Smitten by Giraffe: My Life as a Citizen Scientist 9780773599741

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Smitten by Giraffe

footprints Series Jane errington, editor The life stories of individual women and men who were participants in interesting events help nuance larger historical narratives, at times reinforcing those narratives, at other times contradicting them. The Footprints series introduces extraordinary Canadians, past and present, who have led fascinating and important lives at home and throughout the world. The series includes primarily original manuscripts but may consider the English-language translation of works that have already appeared in another language. The editor of the series welcomes inquiries from authors. If you are in the process of completing a manuscript that you think might fit into the series, please contact her, care of McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1010 Sherbrooke Street West, Suite 1720, Montreal, QC H3A 2R7. 12 Alice Street 1 Blatant Injustice: A Memoir The Story of a Jewish Refugee from Nazi Germany Richard Valeriote Imprisoned in Britain and Canada during World War II 13 Crises and Compassion Walter W. Igersheimer From Russia to the Golden Gate Edited and with a foreword by Ian Darragh John M. Letiche 2 Against the Current 14 In the Eye of the China Storm Memoirs A Life Between East and West Boris Ragula Paul T.K. Lin with Eileen Chen Lin 3 Margaret Macdonald 15 Georges and Pauline Vanier Imperial Daughter Portrait of a Couple Susan Mann Mary Frances Coady 4 My Life at the Bar and Beyond 16 Blitzkrieg and Jitterbugs Alex K. Paterson College Life in Wartime, 1939–1942 5 Red Travellers Elizabeth Hillman Waterston Jeanne Corbin and Her Comrades 17 Harrison McCain Andrée Lévesque Single-Minded Purpose 6 The Teeth of Time Donald J. Savoie Remembering Pierre Elliott Trudeau 18 Discovering Confederation Ramsay Cook A Canadian’s Story 7 The Greater Glory Janet Ajzenstat Thirty-seven Years with the Jesuits 19 Expect Miracles Stephen Casey Recollections of a Lucky Life 8 Doctor to the North David M. Culver with Alan Freeman Thirty Years Treating Heart Disease among the Inuit 20 Building Bridges John H. Burgess Victor C. Goldbloom 9 Dal and Rice 21 Call Me Giambattista Wendy M. Davis A Personal and Political Journey 10 In the Eye of the Wind John Ciaccia A Travel Memoir of Prewar Japan 22 Smitten by Giraffe Ron Baenninger and Martin Baenninger My Life as a Citizen Scientist 11 I’m from Bouctouche, Me Anne Innis Dagg Roots Matter Donald J. Savoie

Smitten by Giraffe My Life as a Citizen Scientist anne inniS DaGG

mcGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© Anne Innis Dagg 2016 ISBN 978-0-7735-4799-5 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-7735-9974-1 (ePDF) ISBN 978-0-7735-9975-8 (ePUB) Legal deposit third quarter 2016 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Dagg, Anne Innis, 1933–, author Smitten by giraffe : my life as a citizen scientist / Anne Innis Dagg. (Footprints series ; 22) Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-0-7735-4799-5 (cloth).–ISBN 978-0-7735-9974-1 (ePDF).– ISBN 978-0-7735-9975-8 (ePUB) 1. Dagg, Anne Innis, 1933–.  2. Women zoologists–Canada–Biography.  3. Women scientists– Canada–Biography.  4. Women college teachers–Canada–Biography.  5. Women in higher education–Canada.  6. Sexism in higher education–Canada.  7. Giraffe–Africa.  I. Title.  II. Series: Footprints series ; 22 QL31.D34A3 2016

590.92

C2016-903705-3

C2016-903706-1

In memory of Tigger, Sport, ararat, mouse, Silver, Tiger, Amadeus, and Creepie

Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii Illustrations xiv, 112 1 Family Life 3 2 Giraffe Research in Africa 21 3 Research, First Teaching, and Earning a PhD 33 4 Being a Professor: Teaching and Research 41 5 Completing Research on Animal Gaits 55 6 First Scientific Book on Giraffe! 65 7 Environmental Efforts, 1972–1988 73 8 A Potpourri of Interests, 1972–1980 95 9 A Sexist University: How Bad Was It? Awful! 121 10 Social Activism: Working for Equality for Women in the Arts 129 11 Follow-Up: Homosexuality, Taxonomy, and Mammalogists 149 12 Women and Science at Canadian Universities 169 13 Follow-Up: University Life, Sociobiology, Infanticide, and Rape 181 14 Focusing Again on Animals 193 15 Return to Giraffe 201 16 Conclusion 207 Bibliography 209 Index 219

Preface I was three when I saw my first giraffe. It immediately became my favourite animal and I wanted to learn everything about it. When I grew older, I realized that this goal meant that I should become a zoologist. At the time zoologists usually worked at universities, so my dream became not only to attend university but to become a university professor like my father and brother. Then I could study the behaviour of giraffe and other animals for the rest of my life! I graduated in zoology in 1955 from the University of Toronto, earning a gold medal in the process, and went to study giraffe in Africa as planned. On my return, after years of post-graduate work, including successfully teaching courses in zoology at three different universities, I earned my PhD. All I needed to fulfill my dream of a life of teaching and doing research was to become a professor with tenure. What I had not counted on, however, was that at the time universities were loath to hire women, no matter how experienced, except in part-time or short-term positions. One dean told me he would never give tenure to a married woman because she had a man to support her. Case closed. It seemed obvious to me that this sexist attitude was ridiculous and must be changed. So my life became one not only of continuing to do research, usually at my own expense, but of fighting university systems that discriminated against academic women. And then, realizing that women suffered because of

their gender in most other fields, I began to work for them too. Publishers should publish excellent books no matter the gender of the author. Artists should be judged by their art, not their sex. Homosexuality was not unnatural, since, as I had proved, it was common in many animal species. This book describes what it was like to spend my life learning about the behaviour of giraffe and other animals and fighting discrimination. For most of my adult life I have been a citizen scientist. I define the citizen scientist as a person who has been academically trained in science or who understands scientific principles and carries out research and other enterprises in an accepted scientific fashion. They are “citizens” because their work is not backed by a university or government or think-tank, nor paid for by a commercial company. And there are millions of us: anyone who decides to set up a group to stop mining in the Canadian north, or organizes bird-watchers to report their sightings so measures can be enacted to help disappearing species, or coordinates individuals in developed countries to help people in poor countries earn money through microloans. With each such enterprise, data have to be collected to indicate the need for action, volunteers need to be encouraged and kept in the loop about what is going on, and the results of the activity have to be analyzed, detailing success or failure, so that planning for the future can begin. There are also many citizen scientists who, like me, are concerned mainly with their own particular interests rather than in a communal enterprise. These have often been women, especially in the past when women were denied education and jobs similar to those available to men. One example is Catharine Parr Traill, who wrote and illustrated articles and books about plants in Ontario in the 1800s. Citizen scientists address incredibly varied topics, which are often researched using methods that might seem odd or too labour intensive. For instance, they may have more time than paid scientists to devote to detailed daily observations, such as analyzing the hourly behaviour of birds in their backyard. Individuals may start out as citizen scientists when they are x

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young but eventually be hired by governments or other agencies that have noticed their abilities. This eventuality is usually welcomed by the individual, but he or she must then adhere to the employer’s agenda: they are no longer citizen scientists, free to follow their own unique path. Many topics chosen by citizen scientists may be both highly original and vitally important. Think Silent Spring by Rachel Carson who, because she was a biologist and loved nature, realized as early as 1945 that pesticides such as ddt were destroying the environment. She had no academic affiliation and no institutional voice, but she wrote a book that changed the way we interact with the natural world. Citizen scientists are often lonely. People paid to do scientific research usually have colleagues with whom they can chat and exchange information. Unpaid scientists frequently work alone, using their own money to carry out their projects. A recent example is my German friend Hilde Gauthier-Pilters, PhD, who studied camel behaviour in Africa. For many years she visited the Sahara Desert in the heat of summer to research how these animals are able to survive under stressful conditions and to document the work of the camel men who supplied them with water from deep wells. She paid her own way, accepting contracts from a company or government only if they enabled her to carry out her own research in her own way. My two trips with her to Mauritania and the scientific book on camels we wrote together are described in chapter 8. This book describes what I have been able to achieve while working largely alone, usually without benefit of financial help for research and without long-term colleagues with whom to discuss biological and other relevant issues. I have been extremely lucky in having a casual university connection, first because my husband was a physicist at the University of Waterloo, second because I was able to earn a PhD in biology at this university, and third because in 1978 student representatives voted to make me a part-time resource person in a small program there, Integrated Studies (later Independent Studies), which employed me until it closed in 2016 and allowed me to use the university’s name on P r e fA C e

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my publications. However, “real” professors never had time to waste on part-timers such as me, so I never had university colleagues with whom to discuss academic subjects. Using my own finances though, I have been able to study what interests me and what seems important. This is an incredible luxury unavailable to most people. In the 1950s all Canadian universities had far more men than women, both as professors and as students. But because the University of Waterloo, founded in 1957, specialized in engineering, physics, and chemistry, the first students were entirely male, as were virtually all the professors. Women such as myself with a university connection either accepted the dearth of women at universities or fought against this discrimination. As a feminist, I joined the latter group. Over the years I carried out research both in animal behaviour and in various women’s issues. Some projects could be completed in a few weeks or months, but others took years. This means that this book is rather a bumpy ride chronologically, because times spent on projects and on writing books and articles often overlapped.

