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The Current Transcript for February 18, 2019

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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VOICE: He wanted children to be raised outside in scanty clothing. He wanted you to toughen them and that meant firing guns near their heads to keep them from getting startled.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTII: Not the kind of parenting advice you'd expect on raising children, but back in the 1700's, philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau's ideas were seen as an improvement on those who came before him, who preached children should be abandoned in the woods or swaddled and left in front of fire hazards. We have come a very long way in our societal views on how to raise children. Across much of western Canada and Ontario, today is Family Day. So as you look at your little ones with pride, park the parental guilt and listen to Jennifer Traig recount a cultural history of misadventures in parenting. That's in half an hour. Also today, she was the first zoologist to study giraffes in the wild, but instead of recognition Anne Innis Dagg's academic and research career was sidelined by the men running her department at the University of Guelph, sidelined because she was a woman.

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VOICE: I just loved them all with them and I thought I would always go and study biology, so I could study them and then to find out all of this is going to be nothing because I was a woman. It was terrifying and horrible.

AMT: Now the University of Guelph has apologized. So today we're replaying my conversation with Anne Innes Dagg about her fight for women in academia and about her great love of the majestic animals who inspired her. Hear the woman who loved giraffes in an hour. But we're starting here in Haiti.

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I, Jovenel Moise, head of state, I won't leave the country in the hands of arms, gangs and drug traffickers.

AMT: Where a defiant president of Haiti is trying to deflect the anger of his nation. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Canadian doctor recounts 'hair-raising' experience trying to escape Haiti protests

Guests: Carol Pedre, Dr. Heather Dow, Jennifer Sydney

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[Sounds of demonstrations in Haiti]

AMT: That is a bit of the soundtrack that's been playing across Haiti for almost two weeks. Since the 7th of the month, daily demonstrations have brought the Caribbean nation to a virtual standstill. Protesters are calling for the resignation of president Jovenel Moise, .pointing to skyrocketing inflation and accusations of corruption. At least nine people have been killed in clashes with police. Roadblocks have kept humanitarian aid from reaching those who need it most and basic supplies are running low. The Canadian Embassy in Port-Au-Prince is closed and dozens of Canadians who were either vacationing or working in the country, have been scrambling to get out amid the growing unrest. In a few minutes we'll speak to a New Brunswick doctor who made it home over the weekend, but first, Carel Pedre is a Haitian journalist based in Port-au-Prince and that's where we've reached him. Hello.

CAREL PEDRE: Hi.

AMT: We are hearing that people have been afraid to go out on the streets. What can you tell us?

CP: Yes I can say that there's a sense of calm that is returning to a different part of the city, the capital of Port-au-Prince, but that doesn't mean that the tensions are gone and people are still afraid because what's happening is you have the president will talk, the prime minister address the nation, but people don't really feel that they're in control of the situation. But at the same time, the political opposition are not happy with both of them and they're still trying to protest to ask the president to resign. So the problem is still the same, I could say, but at the same time since people have been locked down for the past 10 to 12 days, so now they're trying to find things to eat. And the protetest I could slowed down a bit, but no one knows what today will provide in terms of protests and violence.

AMT: And you're talking about getting supplies, how scarce is food and water right now and clean water?

CP: That's a big problem for clean water. So you can see yesterday or the day before yesterday, a lot of people, long line of people waiting for to have a gallon of water or to have gasoline for the car or gas propane for them to be able to cook. So that's the biggest problem right now and I think that if we're going to spend another week like that, it's going to be a humanitarian crisis for sure.

AMT: The currency has gone into free far in the last two years. What's the effect of that been on people trying to live their daily lives?

CP: The problem is all the basic products are really expensive and people still get the same paycheck, but now they have less power to buy things and that's one of the main reasons of the protests actually because we need 84 gourdes to buy one US dollar. And when you know Haiti only imports those gourdes, so people can't really afford the basics.

AMT: Now the president has been accused of corruption in relation to oil, Venezuelan oil, what's going on there?

CP: OK. This is what happened, the government is accused because the name of the prime minister and the name of the president on the last report about how they were spending and a lot of people think that it was a race and now they ask the government to take action and justice against those people who steal that money, but since the prime minister got some money from it for consultation, the president has his company at this time who got a contract from the Petrocaribe fund, people skeptical and are wondering if really they're going to take action for that, but the prime minister promised that there will be action again those people who steal that money.

AMT: So, let me just clarify. Petrocaribe is an aid program that Venezuela was offering to several Caribbean states, including Haiti. So it was money to pay for fuel and it was in the billions and there's been a report that says a lot of that was diverted.

CP: Yes, it was money for fuel, but what Venezuela was the Haitian government could keep the extra money from the fuel and pay in 25 years. It was sort of like big credit that they give the government. So that money was not well managed and there's a lot of corruption problem for the past, as I said, 8 years about that money. And people were in the streets actually since July to ask the government to take action against those people who stole that money, but also the fact that you can see a lot of people are getting poorer, while the people in the government, the officials are getting richer. So that's the problem with Haiti now and I think that people are asking the president to step down because they think that he doesn't have the leadership to lead the country to fix those main problems because we are a poor country, so we really need to have a sense that we we're going through better days that tomorrow will be better, not getting worse every day.

AMT: So you're really just waiting to see, you don't know where this is going at this point?

CP: We don't know because even like today or the day after tomorrow they can cut the price of rice, but are they going to do for the corruption problem, what are they going to do for the national currency, the inflation and all the other case of corruption we have in the government. I think they need really do it quick, so people can have a sense that the government is working, so they can wait a bit. Like we're maybe two to three weeks to see where they're going, otherwise we will definitely have more angry people in the streets because the political opposition because you have people going in the street because they're hungry against the government. But you have people that organize those protests, they have political reasons to do so and those people, they're still in the streets.

AMT: OK well, Carel Pedre, thank you for bringing us up to date on this.

CP: Thank you very much.

AMT: Carel Pedre is a Haitian journalist. We reached him in Port-au-Prince. The protest in Haiti made travel to the island's on the international airport in Port-Au-Prince very dangerous over the last several days and that left a number of Canadian tourists and aid workers stranded. Over the weekend, more than 100 Quebec tourists who had been trapped by the protests were taken by helicopter to the airport and flown to Montreal, as well a group of high school students and a group of Christian missionaries were on flights to Canada Sunday night. A number of Canadians are still awaiting to make it out safely. My next guest was able to travel over the weekend. Dr. Heather Dow is an emergency room doctor from Woodstock, New Brunswick. She was in Haiti as part of a medical team providing free health care, until the growing unrest forced her and her colleagues to cut their trip short. Dr. Heather Dow is in Woodstock, New Brunswick again. Hello.

HEATHER DOW: Hello.

AMT: When did you realize you had to leave Haiti?

