The Woman Who Loves Giraffes Documentary

I recorded this documentary on TV last month and just watched it tonight. Has anyone else seen ‘The Woman Who Loves Giraffes’? It was so good, very inspiring, informative, interesting and touching. I wanted to write about it because as a woman myself who loves giraffes and who thought about being a zoologist at one point, I loved it! It’s about this woman, Dr. Anne Innis Dagg, a zoologist from Ontario who was the first woman to study giraffes in the wild in 1956 in Africa after university when she was only 23, during the Apartheid of all things. She wrote letters trying to find a place to stay in Africa and made contact with the manager of a ranch there near a national park in South Africa with wild giraffes roaming the 20,000 acre property. She took a ship there and spent a year there for her thesis and went on to write numerous papers and books that were published. When she returned home she got married and had children but wanted to continue her work and got her PHD and taught for a while at a university until they refused to grant her tenure in the 70s because she was a woman. She went on to fight for woman’s rights for years and tried to get other jobs at universities but she couldn’t find a job as a professor, most of them saying they didn’t hire married women, which was sad. She was so accomplished and educated to have a fate like that.

She was relatively unknown for years until other people who worked with giraffes heard of her work and read her books and started inviting her to conferences to speak and receive awards for her pioneering work in giraffe biology and behaviour. She was finally able to go back to South Africa in her 80s, 60 years after her first visit and was shocked by the decline in the population there do to the development of roads through their range, hunting for meat, etc. The ranch had been sold and split into game farms but she was able to see the part of the old place where she had stayed before. The population dropped from 28,000 reticulated giraffes in 1998 to only 5000 in the range there in South Africa. There is a reserve there where they are trying to conserve the population of the giraffes and educate the children there about them. Another scientist there is now monitoring giraffes with gps trackers and drones. During and after her trip she was able to meet and talk with a lot of other scientists, zoo keepers and other people working with giraffes to publish a new book about them in 2016. For anyone else who loves giraffes I hope you watch it and look up her work and the organizations she supports to help conserve giraffes!

Here is the website and you can rent it online, buy it or go to screenings coming up.

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This website has a bunch of playdates for it to see in it theatres in various places in the US and Canada: https://zeitgeistfilms.com/film/thewomanwholovesgiraffes

These are some organizations Anne supports to help save the giraffes!
http://savethegiraffes.com/

GCF Home

http://www.reticulatedgiraffeproject.net/en/RGP-Home.html
https://www.wildnatureinstitute.org/