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acknowledgments My thanks to the following people who helped make this book possible: Jill Bryant, Alan Cairns, Susan Gow, Clare Hitchens, Martha Lauzon, James MacNevin, Anne Miner, Sue Plouffe, Susan Seabrook, Mary Williamson, and two anonymous reviewers.

At the age of four, I seem very self-contained.

My father, Harold Adams Innis, 1894–1952, a professor of economic history at the University of Toronto. Innis College was named after him when it was founded in 1964.

My mother, Mary Quayle Innis, 1899–1972, homemaker, author, and later dean of women at University College, University of Toronto. She has just received an honorary degree from Queen’s University in 1958 and would receive a second honorary degree from the University of Waterloo in 1965.

The Innis children about 1941: Donald (holding Tigger), Hugh, Mary, and me. We are all in our best clothes by our house on Chudleigh Street.

Me and Mary Williamson, my best friend growing up, and close friend ever since.

Mary Williamson and I beside our mothers during our first high school year at Bishop Strachan School, 1947.

Me at age seventeen, revisiting the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago where as a toddler I saw my first giraffe and fell in love with them. I am probably hoping that this is a relative of the earlier giraffe. I visited the Brookfield giraffe again in 2016.

Holding a friendly raccoon in the old Zoology Building at the University of Toronto, with Don Smith nearby. I spent my master’s year there weighing baby mice for a genetic experiment.

Alexander Matthew, manager of fleur de Lys ranch, who gave me room and board so I could study the behaviour of the ninety-five giraffe among his cattle, 1956–57.

Watching giraffe. However, I never collected information about their natural behaviour unless I was sitting in my car, Camelo, and the giraffe were paying no attention to me but rather going about their usual activities.

Guide fernandes and I after successfully climbing Mt Kilimanjaro in 1957. Our four porters made the garland on my hat to celebrate our success. On the descent I walked thirty-five miles in one day; I was then so stiff I was in pain for nearly a week. The four-day trip cost about $50.

This giraffe male was shot by the local warden, who claimed he was on the road upsetting traffic. This was impossible to believe since few cars ever drove by. I measured some of his body parts before the meat was shared among the one hundred farm workers.

Smitten by Giraffe

.1. family Life

I grew up in a middle-class home in Toronto. My father, Harold Adams Innis, was a prominent professor of Canadian economic history at the University of Toronto. My mother, Mary Quayle Innis, was per force a homemaker but also an important author of fiction and non-fiction. I was a happy child, the youngest of four, two boys and two girls. In 1933, when I was born, our family lived at what was then the northern edge of Toronto, on Chudleigh Avenue near Lawrence Avenue. It was during the Depression, so rag-tag people often trudged by our house, sometimes asking my mother for a sandwich, which she provided. Our house was close to a ravine and we played, always unsupervised, either there or on the street with the many children in the neighbourhood – races, skipping, tag, red rover, flags ahoy, hide and seek. In those days most people, like us, did not have cars. Horses pulled the wagons that delivered milk and bread and ice (for our refrigerator). When chips of ice fell onto the road, we fought other kids to brush aside the horse manure and snatch them up to suck, enjoying the coldness. In the fall, though, when there were polio scares, we had to stay home so we wouldn’t catch the

disease. Then we yelled across the street to friends or left favourite books in the middle of the road for them to pick up. One girl on our street died from polio. My father worked hard, both at the university and for long hours at home reading and writing in his study. During term time, graduate students or colleagues of my father came to tea on Sunday afternoons. My mother baked cookies and other goodies on Saturday and my siblings and I served these to the guests. When we were no longer needed, we hung about in the hall and giggled when my father thumbed his nose at us without the guests (he hoped) noticing. When I was four and had not yet mastered the “r” sound, I was sometimes asked to give a short recital, announcing proudly “Wound and wound the wugged wock the wagged wascals wan,” always to great acclaim. Everyone loved it except, perhaps, my siblings. During term time we walked across the ravine to John Ross Robertson Junior Public School. I loved books by then, especially books about animals, which my father always gave me for Christmas. And I loved everything about school. How wonderful to learn new things every single day! I gave a short talk about the giraffe, illustrated by a paper one I had made for the occasion, but my sharpest memory is having to learn to spell the name of the street I lived on. It seemed so unfair that I was stuck with “Chudleigh” and had to stay after hours while those who lived on Greer Road were long gone. I enjoyed church too, which I attended with my mother each Sunday at St George’s United Church. My father had considered becoming a minister upon graduating from McMaster University in 1916, but after serving in the trench warfare of Vimy Ridge in World War I, any religious feeling he ever had was long gone. He never again set foot in a church. He recalled that while living in the trenches during the war, he swore that if he survived, he would never complain about anything again. And he never did, as far as I know. We always ate as a family around the dining room table and I enjoyed listening to the talk of university affairs. There were visitors at times, but I don’t remember many. The only other family-together times were rare trips to the movies to see 4

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Charlie Chaplin or Groucho Marx films and Sunday evenings when we all sat around the large radio – this was long before television – in the living room to hear the Jack Benny and Fred Allen programs, both of which my father loved. I was puzzled when my father mentioned that Rochester, Jack Benny’s servant, was a Negro, as we were taught to say then. I couldn’t figure out how he could know Rochester’s colour when he had never seen him. My parents talked of Jim Crow laws in connection with Rochester, but I had no idea what they were talking about. When I was nine years old we moved to 92 Dunvegan Road, next door to Mary Williamson, who immediately became my best friend. Together, sometimes with Tom Sharp, the English boy who had come to stay with her family during the war, we walked the six long blocks to Brown School by ourselves, back home for lunch, and then back to school again. We were obviously well organized, because at the end of Grade 8 we were each given a medal to prove we had never been late in our eight years of primary school. These years were documented by Mary’s mother, who wrote a letter each week to Tom’s mother in England. Mary and Tom produced a book of these letters, Just a Larger Family, which won the Heritage Toronto Award of Excellence for Books for 2012. There is a photograph in it of Tom and me sitting proudly outside the “house” we had built of odd bits and pieces of wood at the back of our garage, which was rented out as we did not have a car. Our new house was several blocks from the Bishop Strachan School (BSS). The tuition was far less expensive then than it is today, so our parents sent Mary and me there for high school. Mary studied arts and later become a librarian, while I was in the science stream. Again, I loved every minute of school, even learning Latin as well as French. My goal was still to study zoology (and the giraffe), but this course was restricted to Grade 13 students. In my final year, though, I found that if I wanted to enroll in Honour Science at university, I had to take chemistry and physics instead of zoology. Zoology had to wait yet another year! While at bss I was enthralled with the sports that were organized every day after school – tennis, badminton, hockey, fA M I Ly L I f e

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lacrosse, and basketball. Tennis was my game of choice; I later played on the university tennis team and only hung up my racquet a few years ago. Although I was at the tennis court almost every day in summer, my parents saw me play only once, when they happened to be near the church courts as a league match was in progress. They stayed for a few minutes and then left, noting later that my partner hadn’t seemed very good. My husband and I never thought to go to our children’s games either. We were happy they were playing them, but preferred playing tennis and badminton or enjoying Scottish country dancing ourselves. When I see the huge parental interest in games today, I am amazed – and also rather disconcerted at my former attitude. For many summers when I was between four and eleven years old, my father rented a cottage at Footes Bay in Muskoka from history professor Thomas Dadson, one of his friends. Our family lived there for the months of July and August; my father worked at the university during the week and arrived each Friday night by train for the weekend. Our glorious days were filled with swimming, exploring, games, and long walks, a child’s paradise. On one of our walks we lost my father. He had been ahead of us, but then disappeared. Standing on a small bridge over a dry creek, we worried about what to do, until suddenly we heard his laughter. He had hidden under the bridge to fool us. On other occasions we came across skunks and porcupines, which he taunted in subtle ways while the rest of us urged him to be careful. He seemed to know exactly how far he could go without unpleasant consequences. On Saturday mornings we walked with my father to MacTier, a town a few miles away. We marched along the dirt path in single file and I thought about the ice cream cones he might buy for us. He always bought them (we never would have asked had he not), and we enjoyed the treat all the way home. On rainy days, Daddy sometimes read to us, from Winnie the Pooh books when we were young and Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town by Stephen Leacock when we were older. Every few months he would ask out of the blue, “Adam and Eve and Pinch Me went down to the river to bathe. Adam and Eve were drowned, so who 6