HD: Well we were planning to leave on the 12th, which was Tuesday and we became more aware as time went on from the 7th of February until the 12th that this was not going to be possible because there was an increasing number of roadblocks along the mean route nationale, that is the main highway throughout Haitia and it became obvious that we were going to have to postpone leaving.

AMT: And so where were you exactly, you were outside of the capital?

HD: We were at a place called Plage Morisseau, which is about a four hour drive from Port-Au-Prince Westword.

AMT: And so as the unrest and the riots began, you know the prime minister had said the Global Affairs Canada and the country's diplomatic core were working to keep Canadians informed. Were you informed? Did you feel you knew what was going on in the wider place?

HD: Not really. We were in a bit of a news vacuum, having poor internet and cell service. So we were getting trickled down reports from people that we knew or were connected to in Port-Au-Prince and in New Brunswick about what was going on in the wider scene in the country.

AMT: Tell us about the work you were doing. What kind of medical aid were you providing?

HD: We were providing basic primary care. So we would each day load up our medications and supplies and go to one of the small mountain villages around the area and do clinics for all comers.

AMT: And how many, how long have you been doing that kind of work in Haiti?

HD: This was my seventh trip, my colleague care Cathy Davies, it was her eighth trip and we had another young nurse with us that had been with us once before.

AMT: So you were pretty comfortable working there and working in these clinics. Did this throw you what you were seeing?

HD: Well we did have to cancel our final clinic. We'd been able to see over 850 people over of course of seven days of clinic prior to this, but our last day of clinic that we had planned on Monday, we had to cancel because we were told that there were roadblocks everywhere.

AMT: That many people in just those few days, that really speaks to how much they need medical care.

HD: They certainly do.

AMT: So tell me, you decided you were going to leave, you had to drive to Port-au-Prince to the airport. What happened? Tell me about that drive.

HD: We had heard that mornin that things were settling down in Port-au-Prince and that roadblocks in the nearest community, where the prison break had happened had come down. So we had a false sense of a better, a rosier picture of what was happening than actually was the case. It became apparent a short way down the road that there were numerous roadblocks, some of them manned by angry demonstrators, some of them just consisting of burning tires and vehicles in trees. And we made our way through numerous of these roadblocks, sometimes negotiating with people, sometimes we had to pay and then we finally made it to Port-au-Prince, about 30 minutes from the airport. And at that time we were told we couldn't go any further because the road ahead was worse than the road that we'd already traversed.

AMT: How many people were you traveling with?

HD: There were 12 of us in two vehicles travelling to Port-au-Prince from Plage Morrisseau.

AMT: And Heather Dow, you sound so calm. Were you that calm when you were on that road?

HD: No, it was a hair-raising experience definitely, something I've never been through before. I've never been in the middle of an angry mob that threatened physical injury to me before and that was certainly a new experience. But once we got to a certain distance, we realized we couldn't go back and we were going to have continuing difficulty going ahead, so we just continued to make our way towards the center of the city.

AMT: Now you've done volunteer medical work in Iraq as well, haven't you?

HD: Yes I did.

AMT: And how does this compare to that?

HD: Well it was a different situation. In Iraq, we were behind the front line, the Iraqi forces fighting ISIS and driving ISIS out of the last few villages in Iraq and I felt very secure there because we had the protection of armed forces and we were dealing with casualties, both civilian and military of the skirmishes that were happening. But in this scenario in Haiti, it was as if there was no protection at all. There is nowhere to run and no one to count on to help get us through the roadblocks and through the mobs.

AMT: And you just didn't know what mood people were in.

HD: Exactly, yes.

AMT: Yeah. So you say you got about 30 minutes from the airport and you had to stop again. Why and what did you do?

HD: Well we were told that we could not get to the final blockades to the airport. So we tried to think of possibilites of things that we could do. The protesters were not letting any vehicles through except for emergency medical vehicles. So we actually wound up hiring a man who had an old minivan that he put ambulance stickers on, the front and the side and we wound up hiring him to let us go in his van to the airport.

AMT: And was there, there was a flight waiting to go when you got there?

HD: Yes, we were in contact with the airline and they had said that they were aware of the situation in Haiti and that many people were having the same difficulty getting out and that our original flight on the 12th, we could use that flight whenever we were able to get to the airport.

AMT: So you're someone who does this on her vacation. You clearly care a lot about the people who can't get medical help. What are you thinking now that you're home, as you look at what's happening in Haiti. What are your thoughts?

HD: I feel terribly empathetic for the cause of the people that are demonstrating against the government of Haiti. It seems that the country has not had a stable government for so many years. They seem to have elections very frequently and run-off elections and demonstrations to do with that. I think that if we were to go back that it would be important to check the political climate in the country before booking our flights and our trip because obviously this anger has been simmering for some time. I believe last year in July and November there were demonstrations against the government then to do with raising gas prices and the devaluation of the Haitian gourde.It's not something that popped up overnight. It's been simmering for a while, so had we to do it again, we would probably try to be more apprised of what was going on in the country first before setting out on another mission.

AMT: You make a good point. I guess February 8th is the anniversary of the overthrow of Duvalier back in the 80s, yeah so. But it sounds like you would go back.

HD: Well I have a love for the Haitian people and also I feel that those of us that live in countries like Canada with a lot of privilege and economic well-being compared to many parts of the world, that we have a responsibility to those that do not.

AMT: Heather Dow, we have to leave it there. Thank you for speaking with me and it's good to hear you're home safe.

HD: Thank you so much for having me on the program.

AMT: Bye bye.

HD: Bye

AMT: That is Dr. Heather Dow. She's an emergency room doctor from Woodstock, New Brunswick and she was in Haiti providing medical aid when the protest broke out. She returned on the weekend. The Canadian government has now suspended deportations to Haiti. The prime minister said the government is offering its assistance to people of Haiti. Many Haitian Canadians, including my next guest, remain worried about family and friends surrounded by the protests. Jennifer Sydney is director of the theater troupe Main dans la Main and she joins us from Montreal. Hello.

JENNIFER SYDNEY: Hello.

AMT: Who are you worried about in Haiti right now?

JS: Well most of all my friends because I do have family, but I don't them too much. So I would say my friends, but they're always telling me that I don't have to worry because they're okay and them and their families are doing fine. So I guess I don't have to worry too much, but it's my friends, yeah.

AMT: It's hard, to be, you feel a bit helpless.

JS: Like I said back in July, this is definitely a helpless situation, but I do trust them when they're telling me to not worry and apparently there's a calm that went back, so I'm going to stick to that.

AMT: And now the Canadian government has suspended our deportations of anyone who they were about to send back come back. How do you react to that?

