think it is very gratifying for her.”

And there indeed have been tears after some showings, mostly from women who are contemporaries of Innis Dagg or a little younger. They see their own lost opportunities in the story.

“They’ll be sobbing and say, ‘That was me’ or ‘I thought I was the only one,’ ” recounts Mary Dagg, who accompanies her mother to many of the festivals and conventions.

“Mom got a chance to have her story told and have universities come forward and say, this was not a good thing and we want to do something about it,” she continues. “At least she got a chance to have some form or restitution but I think there’s a lot of women out there that don’t get those chances.”

Her three children grown, Innis Dagg lives on her own in Waterloo — Ian Dagg died in 1993 — and continues to write and promote giraffe conservation. A children’s book published in 2016 called 5 Giraffes earned her a Lane Anderson Award for Canadian science writing. She donated the $10,000 prize to giraffe conservation. Two similar books on hippos and rhinos are in the works. Reid still hopes to make a scripted movie or TV series about her life.

Innis Dagg says she is “just so happy” to be recognized again, but she concedes the current validation doesn’t make up for all she lost early in her career.

“I guess it never will,” she says, “because I needed it when I was younger.”