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do you think was saved?” But after the first time we were too clever to respond as he pretended to hope we would. Every year we rented a boat, first a row boat, later a canoe, and finally a very tippy canoe with a sail set up in it. One of my most amazing memories is seeing my father pick up a canoe and swing it over his head to stand there in a mighty T formation. I thought he had gone mad! But he explained in a grunting voice, “This is how you carry a canoe on a portage.” Later I carried canoes on various trips in northern Canada, but always by lugging one end while a friend wrestled with the other. Sometimes we paddled to nearby Badgerow Island (then mosquito-infested bush but now a playground for millionaires). Daddy would put a bit of bread on a hook tied to a string, fasten the other end of the string to a stick, and jounce the bread in the water hoping to catch a fish. He never did. (Later my sister insisted that this made my father a fisherman, but I had my doubts.) We always had a swim, my father in a wool suit that went up over his shoulders, trying not to drown by frantically breast stroking with his arms and kicking with his legs. Then he would build a fire to heat up water in a billy can hanging from a stick. When the water was hot enough, he’d add wieners, saying “It’s boiling like old Billy-O.” As we ate, he reminisced about canoeing down the Yukon River and other northern waterways as a young man. (He began one long canoe trip needing a cane when on shore because of the war wound in his thigh, but ended being able to walk without it thanks to the long rest for his leg.) After dark we were herded into the tent he had pitched to spend a crowded night. Sensibly, my mother stayed home in the cottage on these occasions. Some evenings we sat on the hill at the end of Lake Joseph, watching the wind sweep over the water and, when it became dark, admiring shooting stars in the sky. Our last Muskoka summer was when I was eleven, because my older brothers and sister were no longer much interested in cottage life. For the next years I worked part time at the Deer Park Library in Toronto and read reams of books. One day I founded a newspaper. The first and only issue of The Giraffe Gazzete (sic) comprised two items by me: “Bow and Arrow Manufacture” and fA M I Ly L I f e

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“The Life of the Toad.” Although I filled all six production roles for Raffy Publications, I was not overworked as there was no second issue. A particularly happy summer was when I was eighteen and attended Tanamakoon Camp in Algonquin Park where I learned to paddle a canoe properly. One of our early meals was a plate of chicken, mashed potatoes, and peas, followed by ice cream for dessert. I have remembered all my life the glory of that feast. I had never before had mashed potatoes (my mother and later myself had better things to do than mash potatoes), nor had I ever tasted chicken. Growing up on a farm, my father had had more than his fill of it so my mother never cooked it. Instead, like most housewives of the time, she produced simple meals from staple foods – red meat, potatoes or rice, a vegetable, and a dessert. (While we are on the subject of food, we never had steak at home either. It was embarrassing at university when I had to ask a date, who had organized a steak dinner over a campfire, what a steak was.) When I was a teenager, the salary for my first months at the library was 25 cents an hour. Soon the minimum wage was raised to 43 cents an hour, almost a miracle! By age eighteen, I finally had saved enough money to buy the $25 watch I coveted and which I still possess. The next summer I was thrilled to be invited back to Tanamakoon Camp as a junior counsellor, although there was no salary beyond my room and board. However, when my mother told me that my father was seriously ill, with “arthritis,” she said (cancer being too terrible a word even to be spoken apparently), I realized I had to stay in the city instead. I worked at the Banting and Best Medical Building on College Street as a “gopher,” doing whatever grunt work no one else wanted to do, and was paid $25 a week. Every lunch hour I walked to Western Hospital to sit with my father, who was a patient there. I worked at the medical building for two summers and was upset by the nonchalance and cruelty with which the laboratory animals were treated. Sometimes a researcher would try things out just to see how they went – in one case sewing a relatively 8

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large glass bulb into the stomach of a mouse. Much later I published three papers showing how much hurtful research was done on animals in laboratories, and how often few or no other scientists were interested in the results. Sometimes not a single other scientist cited a scientific article whose production had involved hundreds of animals being harmed and even killed (see chapter 14). Like high school, university – at the University of Toronto, like my brothers and sister – was a great time for me. The firstyear course load was horrendous – zoology, botany, chemistry, physics, mathematics, English, German, and Greek and Roman history. To this I added indoor hockey, which had practices at seven in the morning because all the later and better times were taken by boys’ teams. We must have been the worst team on record because we never scored a goal in four years of play, perhaps because of more motivated opponents, like the one who snarled at me, “Keep away from the puck or I’ll knock your bloody teeth in.” I ended the year with a third-class mark, which disappointed my mother. I, however, was completely happy with my life. I played tennis in the summer, read reams of books by the great masters, and at university even had a few boyfriends. Although I had been told at bss never to kiss a boy unless I was engaged to him, I kissed one after we dated for six months. I learned later that at least three of my classmates, including myself, had not had sex until we married, which was after obtaining postgraduate degrees. Very different from today. I eventually became a full-blown feminist, as this book describes, but I wasn’t one for many years because I didn’t realize there could be a problem of this sort. I assumed that men and women were equal. My parents both worked hard, although of course only my mother did the housework as well. Our family seemed to treat both the boys and girls fairly, although the boys’ job was to take the garbage to the curb for pickup once a week while the girls had to help in the kitchen and wash the dishes, which was obviously more onerous. While I was in high school I actually did most of the cooking because my mother fA M I Ly L I f e

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preferred to write the articles she frequently sold to places such as Saturday Night and Canadian Forum. My cooking generally involved reading somewhere near a pressure cooker filled with potatoes, carrots, and other vegetables, peering up now and then to ensure that all was well on the stove. Needless to say, these were not gourmet meals! (My daughter refused to eat pork chops until recently, when she realized that they need not taste like those I had cooked.) There were no red flags of sexism at the University of Toronto, at least none that I noticed during my and my siblings’ time there. And although many people had laughed at my dream to go to Africa to study giraffe, I was able to realize my ambition.

My father My interest in animals may have started with my father. He grew up on a farm where he milked cows before and after school, and on holidays he sent his ferret down rabbit holes to chase out rabbits. If he caught a muskrat in a trap he had set, he skinned it, stretched its hide on a wooden shingle cut to the proper size, and sold the fur for 10 to 25 cents. He was deeply interested in natural history and the behaviour of wild animals. Every spring, he would listen for the first sound of crows, which meant, at last, the end of a long winter. (Now, of course, crows stay around in southern Ontario all year long.) Twice a year, my father would take the train to Brantford and then the bus to Otterville, often with one of us children, to visit his parents and siblings, Lillian, Hughena, and Sam, who all lived in the area. He not only asked about everyone’s health but about how many cattle were being milked, how much milk was produced, what crops were being grown with what yields, and what the sale prices were. His parents’ house was extremely austere. As when my father was growing up, there were no books other than the Bible in evidence, although in his youth there had been The Family Herald and Weekly Star. Rumour had it that my grandmother had named him Harold after the “Herald” 10

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in the magazine, expecting him to be an exceptional boy and man. Because his parents and brother and sisters were staunch Christians, Daddy usually did not smoke in their presence and never admitted that he sometimes (although rarely) drank liquor. On one occasion my father and I visited a tobacco kiln, probably without his parents’ knowledge, given that they considered smoking an evil practice. There he interrogated the owner, making notes about such things as how many tobacco leaves were tied around each stick, temperatures, and times for drying the leaves. I was amazed at his intense questioning. I think it was then that I learned the importance of recording data, even if it did not seem relevant to anything at the time, a habit I have practised my whole life. Most people seemed to view my father as a friendly, confident man, and I thought he was terrific in every way. I had a doll called Tweetie Pie who had an odd smile on her painted face. Whenever he saw her, he’d snarl at her “Wipe that smirk off your face,” and give her a pretend swat. I would cry out “No, Daddy, no! Don’t hurt Tweetie Pie!” We both enjoyed this interaction. Sometimes he did unexpected things. Once, when he saw me painstakingly searching each raspberry in a dish to make sure there were no tiny worms on it, he rolled his eyes, grabbed a handful of berries, and ate them, worms and all. I was aghast. “That’ll be Jake,” he probably commented, licking his lips, using a term he’d picked up in the war. He never played outdoor games with us. Probably he did not know how, given that life was too serious for sports when he was growing up. He could never stay after school to play with the other boys because he had to walk the several miles home to do his farm chores; later, when he was at high school in Woodstock, he had to take the train home right after school. While I was growing up in Toronto, my father worked at the university from nine to four and then at home following afternoon tea. After dinner he retired again to his study to work until about ten. He would sit either at his desk, writing in his tiny script, or read in a comfortable arm chair surrounded by dozens fA M I Ly L I f e