JS: Well for sure you know like I'm kind of relieved of this decision that the Canadian border services has temporary terminated expulsions to Haiti. I believe it started back in the 15th, but hte thing is they were supposed to to do that since July when the price has increased. When the turbulent price has increased so in that I'm kind of, I feel a little bit disappointed, you know, but certainly I'm just going to go with what's going on right now and the fact that they terminated it now well, rather late than never, right?

AMT: You know after the earthquake there was a period of hope that things would get better, brighter. How do you feel about the future of Haiti?

JS: I feel how can I say, I have a lot of faith. And I feel like right now we're like in this transition. You know what I mean. All of that, all the people are screaming for their rights. So I feel like as a Haitian, I know that this period is a period of transition and I hope that Haiti will remain in the hands of Haitian leaders and not be occupied by another country. So I feel I have a lot of hope. I trust my people. I trust, but I don't trust the people that are doing fraud and corruption. So these people need a trial. They need a trial for the people stealing money because there was too much corruption going on in this country and now the people are screaming enough is enough.

AMT: OK, well Jennifer Sydney, thank you for your thoughts on this.

JS: It's a pleasure.

AMT: Jennifer Sydney is a Canadian of Haitian descent and she joined us from Montreal. Stay with us, the CBC News is next and then if you've ever lost sleep over your parenting skills, author Jennifer Traig's investigation into parenting fads from the past will have you breathing a little easier. She joins me with her humorous and affirming look at parenting through the ages. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Parenting throughout history could be weird, and downright dangerous: author

Guests: Jennifer Traig

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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AMT: Still to come, she is the Canadian zoologist who pioneered the study of giraffes in the wild. You might even call her Canada's Jane Goodall. Then why is it that you likely have never heard of Anne Innis Dagg? The giraffeologist extraordinaire is finally getting her due and some long overdue recognition and an apology from a Canadian university. We will revisit my conversation with Anne Innis Dagg and update you on her story in half an hour. But first, rockabye baby on the tree tops.

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VOICE: Motherhood is a beautiful experience. It's not physically or mentally or financially, but in every other way it's beautiful. I know that being a mom is not easy. I want to help you out. I asked my Facebook followers to post questions that they had about being a parent and I'm going to answer them for you right now. Alright Laura V asked, my one-year-old just started teething and won't stop crying, what should I do? I do know this one. You put your finger, a little bit of rum on the tip of your finger and then you pour the rest in a big glass and drink it. And then that's the most important thing. You won't hear them.

AMT: Well that is comedian Ellen Degeneres with some inappropriate parenting advice. But whether it's rubbing rum on a baby's sore gums or swaddling a child tightly as a mummy or keeping a baby away from bananas, parenting advice that sounds outright wacky today, may have been considered the most up to date practice, generations, hundreds of years ago even. Tips and tricks for bringing up baby have varied widely across history and different cultures and of course today's parents have no shortage of often conflicting advice from which to choose. Here's what one Vancouver couple learned about the sheer volume of advice out there and when it actually comes in handy.

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VOICE 1: Hi, I'm Allister.

VOICE 2: And Stephanie.

VOICE 1: And we have a baby named Olive.

VOICE 2: The best advice I received was to not take any advice at all. Be as present as you can be, don't rush things, you know give yourself extra time in the morning and then I was like wait a second that sounds like advice, but yeah it was to really do things the way that felt good for us.

VOICE 1: We did read a book. I read a book, The Birth Partner and it was advice on what I can do to support my partner while she's going through the birth process. The whole thing was very unfamiliar to me. I left the hospital with Stephanie going, looking around at all these amazing women thinking you deserve so much more credit than I have ever given. Men of the world, just hold on a minute. There's some amazing stuff that women do. It was a reference point. If we had a question, it was a source I trusted more than the internet. And something about the aesthetic of this book appealed to me. It was very readable and I did read it, cover to cover and I didn't expect too.

VOICE 2: That book helped me and having a doula helped me to just remind us that all these are normal feelings and natural sounds, you know you're not actually dying. You're okay and it was like.

VOICE: Well the writer and mother of two, Jennifer Traig, has been thumbing through parenting books, such as that one and she's looked at some of the more mind boggling parenting wisdom from generations past. She's compiled her findings in a new book called, Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting. Jennifer Traig joins me from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Hello.

JENNIFER TRAIG: Hi. Thanks for having me.

AMT: What do you think of the excitement we just heard from that couple?

JT: Oh you know I'm both envious of them and totally relieved, I am out of that stage because its rewards are so sweet, but the hard parts are so hard. It sounds like they're doing great, which is wonderful.

AMT: Mothers and fathers haven't always embraced their role the way they seem to now, have they?

JT: No, not at all. For most of history, parents simply did not parent. The verb is only about 45 years old. It came about in the 70s. Before that, they reared their children but mostly they left that impact to other people -- to staff, to older siblings, to other relatives. A parent's job was to have the kids, not necessarily to raise them.

AMT: And why were they so hands off historically?

JT: Well, you know they had other stuff to do. We have a lot more free time. We spend more time with our children than any generation in history. But when you know you're responsible for planting the food, harvesting the food, preparing the food, weaving the clothes, replacing the clothes, washing the clothes, you don't have as much time to read your children Aesop's Fables.

AMT: When you study the ways parents turned over the care of their children to others, many of the examples seem shocking today. What were some of the more common practices, particularly in parts of Europe?

JT: The one that I cannot get over is what held through much of Europe, especially France, through the 18th century and it was sending your children out to wet nurses. In one year in the late 18th century, the 21,000 infants born in Paris, 17,000 were sent out to country wet nurses, only seven hundred were nursed by their own mothers. And that would be if the entire population of my town sent our kids to say, Alaska. We'll see you in five years when your ready for kindergarten. In the meantime, you're going to live with someone none of us know and I'm sure it'll be just fine.

AMT: Were those mostly affluent people sending their kids?

JT: No. The affluent kid -- generally the odds for their kids to survive were much better because they could keep their kids closer. The poorer you were, the farther out in the country your kids went. So et nurses also sent their kids to even poorer wet nurses because a lot of families preferred that just one nurse take care of the child and not nurse her own children.

AMT: Some of them never survived that, eh?

JT: No, no and some of the wet nurses weren't actually nurses. Sometimes they were prepubescent girls posing in which case the children would be fed like a mix of flour and water.

AMT: And that doesn't end well.

JT: No.

AMT: Even babies kept in the home were not really supervised. Tell us about early swaddling techniques.

JT: Right. So children were swaddled from head to toe like mummies. It could take up to two hours to get the kid rigged up. Because of this, they were rarely changed so they stewed in their own filth pretty much all day. And this was for two reasons. One, if they were completely immobilized you didn't have to worry about them getting into things because they could not move. The other reason is that for a long time, it was felt that children wouldn't assume human form unless it was forcibly imposed upon them. So they were wrapped up with the idea that this would make their limbs grow into human limbs and their trunk stay a human trunk.

