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Junior Giraffe Club provides outlet for youth to help with species conservation

January 2, 2025   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

It can be a challenge for many people to discover gifts for the youngsters in their lives that are unusual and parenthetically, perhaps, educational but, most of all: fun.

Here is a suggestion for membership to the Junior Giraffe Club with the Anne Innis Dagg Foundation. This is a story that might suit that search very well.

When she was three years old, Canadian zoologist Dr. Anne Innis Dagg’s mother took her to the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago, Illinois, where she met her first giraffe. At that moment, the child fell in love with giraffes, a passion that guided all her life into her final year. She died in April this year at the age of 91. 

She was the world’s first “Giraffologist.”

Coming from an academic heritage, Dagg turned to science in all her education, earning a bachelor’s degree in biology and a master’s degree in genetics, but her interest and enthusiasm for giraffes had not lessened.

In 1956, at age 23, she decided to go to Africa on her own to see and study giraffes. Her mother encouraged her to make the trip. The barrier was that she was not a man and that women did not travel to Africa alone. Still, she learned about the Fleur de Lys Ranch near Kruger National Park, South Africa, and she applied to stay at the ranch to study giraffes, signing her letters “A. Innis,” hoping the farm owner, Alexander Mathew would presume her to be a man. At one point in her journey to South Africa, Mathew discovered she was a woman and told her he could not allow her to stay at his farm. 

Persistence, however, won the day and Mathew consented to her coming.

Arriving by ship to South Africa, Anne purchased a used Ford Prefect and drove herself to the Fleur de Lys farm. The next day, she drove that Ford she named Camelo, after the giraffes’ scientific name Camelopardalis, to the 33,000 hectares where the giraffes lived and roamed in the wild.

There is where all her dreams came true and the true birth of her life with giraffes began. At first, they and she were not sure how to react to one another. She came every day for 10 hours a day, taking meticulous notes and very many photographs. She observed how they moved and ate and slept; how they associated with each other, mothers and babies, male and female, even male and male. They became used to her being by them.

Her notes and observations were based on scientific studies and in due course, she published her observations in a journal in South Africa. She also published an article in 1958, “The Behaviour of the Giraffe, Giraffa Camelopardalis, in the Eastern Transvaal.” It was the first scientific article about an African mammal ever published.

Between those idyllic days in South Africa and publishing her first article, between 1956 and, all the way forward to 1976, she finally published her first book about giraffes, titled “Giraffe: Biology, Behaviour and Conservation.” This book, co-authored with Bristol Forster, a former classmate at the U of T is still considered the “Bible” on giraffes by zoologists around the world.

In May 2020, the Governor General of Canada awarded Dagg with the high distinction of the Order of Canada.

Back in November 2021, the Citizen published a feature about twin girls, Rebecca and Rachel, who had built a life-sized giraffe in their yard in Alton, to promote the Foundation, the Junior Club and the conservation of giraffes. In a text exchange with the Citizen, Rebecca, now attending the University of Waterloo, studying physics, told us that she and her sister “first learned about Anne Innis Dagg from the … documentary, ‘The Woman Who Loves Giraffes.’” Right after seeing the film, Rebecca wrote a letter to Dagg, to tell her that she found her story to be amazing and that she loves giraffes too.

There followed a meeting between them with Dagg’s daughter, Mary and later, in 2020, Rebecca was asked if she would like to become the first member of the Junior Giraffe Club.

Rachel offered, that being a “member of the club and contributing to species conservation has meant the world to me.” She went on to say that she has learned so much from the club’s monthly events, which are held virtually.

The Junior Giraffe Club features a pen pal plan with children in Africa and a chance to meet their peers and learn so much through the monthly events. The theme is about giraffes and conservation in other places but at home too. Here in our own backyards.

To learn more about the Junior Giraffe Club, visit www.juniorgiraffeclub.org.

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