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of piles of books on the floor. Every half hour or so he would put his book aside, lean forward, and play a game of Idiot’s Delight on the rug between his feet. This game of solitaire must have relaxed his mind somehow. When I was about twelve, I wanted to try out for a choir, so I memorized the “Tit Willow Song” from the operetta The Mikado. We were ordered never to bother my father when he was working in his study, which was almost all the time, but, since no one else was home, I timidly entered the door to see if he would listen to me sing it. He put down his pen, sat back, and watched me through the whole song. I was stunned that he would be so attentive, and incredibly grateful. He said that I sounded fine, although he himself was unable to keep a tune so his praise was suspect. I retired feeling great, although I didn’t get into the choir. When I was a teenager, my father, on doctor’s orders, sometimes strolled around nearby Forest Hill Village with me as it was growing dark. I was studying Greek and Roman history in school at the time and was mesmerized by everything he told me about their communication systems. I can still recall the thrill of those warm evenings ambling under the leafy trees, soaking up everything he said, proud that he considered me a worthy listener. One of his students at the time, Graeme Ferguson (one of the inventors of imax), told me recently that he was at my father’s final lecture before he took medical leave. He asked the students not to take notes but to listen carefully – an unusual request as my sister had often lamented that anyone who dropped their pen or pencil during one of his lectures was in despair over what they missed while they tried to retrieve it. My father then announced that what he was going to tell the class was a summary of what he had learned during his life. When, sixty years later, I asked Graeme what my father had revealed, of course he could not remember. The thought of never knowing what was said that day, the synthesis of my father’s life work, still brings tears to my eyes. This was perhaps one of the first of the now popular “Last Lecture” phenomena for retiring professors. 12

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Two months before my father died, my mother hired a nurse to sit with him all night. She took over my bedroom, which was next door to his, so I moved into an empty room on the third floor. Each day after class I studied at the university library until it closed at 10 p.m. because I was too worried to go home. Walking up Dunvegan Road from the streetcar on St Clair, I was almost afraid to look up at the window of the room where he was. If the light was out, did that mean he had died? If it was on, would he be awake and in pain, the nurse knitting calmly nearby? The next morning my brother Hugh and I would go into his room to say hello, then retreat to the university. My mother, brother, and I never talked to each other about what was happening. We each just suffered in our own way. It was a terrible time. His death, after many months of pain, was horrific. Many men from the university came to our house and hugged my mother – a form of greeting I had never seen before that made the occasion seem even more disastrous than it was. The funeral service was in Convocation Hall, with lectures cancelled so that all professors and students could attend. I completely lost my self-control during the service and can still hear in my head my cries of grief, which seemed to resonate through the whole huge building. Toward the end of the service, my sister-in-law helped me leave. Only later did I fully realize what an important scholar my father had been, not only at the University of Toronto but far beyond. And perhaps how lucky I was to have somehow inherited his work ethic. Because of this, I did what I could later to further his reputation. From 1990 to 1993, on behalf of the Harold Innis Foundation of which I was a director and then president, I tried, unsuccessfully, to find a publisher for my father’s letters, beginning with his First World War experiences, but I did publish two articles about my father as I knew him (Dagg 1991a, 1994b). In 2015 and 2016, portions of my father’s huge manuscript about media communication, his memoir, and his war letters from the First World War have at last been published, thanks to the hard work of William Buxton, Michael Cheney, and Paul Heyer. It is wonderful to now have his work so valorized. fA M I Ly L I f e

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The Harold Innis Foundation presented many conferences over the years, one on the Innis Years at the University of Toronto, 1920–1952, which I introduced and wrote up, and another on my father’s academic achievements to celebrate the centennial of his birth in 1994. We heard that he was a no-nonsense lecturer, once announcing to two women talking in class, “Lectures are a place for listening, except for one person talking.” He then asked them to leave, which they did. On another occasion he himself left when a particularly inept student was presenting his work. I am sure that my father’s respect and love for his university was passed on to me, which contributed to my anger later on when I found university officials behaving in sexist ways that I felt demanded retribution.

My Mother My mother, Mary Quayle Innis, was as industrious as her husband. She was born in St Marys, Ohio, but because her father was an engineer for a telephone company, the whole family moved every few years so he could oversee new installations and she grew up in various towns around the United States. She met my father when she enrolled in his economics class at the University of Chicago, where he was earning his PhD. She was probably impressed by his quick wit, tall stature, and limp and cane, souvenirs of a shrapnel wound at Vimy Ridge and his year-long hospitalization in England. They married in 1921 in Chicago and she moved to Canada, where my father, after finishing his PhD, had taken a job at the University of Toronto. I seldom met any of her relatives, but we were enthralled when her sister-in-law, Mary Jane Ward, published The Snake Pit, describing her stint in a mental hospital. In no time Mary Jane became wealthy and could share exciting stories about meeting Olivia de Havilland, who was starring in a movie version of her book. The book and movie are credited with leading to better treatment for those in the United States with severe psychological problems.

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During the 1930s, all professors were urged to hire household help to help counter the Great Depression, which had put millions of people out of work. We hired a maid, which was fortunate for my mother, because my father had just asked her to write a book, to be called An Economic History of Canada, which would tie in with his lectures. He needed it quickly and the task would have been impossible without help with child care. Her book and her articles on related topics were key resources for university students for many years (Dagg 2000b). After 1939, when maids universally were much relieved to be able to go into better-paying war work, my mother took on all the housekeeping for our family of six and a dog. Most days this involved walking to the store five blocks away for food (we had no car, but fortunately milk and bread came to the door by horse-drawn vehicle). Saturdays she usually baked cookies and pies, the former to be eaten by the graduate students who, during term time, came for Sunday afternoon tea at our house. As a teenager I took over the laundry, which involved a basement washtub, two tubs of water, pushing the weekly clothing for six people three times through the wringer, and then hanging the clothes up to dry, either outdoors or in the cellar. (This prepared me for the thousands of diapers I would wash and fold in the future, since I refused to use disposable ones, which are both environmentally unfriendly and expensive.) Despite all her housework and children, my mother continued to write. After moving to Canada she published a novel, Stand on a Rainbow, as well as eighty short stories in Canadian national magazines, including Saturday Night, Canadian Forum, and The United Church Observer, some of which have been analyzed by Donica Belisle (2011) of Athabasca University. She also published and edited books about Canadian history. My mother served on many church and other women’s committees, where she was known not as Mary but as Mrs Harold Innis. This work included the editorship of the quarterly journal of the National Committee of the Young Women’s Christian Association in Canada. Every three months she and

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several other women took over our living room to choose what should go into the magazine and how the material should be arranged. In 1948, when she was asked to write a history of the ywca, she was allotted money to hire a cook to give her more time for this work. I remember how delighted we children were when this woman produced home-made French fried potatoes for our dinner – our family never went out to restaurants and my mother had certainly never prepared them. When I was seventeen, my mother took me to the main reading room at the University of Toronto where a variety of students were quietly studying. “Your university days will be the happiest days of your life,” she said. I wasn’t sure I believed her. Surely greater times would come later on? But she was right. To be free for four years to learn what you want to know and to have good friends learning along with you was indeed magnificent. My mother was always busy, but kind and lots of fun, too. When I contracted scarlet fever at age eleven and was incarcerated in the isolation hospital for a month, she made me three stuffed giraffe – a mother, a father, and a youngster – even though she was told they could not be disinfected and would have to be destroyed rather than coming home with me. I also remember her rushing merrily about the house to hide any wine or liquor if my father’s relatives came for an unexpected visit. Because my uncle was a dairy farmer, she hid the margarine as well, so as not to upset him. During one of his visits the margarine fell to the floor when she opened the fridge door, so after that she would pretend to fence it in with other foods to prevent its escaping again. When my father became sick with cancer, she was constantly at his side. After he died, she continued to write articles and edit books, but she also took on the large task of collecting a number of my father’s articles into one volume, which became Essays on Canadian Economic History (1956), and of editing three of his books for republication. This often involved working into the text ideas that her husband had noted (almost illegibly, in his tiny writing) in the margins of his books and articles.

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In 1959, my mother was asked to represent Canada at an international conference on education in Oxford, England. The conference had almost begun when people realized that the Canadians who had been sent to it were all men. There was an uproar among women’s groups, who pointed out that this was shameful, particularly given how vital women were in the education of young Canadians. When Prime Minister Diefenbaker was finally asked to name a woman to be sent over to the conference post haste, he chose my mother. During the early 1960s she continued to work as the dean of women at University College, University of Toronto, coming to Waterloo by train every second weekend to spend time with my husband and me and our children, Hugh, Ian, and Mary. Some summers she took trips with Swan Tours, which featured on-board lectures about the ancient history of the parts of Europe they visited. Later I would sit beside her on her bed while she explained to me with postcards all the wonderful sights she had seen. At Christmas 1971, long after she had retired, our family was visiting my mother in Toronto. Although she was anxious to keep on with her writing, she had been unable to find a suitable subject. She told me that she really had no desire to live any longer, although she was only seventy-two. She died suddenly of a stroke two weeks later. I was as devastated by this as I had been by the death of my father, but at least I knew that she would have wanted to go that way.