AMT: Cracy, huh? Most babies look pretty human to me. They all do actually. So what did that do to the child?

JT: Well, you know it was not great for a number of reasons. One, it kept them from playing, it kept them from exploring, which was good and bad. You don't want a child exploring unsupervised in a home with an open hearth but the fact that they were you know straight also meant they couldn't escape when there was trouble. You know I noticed that when they were bundled into into a cradle and then nosed into a fire by the livestock that passed in and out of the house.

AMT: How many babies died from swaddling in medieval times I guess, huh?

JT: I don't know the exact numbers until maybe them until about late medieval period you had about a one a 1 in 2 chance, a 50 percent chance of making it to your 10th birthday.

AMT: What other things would happen to them when they were swaddled?

JT: Ah some of them were more fun because they were basically footballs. They could be thrown from room to room and were. They were sometimes hung on a hook like we would hang a person on a hook now, just to keep them on the wall where you observe them, but all in all it was not a good practice for anyone. It didn't bode well for their survival.

AMT: And there seemed a more extreme form of hands off parenting and that was child abandonment. How common was that historically?

JT: It was very common in the ancient world. It was so common in ancient Rome that most, it's thought that most families abandoned at least one child and Romans expressed surprise that other cultures didn't do this at all. It's just unthinkable to us now, but for them it really functioned as a form of family planning that if you had more children than you could currently support if a new one was born and you didn't necessarily consider that child human yet it would be abandoned hopefully for another family to claim which did happen.

AMT: What else would happen. They'd be in the woods, they'd just leave them there?

JT: Yeah there were sort of designated areas where they were left. Sometimes they were eaten by animals, sometimes they were taken by slave traders and raised to sell slaves and sometimes they were adopted by families. For some reason a lot of the founding myths of cities including Rome are about foundlings who are raised by sometimes by animals, sometimes by peasants.

AMT: Romulus and Remus.

JT: Exactly.

AMT: As time progresses, we come to the Enlightenment. Did parents become more enlightened?

JT: Well I guess it depends on your definition. So that was a point when parenting practices really changed and it was due to Locke and Rousseau who brought some wonderful developments and some less wonderful developments. They argued successfully for an end to swaddling. They argued that mothers should nurse their own babies. Locke in particular, had a lack of sound advice. He was a doctor. He did not have children of his own, but he was you know a pretty sane and sensible guy. Rouseau was a little nuttier. He had I think six children. He gave every single one of them up to a foundling home. Not only did he not record their names, he didn't record their genders.

AMT: Why would he do that?

JT: Well you know he he had them with basically his servant girl. I don't think he had any interest in parenting himself.

AMT: He just wanted to talk about how other people should.

JT: Right and the fact that you know I don't think he even meant to. I think that he wrote this, he wrote a philosophical treatise and really was not intended to be a parenting manual, but it was the closest thing that had been published at that point. And parents really seized on it and you know it would be like you know raising your child according to you know Game of Thrones or something today. It was a novel. It was not intended to be an advice manual, but parents, especially upper class parents really started following his advice, which was extreme. He wanted children to be raised outside, scanty clothing. He wanted you to toughen them up, not give them much food. He did not want them to be particularly socialised. He wanted them to grow up naturally in nature, but he wanted you to toughen them and that meant you know firing guns near their heads, to keep them from getting startled, throwing spiders at them. He had a lot of really bad ideas.

AMT: And how influential was he?

JT: He was incredibly influential along the upper classes. He was very trendy. Marie Antoinette was a follower and you know a number of royals corresponded with him on matters as mundane as diapers and a lot of the kids did not survive this.

AMT: So interesting. Let's move to the Puritan era. How did parenting conventions change then and was it good, was it bad?

JT: Again like a really mixed bag, that's another point when things change a lot. One of the great changes was that parents became much more invested in doing the parenting themselves, especially men. As far as I know that's the only time that fathers until today have taken on such a role and it for not great reasons. It was because of the legacy of Eve, women weren't trusted to such an important task. You know it endangered their children's souls if the mothers were allowed to teach them. So men took on their education, their discipline, but also you know got up in the middle of the night with them when they cried.

AMT: So interesting again. Now okay, now let's to move to the early 1900s. Two men, Luther Emmett Holt, followed by John B. Watson, they arrive on the scene with what they call scientific parenting advice. Tell us about them.

JT: Yes so that was another evolution with you know mixed results. So everything at the time was being measured and quantified and made scientific and that included parenting. In many ways that made things much much harder for parents because suddenly there were timetables that you know when your child had to meet and suddenly there were very strict rules about when you could and couldn't touch them or feed them. Watson in particular really advocated a completely hands off way of parenting children. he thought it would be ideal if children could be rotated through a series of foster homes, rather than raised by their own parents, so they would never grow attached to anyone. And he you know considered hugging and kissing your child was poisoning them with mother love and they would never be able to function because you've spoiled them utterly. And you know, now it just sounds crazy, but he was the head of the American Psychological Association. He was the pre-eminent American psychologist, so a lot of parents followed his advice.

AMT: He spoke with great authority or so they thought. He was the one who said kids shouldn't eat bananas.

JT: Oh that was Holt.

AMT: Oh that was Holt. Okay. Yeah. What was that about?

JT: Well you know fruit was widely distrusted, really until just starts to change in the early 20th century, which is funny for parents now, you know begging my kids, you know eat a banana, eat an apple. But until vitamins were discovered, the fruit was considered empty calories. It could be dangerous because you know you ate seasonally. Kids would sometimes eat too much and get sick out. So it was widely distrusted. I don't know why bananas in particular, but yes those ones were not a favorite of among the child rearing experts.

AMT: So why do you think so many parents would go along with directives like don't kiss your children, don't hug them?

JT: Well you know parenting is so hard and you doubt yourself constantly and if someone with authority says, I have a solution for you and this person is credentialled, this person you know holds a position of rank, you tend to listen.

AMT: Then we probably get the most famous of the parenting experts Dr. Benjamin Spock. Remind us about the seachange he ushers.

JT: He did. He really did, he again changed everything. I believe the only book that's outsold his is the Bible and his really was a child care Bible and it was for na number of reasons. One, it was incredibly reassuring. You know it told parents you are doing a good job. Trust your instincts. Enjoy your children, which was something that parents really needed to hear and the other reason was it was purely practical and it was the first time that a childcare manual had an index. So you didn't have to sit down and read it from cover to cover when you had an emergency and you know do I call a doctor, you flip to the index and find out what to do.

AMT: Eventually there was a Spock lash, what happened?