Parental influences I have been greatly influenced by my parents’ academic interests and have spent my whole life reading, researching, and writing: from an early age I made out a three-by-five-inch filing card for each book I read, including the month I read it as well as the title, author, publisher, date of publication, and maybe a comment. I now have many thousands of such cards, which ensure I never

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read a book twice. To be happy, I have to be working on some goal, so fortunately I have lots of energy. For a time, when I was a teenager, this goal was to be the best in tennis. As an adult, it has been to accomplish some project or to finish an article or book I am writing. Someone asking me to “Sit down for a while and relax” or “Please come for a visit and we can do nothing for the whole week!” suggests a nightmare. By their work ethic, my parents showed me that writing and scholarship was what life was all about. What has seemed strange to me is not that I work so hard but that most other people lead completely different types of lives. My siblings were also influenced by our parents and all of them earned postgraduate university degrees. My brother Donald, who died in 1988, became a professor at Geneseo State College in New York; my brother Hugh was a professor and administrator at Ryerson University in Toronto; and my sister’s son, Kip Cates, is a professor at Tottori University in Japan. As this book details, I also wanted to be a professor, which was very difficult for a woman at that time. Neither of my parents drank very much, which was, in retrospect, a boon for me as I followed their lead. I had my first drink, an awful-tasting beer, on the day I turned twenty-one, which made it legal. I also drank on the ship sailing to Africa, because this is what people did in the evening. However, I soon realized that the more I drank, the more foggy my mind became, a feeling I disliked, so I stopped drinking for the rest of my life, which means that after an evening outing, I am always up for reading, writing, and learning the next morning, and never hungover. My mother was important for me also in that, unlike the mothers of my friends, she kept her domestic chores to a minimum. Their houses were always immaculate when I visited, while mine invariably had “that lived-in look,” as she wrote in a short story. As an adult, I have managed to reduce housework even farther, feeling that “A clean house can mean a wasted life,” as the saying goes. Thanks, Mum. Nor did my mother wear trendy clothes or much makeup, a fashion statement (of sorts) that I have always meticulously 18

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carried on. To my mind, time choosing clothes and applying makeup is wasted. When I was nine years old and scoffing at my fifteen-year-old sister for her use of lipstick, she bet me a nickel that I would be wearing it by the time I was her age. She lost the bet six years later and I had money to buy an ice cream cone to celebrate! I always wore a skirt to university rather than slacks, though, as I felt this honoured the place I loved so much. In a way, my mode of operation has been similar to the feat of a long-distance runner. I am always involved in a topic of my choice, but every few years I have been lucky to find someone else interested in that same topic, just as someone may race beside a distance runner for a mile or two before dropping away. This person and I work closely on a joint project for a few months or years before our interests diverge and we again go our separate ways. This has resulted in many friendships and a number of very satisfying multi-authored enterprises. Co-authoring an article or book is paradise: sending missives back and forth every day or two to decide on the exact wording of a paragraph, exulting in the discovery of a pertinent reference once thought lost, or railing against the apparent irrationalities of publishers.

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.2. Giraffe research in Africa

One summer, when I was a toddler, my mother took me with her to Chicago to see her parents. Together we visited the Brookfield Zoo and stopped to admire the giraffe. I was entranced! I am not sure what thrilled me most – their great height, their long neck and legs, their large dark eyes, or all of these. I only knew that I was smitten. From then on I wanted to know more and more about this wonderful creature. My family and friends were amused by this obsession. For Christmas my father always gave me a book about animals, although not about giraffe because there was no such thing. When I had to give a talk at school, my friends sat quietly while I expounded on the giraffe’s long neck and spotted coat, holding up crayoned pictures I had made to captivate them. Thanks, Book of Knowledge. I began attending the University of Toronto in 1951. Of course I enrolled in biology. My goal was to earn my degree, then spend a year in Africa studying giraffe. After that I would worry about a job. To save money for the trip, in the summers I worked as a gofer at the Banting and Best Medical Building or cleaned mammal skulls for the Royal Ontario Museum permanent collection. During my senior years, I was also a lab demonstrator for

younger students, which proved to be more lucrative than my other jobs. In addition, I won a $500 Gold Medalist scholarship upon graduation. I learned a huge amount during my undergraduate years, but in the 1950s there was no academic discipline called Animal Behaviour. I wanted to know how giraffe lived their lives, but none of the few scientific reports on this species, or virtually any other, focused on this. Articles on giraffe usually dealt with the anatomy of dead animals or with negligible differences between the various recognized races. In my fourth and final year, it was time to organize the trip to Africa that I had looked forward to for so long. I had two areas of concern. The first was where to go in Africa: I needed to live somewhere near wild giraffe so I could watch them every day. I wrote letters to any possible contact and to Departments of Wildlife in African countries where giraffe lived, hoping that at least one would help me reach my goal. All were answered politely, but none offered help. After I noted comments such as “a lone woman might have problems in this reserve,” I began to sign myself as A. Innis so I would seem to be a man. Still no luck. The most encouraging respondent was Louis Leakey in Nairobi, Kenya, who, in 1960, would facilitate Jane Goodall’s research into chimpanzee behaviour. He sent me three letters detailing his efforts on my behalf and the problems involved, but in the end found no useful giraffe possibilities. (Many years later I was able to repay his kindness when he asked me to review the sections on giraffe in his book Animals of East Africa.) My second area of concern was what to do when I got to the giraffe. I asked my professors about this, but they were of little help. No one they knew had actually studied the behaviour of a species in the wild. Were there books I should read to help me? The only one they could recommend was Fraser Darling’s A Herd of Red Deer, a pioneering study of deer living in the Scottish Highlands, written twenty years earlier. By mid-summer of 1955 I still had no leads for researching giraffe in Africa. Not knowing what else to do, I enrolled for a master’s degree in genetics, a subject I adored. In my genetics 22

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course in 1953 our euphoric professor had stridden into the classroom to announce that the structure of dna had just been discovered. How amazing is that? My own work was less exalted – my thesis turned out to be a study of whether different strains of baby mice thrived differently if different foods were given to their mothers. They did. Each day I weighed scores of babies, picking each one carefully out of one of the wire cages lining an attic room in the old zoology building. At times I wished I hadn’t talked about going to Africa so much, because my friends were heartily amused at my preoccupation with mice instead of giraffe. Although he was pleased with my final thesis, which merited a master’s degree, my supervisor, geneticist Len Butler, did not suggest that I publish my results. I have since wondered why not. Were my results, although accurate, not worth much? Did he assume a woman would never have a career in science? Did he worry that the work of a female scientist would not be treated fairly? Eventually I sent my results to the Canadian Journal of Zoology, which agreed to publish them. However, the editor noted that I had prepared the manuscript and graphs incorrectly, and this so upset me that I never did submit my work for final publication. Looking back, with the clarity of hindsight, I wonder how I could have been so sensitive and so silly. Early in 1956 Rufus Churcher came from Africa to earn his PhD at the University of Toronto – he later become a professor there – and my luck changed. He told me of two professors, Griff and Jakes Ewer, who taught at Rhodes University in South Africa. While visiting a reserve in the province of Natal, Griff had met a giraffe, Shorty, who had been introduced there from a herd in the Transvaal, further north. She knew a ranch manager, Alexander Matthew, who might be willing to have a student come to watch the ninety-five giraffe on his 20,000-acre citrus and cattle ranch near the Kruger National Park in South Africa. I was euphoric. I wrote to him immediately, signing my letter A. Innis, and he wrote back cordially, stating that I could board with the cowhands and spend each day in the field with the giraffe. I excitedly shared this amazing news with my mother. “I can stay at this place, Fleur de Lys Ranch, while I watch giraffe every GIrAffe reSeArCH In AfrICA

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day!” I announced. After my father’s death four years earlier, she had become dean of women at University College, where she had advised many confused young people. She was cynical about the whole endeavour: “But he obviously thinks you’re a man!” she objected. “Well, I can sort that out later,” I retorted airily. Thanks to my savings, my gold medal money, and the kindness of my worried mother, I now had $2,000, which I trusted would last me a year in Africa. I immediately booked passage on an ocean liner for England – planes were far too expensive in those days for any but the elite. My mother waved good-bye at Union Station as I departed. I was wearing a knapsack and carrying a suitcase which held three skirts and three blouses; later I would buy long pants for work in the field. In London, I mailed a letter to Mr Matthew stating that I was thrilled to be on my way to visit his ranch, this time signing my name as Anne. Subtle, I thought, since he would know I was not a man after all. I gave the Ewers’ home as my return address, since that was where I would stay on landing in Africa. From England I sailed south for two weeks around Cape Town to Port Elizabeth. There were two black people on the liner among hundreds of whites, but I was the only person to speak to them. Josiah Chinamano was also reading books about Africa, so we traded them and discussed them at length, to the annoyance of the other passengers, who knew that white people, especially white women, should not talk to black people. Josiah was returning from teaching in England to rejoin his family in Southern Rhodesia. Over the years, Josiah and I kept in touch by mail. Once when he came to North America, he stayed with us for a weekend. A church official, on meeting him, asked him to come on Sunday to speak at his church, which Josiah agreed to do. I was pleased, but the elder insisted that it must be my husband, Ian, who accompanied him to the service, not me, even though Josiah was my friend. A woman wasn’t wanted, so I stayed home. There were two types of discrimination at play here: racism (toward Josiah) and sexism (toward me). Later, Josiah wrote asking if we could support one of his daughters for 24