JT: Yeah. So he was blamed for the excesses of the 60s, which was really not fair. I believe it was a senator that said children had been Spocked when they should have been spanked. And he was perceived as very permissive. If you look at the books, in fact, he's not at all. He is a pretty, he advocates pretty firm parenting. It was really a misinterpretation. He had endorsed feeding on demand that you know if you wanted to feed your kid when he seemed hungry, according to his schedule, that was okay and for some reason parents took that to mean let your kid do whatever he wants, whenever he wants. And Spock spent the rest of his career you know pushing against that.

AMT: So that was were the politicians thought that he basically ushered in the social revolution.

JT: Yeah. Yeah, it was really because of a misinterpretation.

AMT: He did tell parents to trust themselves. Do you think they're capable of that? Because judging by the steady stream of new parenting manuals, it seems a lot of parents still feel they need guidance.

JT: Right. You know I think and my kids are seven and nine, so I haven't experienced adolescence yet and I dread it. But I think you know as you enter each phase, it's terrifying and everything changes and your skills don't transfer at all. You know the infancy, nothing in your life prepares you for this. So you do turn to the advice menus, you turn to other parents, you turn to the Internet, which is generally not a great idea. But eventually you find your bearings and you're fine until they hit the next developmental stage and everything goes out the window again.

AMT: And then you just look around to see what other ideas people have. It is hard not to notice that many of the so-called experts offering their guidance over the years, the decades, the centuries, have been men and some are more qualified to give than others and you've explained that. What impact did that have on the nature of what they were telling parents, especially mothers?

JT: Not a good one. I would say much of the early advice comes from monks. They're really you know have zero childcare experience by definition. They also provide a lot of the obstetrical advice, which really was just utterly useless and women tend to get blamed for things that aren't their fault a lot. Really until Spock comes along and tells mothers that you're doing a good job.

AMT: Freud did a lot of mother blaming too, right?

JT: Oh yeah, yeah. Before Freud, if something went wrong with your kid, the mother or the parent generally weren't blamed. You know the devil might be blamed, but it wasn't you know because you sent your kid to daycare, but with Freud, yes yes, everything shifted to the parents, especially the mothers.

AMT: So as a mom, was there anything you learned as you sifted through all this research that made you approach your own parenting differently?

JT: Yeah, I really relaxed a lot when I realized how badly parents had done this and yet humanity had continued. That was you know made me feel like okay, I am here, I am feeding my children, I am not you know swaddling them so tightly, they can't move. I'm doing a pretty good job. And the one piece of advice I really took was dealing with sibling fighting, which was to stay out of it and that helped. My kids fought like animals when I started writing and now they really get along well.

AMT: When you think about other modern parenting norms, are there practices you think will be viewed as shocking by future generations the way we look back on putting opioids in children's cough syrup or depriving them of parental affection?

JT: Yeah, I think about that all the time because you know my parents, my father is a physician, my mother's a nurse, they took wonderful care of us and they still did things that I cannot believe. You know my mother smoked while she was nursing me. You know rode around unbuckled in a car full cigarette smoke. I know we're doing things that will shock our children one generation later and the only thing I can think of is the screens. That I think you know a generation from now, people will not believe that we allowed our kids to use our phones all day and had phones at the dinner table and phones in the car. That it'll be the cigarette smoke of our day.

AMT: They'll say can you believe it?

JT: Yeah.

AMT: You know there's that great scene in Mad Men where Betty Draper is serving dinner and she's smoking and there's a bowl of mashed potatoes on the table and she lets her smoke go right into the mashed potatoes. That'll be the smart phone.

JT: Yeah, exactly.

AMT: So based on how wildly parenting has evolved through history, how natural do you think it really is?

JT: Well I think natural is sort of a useless term, that it just doesn't really mean anything because even the things that I thought were just biologically hardwired, turned out to not be at all. Crawling was the main one that I thought this was a very natural developmental stage that my children would have to pass through and that turned out to be about 100 years old. As of 1900 only half the children crawled and that was because they were actively discouraged from it. Parents would actually knock their knees, if they saw them doing that because one, it was felt that they wouldn't learn to walk properly if they did crawl and two, it reminded people too much of animals.

AMT: I want you to listen to a comment. We have another mother in Vancouver I'd like you to hear.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: I joined a group called The Leche League that kind of advocated natural breastfeeding and it's okay if your children sleep for part of the night in your bed. Not to worry, they grow out of it. They grow out of everything. And yeah, gentle loving guidance, right? I didn't follow Dr. Spock, it just didn't feel right for me. So I would say whatever feels right for you that you know you should do. And I have three daughters, two of them are doctors, one is a nurse and I have three grandchildren. So I didn't do too bad.

AMT: Jennifer Traig, what do you think of that parenting philosophy?

JT: I like it a lot. If I have a single philosophy, it's definitely you do you. You know what works for your family and it's useful to remember that the original meaning of advice was judgment and I think a lot of times that's what we're doing. We're judging other families and other parents, when usually people do what they do because it works for them.

AMT: She sounds a bit like Dr. Spock. Do you think his advice holds up well?

JT: It does. It's extraordinary, yeah. There are a few things, some of it is not politically correct. He occasionally uses as a word that rankles the modern ear, but most of it holds up pretty. You know in his last edition, he advocated veganism. He was pretty forward thinking.

AMT: So in some ways he's saying act natural.

JT: Yeah, exactly.

AMT: So you're pretty confident parents will figure out? Kids will be alright?

JT: We seemed to have you know lasted for several millenia, so I think we'll keep going.

AMT: Come back when your kids are teens, okay?

JT: Thank you.

AMT: Thank you, Jennifer.

JT: My pleasure.

AMT: Jennifer Traig is the author of Act Natural. A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting and she spoke with us from Ann Arbor, Michigan. So there you go, park your guilt, enjoy your kids. And stay with us. Coming up in our next half hour, from the time she was a child, Anne Innis Dagg knew she wanted to devote her life to studying giraffes. It was one of the worst features of human society that for years kept her from fully realizing that dream. We'll talk to her. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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How the world's first 'giraffologist' stuck her neck out to fight sexism in academia

Guests: Anne Innis Dagg

AMT: Hello I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current. Let's go back in time for a minute to the 1950s TV game show: To Tell The Truth.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1:

What is your name please?

VOICE 2: My name is Anne Dagg.

VOICE 3: My name is Anne Dagg.

VOICE 4: My name is Anne Dagg.

VOICE 1: 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 a natural habitat. The London's Zoological society published my findings as a unique scientific record of the behaviour of the giraffe, [unintelligible] these young ladies all claiming to be Anne Dagg giraffe expert.

AMT: Well the real Anne Dagg, giraffe expert, certainly had an interesting story to tell on that game show. She was a trailblazer. The first Western researcher, man or woman, to study any animal in the wild in Africa.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: We will start this cross examination, if we may, with [unintelligible].

VOICE 2: Number one, how come you decided to study the giraffe?

ANNE DAGG: I always liked animals and giraffes fascinated me when I was a child and went to the zoo.