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a year while she studied to be a nurse in Kitchener, Ontario. We did not feel we could manage a fourth child at the time, so this did not happen. I wish we had agreed, though, because the end of his life was horrific: he was sent to jail by the British for fighting against apartheid as second in command to Joshua Nkomo of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (zapu Party). Eventually their party lost to that of Robert Mugabe who became, and remains, head of Zimbabwe. On arrival at Port Elizabeth, Jakes met me at the liner and drove me to Grahamstown, where he taught at Rhodes University. There, the Ewers kindly arranged to put me up before I departed for giraffe land. “How will you get to the ranch?” Jakes asked me as the family and I were eating dinner on my second day on dry land. “The Transvaal is a thousand miles away.” “Train,” I replied. “Or bus,” I added, seeing the amused look on his face. “There are no trains or buses going there. You’ll have to buy a car.” So I scoured the ads in the local newspaper and soon bought a small, second-hand Ford Prefect. It cost $200, which seemed reasonable because fifty miles an hour was its top speed and the leaky radiator needed to be replenished with water every twenty minutes of driving. Our family had never had a car while I was growing up, so this was a thrill for me. I called her Camelo, short for the giraffe’s scientific name, Camelopardalis. Over the next many months I would spend huge lengths of time inside this car, as she acted as my blind: I could observe giraffe without them noticing or being disturbed by my presence. Some days later, again over dinner at the Ewers’ house, I opened a response from Mr Matthew. “You can’t come,” it said in effect. “I am a fifty-seven-year-old man whose wife is now in America organizing our daughter’s stay there. It wouldn’t be proper for you to live in my house without a chaperone.” I was baffled and distraught. Surely a fifty-seven-year-old man was too old to be a threat to anyone? “What shall I do?” I wailed to the others at the table. Jakes and Griff probably GIrAffe reSeArCH In AfrICA

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exchanged amused glances at the thought that sex stops by age fifty-seven. “You’ll have to write again,” Griff offered. “There must be a hospital near the ranch; perhaps you could stay there? Maybe you could take a tent and camp out? There has to be a way when you have come so far.” A week later, in response to my next letter, Mr Matthew relented and sent a telegram. I could come after all, since I was so keen. I set off at daybreak in my trusty Camelo to drive the 1,000 miles to Fleur de Lys Ranch in the eastern Transvaal, near the Kruger National Park. By pressing on from dawn to dusk, I planned to reach the ranch in two days. When night fell, I stopped at a small inn where I had a late dinner and an early breakfast, then carried on at my constant fifty mph speed. Near the end of the trip, when I was exhausted, the last eighty miles were miserable. I navigated unpaved washboard roads that made my dear Camelo shudder even when I drove slowly. A few miles from my destination, Camelo broke down completely. I did too, as I rolled to a stop in the middle of nowhere. By this time it was ten o’clock on a moonless night. Once I turned off the car’s headlights, the darkness was total. There was nothing but silence. I was terrified. I had seen no buildings or other cars for over an hour; this was truly the domain of lions and leopards, drunken men and adders – I had seen several of these snakes squashed on the road earlier in the day. The sensible thing would have been to lock the car doors and settle down for the night. I tried this, but my mind conjured up too many awful scenarios. After a minute or so, I grabbed my knapsack, locked the car, and started inching my way forward in the darkness. My heart pounded in terror for almost an hour until finally a car approached and I flagged it down. The vehicle was driven by the secretary of the ranch, who was out scouting for possible fires. “You must be the Canadian girl,” the driver said, and with these words I knew I was safe. A few minutes later, Mr Matthew drove up in his car. My dream of a lifetime was about to begin!

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Mr Matthew was very kind. He arranged for me to sleep in his daughters’ old room and insisted I use his movie camera and powerful binoculars. I ate meals with him and George Winner, the German man who oversaw the citrus crops, waited on by a male cook and a male “houseboy” who served the food and cleaned the house. Each day I drove to the giraffe to watch and note down their activities from dawn to dusk, with brief interludes back to the house for breakfast and lunch. Heaven! In return, to pay for my room and board, I typed some reports for Mr Matthew, occasionally drove an injured worker to the nearby clinic, and made a census of the kinds of leaves eaten by his cattle. I would gladly have done far more to repay him for his generosity, but he insisted my giraffe work was more important. How to proceed with my giraffe study? On my first day, 5 September 1956, Camelo and I visited the borehole where game came to drink. Seeing a male and a female giraffe some distance away, I walked slowly toward them, thrilled. They paced about, sometimes together and sometimes apart, but usually watching me. When I was twenty-five yards from them, the male cantered over to the nervous female and they stalked off side by side. Obviously, my being on foot had changed their behaviour, so from then on I remained inside Camelo whenever I was on giraffe watch. The giraffe had no problem ignoring my car once they had looked up, disturbed by its noise, and noted that it was parked and not a threat. Each day, stationed in Camelo, I wrote down the temperature, how far the group I had been watching the evening before had moved during the night, and everything each giraffe in my vision was doing every five minutes. This included chewing their cud, lying down, pacing about, or standing looking thoughtful. But browsing was the description I jotted down most often because a large animal can eat up to seventy-five pounds of leaves a day. Once, when the giraffe herd I was monitoring was far away on the opposite side of a wide grassy area, I exited Camelo to do ballet exercises beside her, using her handle as a barre; it was incredibly hot and cramped sitting inside the tiny car waiting

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for each five-minute interval to be up. However, one female giraffe was soon staring at what to her must have been an odd sight. Before long she was approaching slowly to figure out what was going on. Sadly, in the name of science, because I did not want anything I did to influence the animals in any way, I slid back into Camelo to spend more hours sweating over my clipboard. Giraffe are curious, I report later. When the giraffe departed, I tied yellow ribbons around the branches of the trees they fed on. Later, on a trip to Pretoria, I visited the museum there carrying samples from these beribboned trees to a botanist, who kindly identified thirty-two species. On one especially memorable day I saw a mother giraffe suckling her baby, and then one male mounting another after a sparring match. After the whole group had wandered out of sight, I rested under a tree thinking how lucky I was to be at Fleur de Lys. The chance of a lifetime! The sunlight glinted through the trees scattered around me. Then I noticed a group of seven giraffe coming from the opposite direction, heading slowly toward me as they browsed. When they were about thirty yards away, one, noticing me, stopped to stare. She didn’t snort to alert the others but instead gazed intently at this intruder. Gradually, the others noticed her posture and then my presence. They remained tense and immobile for perhaps five minutes, then drifted off. Had the first giraffe panicked and stampeded on seeing me, the other giraffe would have followed her, even if they did not know what had caused her behaviour. I wrote up this event along with every other one in my notebooks, which were eventually crammed with observations. On my first day at Fleur de Lys, Mr Matthew had told me I could stay for four months, to see how my work progressed. By Christmas he hadn’t mentioned my staying longer, so I left Fleur de Lys for several months to earn money as a typist in Dar es Salaam to help pay for the rest of my African stay. In my single room there I spent all my spare time, at least three hours each day, reorganizing the data I had collected into separate files, with a page or two of comments on subjects such as feeding, chewing cud, fighting, babies, fences, drinking, alarms, and pawing 28

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the ground. I had enough data to work out the average times of day of some activities (feeding, ruminating, resting, lying down, and fighting) and how they changed between September (in the winter) and December (in the spring). I also described the various other activities of the giraffe: suckling babies, sparring and mounting of males, serious battles between large males, and one rare male-female mating. I then made a rough draft of my scientific observations, including information I had read about earlier. A barrage of sightings, hundreds of hours sitting in my sweltering Camelo, scores of notations in my notebook, now all organized into an interesting and insightful document. I was pleased with what I had accomplished. I sent this draft to Griff Ewer who, as an eminent mammalogist, had offered to help me, but she wasn’t pleased. She wrote back emphasizing that when one did research, one reported on one’s own findings; one did not include other material except possibly for comparative purposes. Oddly, I had not understood that this was the convention for scientific papers, or perhaps that I was actually writing a scientific paper. I guess I thought I should collect everything known about giraffe behaviour on the theory that, since no one had bothered to study this species before my time, probably no one would do so in the future either. I spent two more months at Fleur de Lys in 1957, collecting further information, and then rewrote my results when back in Canada. My final report (Innis 1958) described such things as when, where, and how giraffe ate, drank, snoozed, chewed their cud, and interacted as a group. I had also been able to conduct a partial dissection of a large male that had been shot on the road near Fleur de Lys. I photographed some of the remains, but unfortunately, because all slides and film had to be sent away by mail to be processed, I had not thought earlier to photograph and identify each individual giraffe. Doing so would have given me more information about individual and social behaviour, the activities that interested me most. The trip by ship back to London was anticlimactic after my year’s excitement. I passed much of the time with Susan Wagi, a nurse who, with her baby, was sailing to meet her husband in GIrAffe reSeArCH In AfrICA

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London. She was the only black person on board, so completely without other friends. Every afternoon we strolled around the deck, with me holding her baby while asking questions about her life. The people we passed, all white, must have been torn about how to regard us; baby Vuyo was incredibly cute and deserved at least a smile, but a smile would have indicated that they approved of our friendship. Few of them smiled or talked to us which made me recall again the horror of racism. An exception was a young lawyer – Chris Hollenbach – who was an ardent South African Nationalist. I argued with him about the awful treatment of Blacks in South Africa, something he had not thought about before. Soon he was talking to Susan as an acquaintance – he had never before befriended a black person. Two years later, he wrote to give me the good news that, thanks mostly to me, he was now a Liberal Nationalist whose children would possibly be Liberals! I was delighted. The Zoological Society of London had published most of the few previous items devoted to giraffe in its Proceedings, so I sent my report to it. Director Harrison Matthews wrote back that my paper was “very much liked” and, after a few additions, would be accepted. When my detailed thirty-four-page paper on giraffe was published in 1958, the first of its kind for any African mammal, I exuberantly bought 175 copies to distribute to everyone who might be the least bit interested, which meant I had many scores of papers left over. Many recipients responded with congratulations, which was most satisfying. It felt wonderful to have had a dream and been able to accomplish it. Dr David Fowle, who, as a member of the Ontario Department of Lands and Forests, had led one of our summer field camps, wrote to me, “I well recall the amusement with which your announcement of your intention [to study giraffe in Africa] was greeted by your friends a few years ago. You now have the last laugh and in the distinguished company of Harrison Matthews too.” I have reread his comment many times since then, always with a smile. Shortly after arriving in England by ship from South Africa, I married Ian Ralph Dagg, a physicist and fellow tennis player

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who was working at the National Research Council in Ottawa; he was a wonderful man I had met while at the University of Toronto who had waited patiently for me to return from my giraffe adventures. Born in Winnipeg, he was the only child of two doting older parents, his mother a homemaker and his father a long-time railway employee. (His father had been asked, early on, if he would pay to have a train station further west named after him. He declined.) His father had died before I met Ian, but his mother often came to visit us in Waterloo, which was wonderful. She loved making meals and taking the children out for long walks, which greatly endeared her to me. Ian had studied physics at the University of Manitoba and then earned a master’s degree from Pennsylvania State University and a PhD from the University of Toronto. His specialty was infrared spectroscopy, which I didn’t understand, but we shared a love of tennis, badminton, and Scottish country dancing. Ian probably did not realize when we married that over the next thirty-five years I would be involved continually in animal research and feminist activities, but he was always supportive of me. Ian and I lived in Ottawa for the next two years where I translated several weighty journal articles about giraffe from French and German to English and gave a few radio talks on giraffe and Africa, including one about climbing Mt Kilimanjaro. I also took a course in hematology at the University of Ottawa, worked briefly at the Carleton University library, and taught physical education for a year at Elmwood School, which was for girls aged four to twenty. Other teachers there earned $3,000 a year, but my salary was only $2,000 because I lacked teacher training. The money was deposited in my husband’s bank account until I objected, when it was placed in an account in my name. In 1959 we moved to Waterloo, Ontario, where Ian had been hired as a physics professor at the new University of Waterloo. He was a little nervous about whether this new venture would fly – when he arrived by train from Ottawa for an interview, the taxi driver he hired to take him to the university had no idea where it was. When he did arrive on campus, there were only

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two buildings: physics and a partial chemistry edifice. The campus has since grown steadily, becoming one of the top universities in Canada, serving over 30,000 students. Before I left Fleur de Lys I had dried and packaged a number of leaves of the plants that giraffe either consumed or ignored and sent them, along with a sample of giraffe faeces, to my longsuffering mother in Toronto. Once settled at Waterloo, I had the help of the chemistry department in analyzing the content of the leaves. I had been told that animals often do not like the taste of tannin, but was unable to prove this from my samples, a conclusion I published in a short note (Dagg 1959). As for the faeces, they proved to be far more enigmatic than the leaves; I buried them in the backyard when no one was looking.

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.3. research, first Teaching, and earning a PhD

Settled into our rented apartment in Waterloo, now pregnant and with time on my hands, I decided to continue my research on giraffe. In my university days, professor Bruce Falls had told our class about an experiment with the robins that forage on lawns, sometimes running, sometimes hopping. Some researchers set up tiny hurdles in a field where robins abounded and found that the birds hopped over hurdles but ran when there were no obstructions. What fun – research where no animals were harmed! I loved remembering these busy birds, running and hopping on variable lawn surfaces. Why not analyze the footage of giraffe I had filmed in Africa? If robins’ movements were exciting, how much more exciting would giraffe be with their long legs and long neck? I decided to study giraffe gaits, analyzing each frame by threading strips of my 16mm film through a projector that Ian had arranged to hang over a card table so that the images focused on a white sheet of paper where I could trace them. I also obtained footage of a moving okapi (the giraffe’s only relative) from a zoo so that I could compare the gaits of these two species (Dagg 1960, 1962). The table was later made higher so that I could stand up

while tracing the features of each of hundreds of strides; this was because if I sat down one, or later both, of my small boys, Hugh and Ian, would scramble up onto my lap to “help.” Over the years I would spend many thousands of hours wrestling with this jerry-rigged equipment, producing results that a computer could now probably obtain in a day or two. Each giraffe tracing included both the leg positions of the animal and the position of the neck. Measuring the angle of the neck to the ground made it obvious that when a giraffe walks, its neck moves forward as its two left or two right legs do, giving impetus to its forward motion. Just before these two legs touch the ground again, the neck and head pull back to lessen the forward momentum. The neck therefore swings back and forth twice, like a pendulum, during each walking cycle. During a gallop, the neck and head swing even farther forward at the time that the fewest legs, or no legs, are on the ground, and arch farther back between these postures when the most legs are on the ground. This fast gait in giraffe has only one cycle, with the four legs hitting the ground in a rotary sequence. To a lesser extent, the heads of race horses move back and forth in the same way with each galloping stride. The position of the neck is even more important for a giraffe when it gets up after lying down, a feat that becomes more difficult as its weight increases and it ages. First, as it rests with its legs bent to either right or left of its torso, it draws its neck and head back so that it can lift its forequarter weight onto its “foreknees.” Then its neck swings far forward so that its hind hoofs can be set on the ground. After a pause in this awkward position, as if to get its breath or its balance, it shifts its neck back again to pull itself up onto its front hooves to a standing position. A giraffe drinks by simply lowering its head to the water, either with its legs splayed out or with them bent under its body. When it is finished, it stands up again. However, its timing is amazing. I had always imagined that it must lift its head slowly so that it wouldn’t faint from the change in blood pressure at its brain. No such thing. When it finishes drinking, it deftly swishes its head up to full height in less than two seconds. Its 34

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circulatory system is obviously highly sophisticated, as various physiologists have reported (cf. Mitchell et al. 2006, 2008). Giraffe had also learned to deal with modern developments. Fleur de Lys ranch was established after the Second World War, when bushveld land was divided into many large cattle paddocks surrounded by 4.4 foot wire fences. Giraffe, whose ancestors had lived there freely for eons, were then enclosed. At first, when moving from one feeding spot to another, the giraffe simply walked through the fences. Mr Matthew was in despair, afraid that they would have to be shot to stop this damage, which allowed cattle to escape. However, quite soon the giraffe learned to step over the fences. An individual would approach one, look down at the barrier, lift its neck straight up, then hoist its front legs over the top wire. It would then move forward with the wire under its belly, stretch its neck and head forward, and lift over its hind legs. The only downside was that a baby giraffe could not do this. One evening I watched a female at the ranch step over a fence into another paddock leaving her baby behind. She turned to wait for the youngster to follow her, but when it did not, she wandered off slowly. The next morning the pair was no longer there, but everyone figured that the baby would probably not survive. The film included other giraffe activities, too, as it had been cobbled together from the many feet I had shot in Fleur de Lys. I showed it in 1961 to the Annual General Meeting of the American Society of Mammalogy in Illinois. It was there that I felt like a true scientist for the first time, although the master of ceremonies, when introducing me, got all three of my names wrong, calling me Miss Annie Dog. Despite this, scores of men in suits listened intently to my talk as the film progressed. Some asked thoughtful questions. And at the end, after the clapping stopped, Dr Richard Van Gelder approached me to ask if I would write an article on giraffe gaits for the magazine Natural History. Thrilled at being so well acknowledged, I readily agreed. I would even be paid for my illustrated article “Giraffe Movement and the Neck.” In my new persona as a “real scientist,” I believed that other zoologists would take my work seriously from then on reSeArCH, fIrST TeACHInG, AnD eArnInG A PhD