VOICE 2: Where did you study the giraffe?

ANNE DAGG: In [unintelligible].

VOICE 3: Number three, is the giraffe monogamous, does the male giraffe look around at the lady giraffes? Or does he settle down?

[Laughter]

ANNE DAGG: Ah, no, he is not monogamous.

VOICE 3: He's not monogamous. This gets good. Oh.

[Laughter]

VOICE 1: [Unintelligible]

AMT: Well the real Anne Dagg was the last one we heard there fielding the cheeky question about the monogamy giraffes, which doesn't do justice to her stature because before there was Jane Goodall, before there was Dian Fossey, there was Anne Innis Dagg, a Canadian born and raised in Toronto.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: 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.

VOICE 2: It takes an explorer's heart to be willing to set off like that, to go to any animals in Africa in the 1950s, as a single woman, traveling the continent herself into her little rickety car.

VOICE 3: This was a different world then. There wasn't infrastructure. There were no mobile phones. There was nothing to the ground breaking stone, but ironically slipped under the radar and doesn't attract attention the she deserves.

AMT: Well she's getting more of the attention she deserves now though. That, what you just heard there is part of a new documentary about an Anne Innis Daggs life and it's called The Woman Who Loves Giraffes. As you hear the experts talk about what a giant she was in the field, it raises the question of how such an accomplished researcher slipped under the radar. According to this new documentary Anne Innes Dagg was ultimately foiled by a sexist academic system that shut down her work with giraffes for decades. Though that in turn lit a spark, Alison Reid is the film's director and she is with me in our Toronto studio, along with Anne Innes Dagg. Welcome.

ALISON REID: Thank you very much for having us.

ANNE DAGG: Thank you.

AMT: Anne, let's start with you. In this film you describe your love affair with giraffes. How did that start?

ANNE DAGG: It started when I was three apparently. My mother took me to the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago and we wandered among the animals and then we came to the giraffe. I do remember looking up at them thinking this is a magnificent animal and it really was when I was three.

AMT: And you would have seen that long long neck. But you found them captivating as you got older. Like it never left you.

ANNE DAGG: Well when I got home I said well I want to talk to my parents and get a book about the giraffe. And they said well there is no book and I just couldn't conceive that there was no book. And so I thought well I'll learn about giraffe and then I'll write one.

AMT: And of course you did and we will get a minute. Alison Reid let me ask you what was it about this story that you found so captivating?

ALISON REID: It was the adventurous and tenacious spirit of Anne. I mean to be a young woman of 23 years old and decide to go to South Africa by herself, during the apartheid, to pursue her dream. Well she wasn't fazed at all by what obstacles were in her way. She just she just always found the yes. In fact she had to pretend that she was a man or a mask the fact that she was a woman to be able to go. She signed her letters with her initial because she was getting rejection responses when she signed her full name Anne Dagg.

AMT: Well let's talk a little bit more about that. So you were in the 50s and, you were a young student Anne, you want to see giraffes for yourself. And you start writing and you were getting all these 'no's. The men who said 'yes' who was he?

ANNE DAGG: That was Alexander Matthew and he was really a cattle male. I guess really they had been putting fences in the near - it was called Fleur de Lys, the place. And they found out that the giraffes could walk over the fence so they didn't have to worry about them. They got rid of all the other animals that were smaller but now then were left with all the cattle and about 95 giraffes.

AMT: So he said yes but he didn't know you were a woman. How did you convince him to take you when he figured out you were a woman?

ANNE DAGG: Well that was hard. I had the right to him again and say I really really really want a come and I can I can wash dishes or whatever and do whatever you want, but I really really want to come. And then he was persuaded and he said well if you want to come that much, then probably you should come.

AMT: Because he was originally going to have you bunk with the cattle hounds but that was off the table, with the men, in the 50s, yes, okay. So you wrote a letter to your mother describing your drive to that farm in Fleur de Lys with the car you'd nicknamed Camillo. Let's listen to part of it. This is read by the actor Tatiana Maslany in the film.

SOUNDCLIP

I drove the last 80 miles to [unintelligible] in the dark. In most of the hills there were grass fires burning in the orange flames showed plainly against a black guy. The road got progressively worse, until it was only a dirt track full of [unintelligible]. About five miles from the farm Camillo stopped and refused to start.

[Sound: Engine failing to start]

I put some clothes in my knapsack. Locked the car and started to walk.

AMT: Okay at this part of the film I am on the edge of my seat. You decided to work in the pitch darkness, on a trail, to a farm that you kind of knew where it was. Like weren't there lions?

ANNE DAGG: Well they were lions clearly but luckily I didn't see any.

AMT: How terrifying was that?

ANNE DAGG: It was completely terrifying. I was just terrified out of my mind. I didn't know what else to do. And I'd lock myself in the car and I was afraid of being in the car because I thought I was just terrified of everything. One of the things I was really terrified about was the snakes on the ground. I knew if I stepped on one I'd be dead. But of course I couldn't see my feet. So I had to go very gradually and hope there wasn't a snake in the area.

AMT: But you got about a mile down that dark road terrified and what happened?

ANNE DAGG: Well then a car drove up and the person driving at [unintelligible] Fleur de Lys and he said 'Oh you must be the Canadian girl'. The happiest day of my life I was alive.

AMT: I was relieved too as I watched this.

ANNE DAGG: They got me and then everything was positive from then on.

AMT: So when you get to the farm and you start working, describe what it was like when you finally saw your first giraffe in the wild.

ANNE DAGG: Yes it was amazing to find my first giraffe. Mr. Matthews said why didn't I rest during the morning because I'd been out so late at night. And then after lunch he took me in my little car and we went to see a little pond. And there was a giraffe just waiting to get a drink of water. And I looked up and thought 'What a beautiful animal'. It leaned down, got a slurp of water and then flung its head up. And I was amazed because I remember thinking you'd think it would - when it did its head so violently - that it would fall over her feet or something. But, no, this was quite capable of doing that. It's great.

AMT: Alison Reid, there is some really interesting film footage in his documentary from when she was at the farm. And I'm watching this and thinking 'wow'. Where did you get that?

ALISON REID: From Anne. Isn't that incredible. Yes. In 1956 57 while she was in South Africa, Mr. Matthew had a 16 millimeter camera which he suggested in film the draft says she was studying them. So we have this incredible footage that was shot in color, right Anne? Of Anne doing her work with giraffes in 1956. So there is footage that she took of giraffes. There's also footage of her studying the giraffes and Mr. Matthew. So it is absolutely a gold mine to discover that footage.

AMT: Well let's hear another part of a letter you wrote, Anne, this is where you have come across a male giraffe that has been killed.

SOUNDCLIP

October 7th 1956. This report will have to consist mainly of the big ball giraffe which was shot Friday. The provincial game warden shot it then came to tell us there is no use fussing. 12 natives and two white men went dark in a truck to bring it in so that they could skin it, and cut it into hunks of meat for the natives. They put the stomach in the intestines and the heart in a big basin for me, so that I could study them later. The heart is reputed to weigh 25 pounds which I will believe after carrying it. The most upsetting part was when they cut up the neck with an axe into lengths, rather in the manner of cordwood. I separated of the intestines so that I could spread them out and see how long they were. I measured them with the yardstick and they were 256 feet. Yank.

AMT: The image of them cutting up the neck like cordwood. That does sound upsetting.

ANNE DAGG: Well there are nine or seven neck bones or that of course they have to cut between where it's easy to get them apart and then there are piled on the side blade and then they'd be taken in. And then you see a man walking away, a black man walking away with his big article under his arm and that would be their dinner.

AMT: But it gave you an opportunity to actually like you strung up the intestines, gives you an opportunity to do some work.

ANNE DAGG: I was fortunate in that, otherwise I wouldn't have seen anything and thought the draft. And it was incredibly interesting to see how long the digestive tract was what the heart weighed, which was about 25 pounds.

AMT: That sounds heavy. Did you ever eat yourself with people in the community?

ANNE DAGG: Never. Never.

AMT: Would you have wanted to?

ANNE DAGG: No, you couldn't eat your friend.

ALISON REID: Anne is a vegetarian actually. And one of the things that she's told me about being a biologist, something that she had a hard time with, is in many times in studying animals you have to dissect them or put them through unpleasant things. And Anne told me that she was determined she would never do that.

AMT: Anne what do you consider the most important things that you learned about giraffes and how they live and behaved during your time at the Fleur de Lys farm?

ANNE DAGG: One of the interesting things was when I saw a male mounting another male, which, being a young woman at the time that didn't know about these things I thought 'this is very strange'. And later on of course this homosexual behavior and I think I was the first to report that, although farmers must have seen it, but I've never found anything in the literature earlier than what I had seen which was interesting.

AMT: You also see them fighting. They would use their necks, huh?

ANNE DAGG: Oh yes, sort of blasting the other one with the head, using the long axe. If they're really excited you could hear the bangs maybe half a mile away. It was really like horror horror movie really.

AMT: It was that loud? They are such massive animals.

ANNE DAGG: Yes.

AMT: You know I think we can all picture Dian Fossey or Jane Goodall posing with primates, interacting with them up close, how did you observe your subjects - the giraffes>

ANNE DAGG: Well I was horrified when I saw these pictures. Because if you're really studying an animal you don't want it being affected by a human being. It will act completely differently. So when you do that you really ruin the whole thing.

AMT: You would stay in the car because the car didn't bother them and you could get up close?

ANNE DAGG: Yes.

AMT: But if you got out of the car what would they do?

ANNE DAGG: Well then they would back away if they saw me as a person. And we have to just presume that when I'm in a car they didn't really think about that since I was there every day for hours, they began to think that I was a bit of the furniture really.

AMT: It was for the better part of a year. Like just every day you went out there.

ANNE DAGG: Yes, there wasn't too much rain really. It's quite dry in that area.

AMT: Alison Reid after Ian's trip to Africa, what happens when she returns home? Because this is where things take a turn.

ALISON REID: Yes. So she had this incredible experience while she was in Africa, did this ground-breaking work. She came back to Canada. She got married. She married the person who she was corresponding with while she was in Africa.

AMT: He had waited for you.

ANNE DAGG: He did. Good man.

ALISON REID: So she had her masters when she went to Africa and when she got back she got her PhD. She started teaching at universities. Her dream was to become a full professor at University and continue her giraffe research. That would have enabled her to do the two things she loved which was teaching and continuing research on giraffes. She had all the things she needed to get tenure. She had a great teaching record. She had done this ground breaking work. She had been published in refereed scientific journals that were recognized worldwide and she was denied tenure.

AMT: When that happened, Anne, how did you react? It was kind of like a no brainer that you should got it.

ANNE DAGG: Yes, I thought so. I was devastated. I just couldn’t believe it really because there were a list of articles I've written and maybe 10 books and I was being told that I wasn't worth it to be a professor. I just thought that was terrible.

AMT: Alison read you did track down the man who shared the tenure committee, a man by the name of Keith Ronald. Let's hear what he had to say about the decision to deny tenure.

SOUNDCLIP

Anne Dagg was the one I hired. She had been working with giraffes in Africa where I hired her. She was a good teacher. She had [unintelligible] program] but it hadn't been fully developed at the point when we came up to the tenure decision. It wasn't a decision I am making, it's made by a committee. 10 years somebody just [unintelligible] five years. They have to earn it. I look back and say do I regret it? I don't know. Maybe she'd may have got a better position in life. But I [unintelligible]. I wouldn't apologize, no. I have nothing to apologize for.

AMT: What did you make of what he says, Anne?

ANNE DAGG: Well, I hated him. It just doesn't make any sense. It was just ridiculous to pretend everything I'd done was nothing whereas what he's done was amazing work.

AMT: And he says there that you had to earn it, after all what you went through.

ANNE DAGG: When I had really more than- probably more than most of the other professors because I had been working so hard and being up to African and written so many papers.

AMT: Alison Reid did you have any trouble convincing him to talk about this?

ALISON REID: I tried to go into that interview with an open mind. I mean that was decades ago and times have changed and attitudes have changed. And I didn't know if his thinking had changed. So I went in and talked to him a lot about the work he did and the other pioneers. I mean he was the first Dean of the department of biology. So he was building that department. So I was asking him what characteristics he was looking for in in the people he built that department with. And it was funny because the characteristics that he was mentioning were all Anne, all described Anne. So when I brought up her name I was hoping that he had changed, that he had changed and said it's a different time, we had different attitudes-

AMT: We heard him. We heard him. He was unrepentant.

ALISON REID: He was. Yes.

AMT: How difficult was it for you after that point, Anne when you were denied tenure?

ANNE DAGG: I gave up. I had to leave the university. I could have stayed one more year but I thought that if these idiots carried on like this, there is no point.

AMT: This was University of Guelph. Your husband was at Waterloo and you could not get full time work there either.

ANNE DAGG: No.

AMT: Because?

ANNE DAGG: Six of us graduated about the same time and I guess head of zoology said we don't hire a woman because they have young children and none of you can have a job.

ALISON REID: Married women I think was there.

ANNE DAGG: And I remember going to a woman I didn't know but one of the six, and I opened the door and we both cried. We were just so upset.

AMT: You talking about falling into a deep depression. We were going through?

ANNE DAGG: Well It didn't stop working and what I really reverted to was working for women and pointing out all the awful things that were being done and for everyone not just me. I shouldn't just think of myself. So I got to work with other women and we had things published and articles. And I worked really hard to try and get things better for women.

AMT: But your lifelong dream of working on giraffes was essentially just like- It had to stop. Just like that.

ANNE DAGG: Yes.

AMT: You also ended up mounting a human rights challenge against Wilfred Laurier University when you were turned down. What happened there?

ANNE DAGG: I was hoping to get a job there that would have been actually right up the street from where I lived. But they gave it to a man with far fewer recommendations than I did who had published much less and just local things. And I couldn't believe it. So I thought well this is ridiculous. So I decided to go to the Ontario Human Rights and this was a group that was supposed to bring equality for men and women. But anyway I lost.

AMT: Alison Reed this was documented in the media at the time but it was a very long fight.

ALISON REID: It became a very long fight and ended up fighting for seven years. And there were many stages to that to the fight and it's all documented actually in that correspond that she has in the archives.

AMT: And even though you weren't really continuing your academic research under wraps you write an important book during this time.

ANNE DAGG: Yes I did write with a co-author actually about draft and that became the first book on giraffe to be written actually. And it was sold quite well but it was before the internet and no one knew who Anne Dagg was and so I never really knew that anyone was buying it.

AMT: But it is that book then in some ways leads you back to the giraffe research community all those decades later. We've got a clip of some of the giraffe experts who speak in the farm talking about that book and what your work has meant to them. Let's listen and.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Anne's book was the only book that you could find that covered giraffes' ecology and biology, a little bit about management, about captive populations. It's a book that you find on every giraffe keeper's bookshelf. It's just the Bible to giraffe, really.

VOICE 2: When I was in high school I knew I wanted to be a giraffe keeper. I loved Anne I read her first but it was really hard to go through at15. But I did it. I highlighted it. I took notes and I memorized every little piece of giraffe information I could find. Working in this field, there was nothing else really coming out for a really long time. I had worked in the field for over 10 years in most of what we relied on still was Anne's book from so long ago.

AMT: That last voice is Amy Phelps from the San Francisco Zoo. Alison Reid , how did she and the other giraffe experts end up being key to this story?

ALISON REID: Well they were the women that rediscovered Anne. Not too many people are aware that giraffes are in real danger, now. Their populations are plummeting. And Amy Phelps was putting together an organization. They were having an inaugural conference in and she was looking for an icon. She was looking for someone to make this special and thought of Anne immediately, because she was the one that wrote this instrumental book, that wrote the Bible on giraffes. But no one heard or heard from Anne. They didn't know her. All they knew was her name on the spine of the book. So they did some research and tracked her down and that was what reincorporated Anne into the giraffe community.

AMT: And, Anne, by this time 30 years had gone by, sort of I guess, without any contact with giraffe. And you say in the film that it close off one happy part of you. What was it like for you when you were - I'm going to use that quote "rediscovered" - when you were rediscovering in invited back into that fold.

ANNE DAGG: It was just amazing because up till then no one even - if I said something about that I studied Giraffe, they just thought I was lying. If I had friends and that would end the conversation. So that was discouraging. So to find people that actually found out who wrote the book, they were really excited as I was.

AMT: And you've been able to write an update to this book now.

ANNE DAGG: Yes, now I've written another one. Cambridge University Press asked me to write one so I did that and it came up in 2014.

AMT: It's all led to you being able to see the giraffes again and returned to the Fleur de Lys farm. What was that like?

ANNE DAGG: Oh that was amazing. That meant that everywhere I came people knew who I was. So I'd be hugging people I had never seen before, but we both love giraffe and that was all mattered. It was a wonderful time.

AMT: Alison what was it like to be there and watch that?

ALISON REID: Incredible. I had seen the 16 mm footage of at very very particular, in front of very particular mountain ranges and in front of very particular buildings. And to go back to those exact same spots with her, it was almost 60 years later, was just incredible.

AMT: It is fun to watch that in the film, to see her then and then to see her now. And in terms of the conservation of giraffes, how much effort is being put into that, now?

ANNE DAGG: A lot of groups have formed in order to help the draft but it's hard to know how effective they are. There are nine subspecies and most of my work on a particular subspecies. Where there people that are hungry it's going to be hard to preserve them. But there are a lot of people working on it. That's really a wonderful thing.

AMT: It must make you feel good. Are these years later to realize?

ANNE DAGG: Yes. Now I can speak to them as friends and email them and it's wonderful.

AMT: You know I have to say what was it in you that made you so single minded in your pursuit? Your growing up in Canada it's a world away and you're just fearless.

ANNE DAGG: Yes. I don't know. I just love them always and thought I would always go and study biology so I could study them. And then to find out that all of this is going to be nothing because I was a woman, it was terrifying and horrible.

AMT: It's so interesting when you talk about young women in the sciences and how difficult it's been to encourage them, and here you were in a community with so many universities, and you weren't able to impart that knowledge and a whole generation of women might have been inspired but didn't know you.

ANNE DAGG: Yes. I wish I had known them and I know a lot of them now. And that's wonderful.

ALISON REID: Yes and you're absolutely right. I mean one wonders what has been lost by not allowing Anne to do her work. And not only Anne but all the other people who have been discriminated against and have not been able to thrive in areas. I mean what have we lost?

AMT: And it ended you know again we point to these other women you know Dian Fossey, Jane Goodall, but we should be saying Anne Innes Dagg . We should have been saying that all along.

ANNE DAGG: I went before the two of them. So I laugh when people are saying 'well they did the first work' and that's not true.

AMT: And how galling is that for you are these years later?

ANNE DAGG: It makes me laugh now. It always was ridiculous really.

AMT: You're very generous. Alison, I have to ask you, at the end of the documentary, the credits are rolling and you come back with the scene of the women's march with the pussycats in Washington D.C. Why did you include that scene?

ALISON REID: To me that spoke to everything that Anne cares about. I mean that march was about people that cared about climate change, that cared about conservation, that cared about women's rights, and people's rights. So that's why Anne was there. Anne went to that march because all those days--.

AMT: She's been fighting that fight a long time.

ALISON REID: Exactly. So I wanted to go out on, you know it's quite dismal the situation with giraffes right now and I wanted to go out on a hopeful note to see Anne, in the midst of all those men and women, all those likeminded men and women, that were not going to take it. You know she was so affected by that. On the way back she said 'you know what? I am so much more hopeful to be surrounded by all those men and women that really do care about all the things that I care about, is so uplifting'.

AMT: It's interesting. It's like they slowed you down but they couldn't stop you. Thank you both for coming in. It's a fascinating story and it's a pleasure to meet you.

ANNE DAGG: Thanks very much.

ALISON REID: Thank you for having us.

AMT: Anne Innes Dag giraffe expert on the subject of a new documentary called The Woman Who Loves giraffes. Alison Reid is the film's director.

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Feb. 18, 2019 episode transcript

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