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and that what I did mattered to the scientific community. I felt further validated when United Press International and Public Broadcasting wned paid me for my footage of a fight between two males for programs on giraffe. In the early 1960s I was hired to teach one course a year in anatomy and physiology at wlu (Waterloo Lutheran University then but now, in the pursuit of provincial funding, Wilfrid Laurier University) just up the street from our house. I loved teaching and was good at it, my salary rising from $1,000 the first year to $2,500 the third. “We were all so young then,” a former student from wlu told me recently. “We had a ball; it was as if we were all learning together. Because of your course I became a high school science teacher.” At the end of the third year I asked if I could teach two courses the next year. The other two members of the department, both men and full-time, thought this was a great idea. “Then I’ll be full-time like you,” I replied happily. “No, no,” they quickly back-tracked, quite upset. Two courses a year was fine for them, but not for me. “You’d still be part-time, of course,” they insisted. At that point I realized that I must have a PhD if I hoped to become a full-fledged professor like the two men. I needed to start a major research project for a PhD thesis so I could reach my goal. My thesis had to be in biology, of course, but could not involve any project away from home because of our children; in 1966 Hugh was six, Ian was four, and Mary was one. Nor, on principle, would I undertake any research that hurt animals. Why not carry on with my work on gaits, comparing the movements of large mammals, including many members of the deer and antelope families that, like giraffe, belonged to the infraorder Pecora? Using borrowed film I would show that the gaits of different species helped define them and postulate why these movements differed due to such things as weight, body proportions, and the environment. Earlier on I had tentatively thought of comparing the gaits of different breeds of dogs. Not only do they love to walk and run but they come in many sizes – large, tiny, thin, and fat. A friend offered to film dog types at a Kennel Club function, but she was 36

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used to shooting animals with a gun, and her films included only the forequarters of dogs, not their hind legs, which made her footage useless. The dog owners I met were also difficult to work with – they wouldn’t allow their dogs off leash so they could run, and they insisted on walking at their own speed rather than that of their dog. When I concocted a list of questions about gaits, only two dog owners bothered to reply and their answers were too general to be of use. I decided that, although fine in theory, research on dog locomotion was not feasible at the time. Instead, a comparison of the gaits of large mammals would be my subject. Fortunately, when I applied to the PhD program in biology at the University of Waterloo, Dr Anton de Vos, a wildlife expert, had just moved there from the University of Guelph. I explained to him that I wanted to do a comparative study of the gaits of ungulates and he agreed to supervise my thesis work. It turned out that, although he was very kind to help me, he knew little about giraffe or gaits. Often when I asked him for advice, he recommended that I talk to my husband, a physicist. And he soon moved on to a position elsewhere. In obtaining photographic material for my thesis, academics such as Milton Hildebrand at the University of California at Davis provided very helpful advice. I also begged, borrowed, and collected unwanted footage of 16 mm film from wildlife photographers such as Larry Linnard of Wildlife Travelogues. In the end, I had sufficient material to enable me to analyze and compare the gaits of American antelope, six species of cattlerelated animals, and nine species of deer. All of these could trot as well as gallop and although small, some gazelles (and cheetah) ran far faster than giraffe, at up to 100 km per hour. I traced the different gaits using the table and projector equipment while Mary, born in 1965, was sleeping and the boys playing quietly or napping. While nursing Mary, I read articles and scientific books for the various courses I was taking. At one point I noticed that I could save $1 on a film rental if I could show that I belonged to an academic institute. I put Mary into her stroller (the boys were at day care) and walked several reSeArCH, fIrST TeACHInG, AnD eArnInG A PhD

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kilometres to the biology department to ask about saving this money. The secretary responded in a snippy tone, stating that I wasn’t a faculty member and so could not claim the money. I always disliked her after that, but, thinking about it later, I realized her response probably represented the casual negativity toward women in science that then flourished at the university. I cried on the way home, feeling that no matter how hard I worked, my efforts were not even worth one miserable dollar. As a welcome diversion, in 1965 I was asked to take part in a weekly episode of the TV show To Tell the Truth. Ian and I had our way paid by train to New York, where we stayed at a fancy hotel. The program was organized so that I and two other women would each claim to be Anne Dagg. The well-known panellists Kitty Carlisle, Tom Poston, and Orson Bean would then ask us each various questions about giraffe. I had to tell the truth, but the other two, who knew little about the animal, made up their answers. The questions and answers went along smoothly until we came to tonsils. “How big are they?” one panellist demanded. I paused, thinking frantically, then said I did not know. “Oh, that gives it away,” my uncle told me he thought at the time. The other two women did not hesitate but quickly rattled off random figures. At the end of the half-hour, the panellists decided that one of the other women was the real Anne Dagg. We had each won a third of $1,000, the big prize! It seemed to me that the panellists should have been able to pick out the real Anne Dagg, because why would an imposter Anne Dagg admit she didn’t know something? In any case, it was lots of fun. And very lucrative for the time. It was a busy two years, as I was not only taking the required courses for the degree and researching and writing my thesis but looking after three young children, making all the meals for the family, and doing all the housework. (Unfortunately, thirty years later women scientists are still doing far more housework than are their working spouses [Schiebinger 1999].) The oral presentation of my thesis went well – I was used to giving lectures by this time – but the response of the all-male doctoral

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committee was disappointing. None of the men knew much about gaits, nor seemed to care about them. Questions became more and more general until they weren’t about gaits at all. I felt a huge letdown when the session was over, and wasn’t overly excited when I was told that I had been successful in earning my PhD. My first thought was relief that I would never again have to write an exam. My thesis topic produced interesting results, published in two papers (Dagg and de Vos 1968a, 1968b), one on slow gaits and one on fast. While walking, giraffe usually have their weight on their two right or their two left legs in turn; they are too heavy to become easily unbalanced. The walk of the related okapi, which I had also analyzed, is similar to that of giraffe but less extreme. Smaller ungulates tend to have walks that involve the support of diagonal legs at any one time rather than lateral legs as in the giraffe. Giraffe – as I had learned earlier – never trot, which involves diagonal legs moving together, but instead gallop when they want to go fast. In this gait the forequarters provide the main propulsion for each stride, with the legs set down in a rotary sequence, left front, right front, right hind, left hind (or vice versa). In galloping young giraffe, all legs may be off the ground at once, but this is not true for the heavy adults. Even so, adults have been clocked at 56 km per hour. As I was finishing my PhD in December 1966, my thesis supervisor alerted me to a part-time job teaching a one-term first-year course in zoology at the University of Guelph. I jumped at the opportunity. I would have enough time to prepare my notes, my neighbour offered to look after my children while I was away, and at the time I could reach the zoology building in Guelph in half an hour’s drive. I loved teaching there during the spring semester and would have continued had it been possible, but we were preparing to leave in the summer for Ian’s first sabbatical year, in Sydney, Australia.

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.4. Being a Professor: Teaching and research

With my PhD in hand, I now hoped to become a tenured professor like my father, my husband, and my brother. Why not? I had a respectable number of ten refereed published papers in top journals to my name and intended to add many more with further research. Ideal projects would have been to study the behaviour of giraffe and other wild animals, but at the time this was not possible. Jobs for biologists were practical – managing wildlife for the benefit of hunters and farmers, studying the pathology of wildlife diseases, and collecting mammals and birds from various parts of North America for study. Many of these jobs involved killing animals, something that horrified me. I had hoped to be able to teach in the Faculty of Science at the University of Waterloo, and had acted as a demonstrator there while earning my doctorate. Five other women with doctorates in science wanted the same opportunity. But the dean of science, Bill Pearson, told us that he did not hire women, no matter how talented; their place was in the family, raising children. Besides, we all had husbands, mostly professors, so obviously we did not need the money. This was a bitter blow to all of us. Fortunately, the University of Guelph Zoology Department had obviously valued my part-time teaching earlier because when

I returned to Waterloo in the summer of 1968, after our sabbatical in Australia, I was appointed a full-time assistant professor to begin work immediately. I was ecstatic, especially because my children were now old enough for day care and school. My job was to teach three courses – wildlife management (the professor who usually taught this was away on sabbatical), mammalogy, and a general first-year zoology course attended by eighty or more students – and to carry out a research program. For the management course, I had to frantically read articles on the various subjects to get up to speed for North American species. There was no relevant textbook, so this involved perusing many research papers before meeting with each class. I had been chosen to give the course because of my work with giraffe, but at that time management in South Africa meant fencing a large area, leaving the wild animals within to their own devices as long as they weren’t a nuisance, and killing individuals now and then to feed the African workers. The mammalogy course was much easier to organize. I decided that the class of thirty or so should concentrate on one or more families of mammals each week. The department had a large collection of skins and skulls of various species, under my jurisdiction now that I taught this course, so I brought suitable selections to each lecture or lab for the students to handle and observe. This seemed to work well, including as it did some rare groups that might not have been considered otherwise. The general zoology course was based on a textbook, which was helpful because the classes were large. Since it was a firstyear introductory course, students came from a variety of disciplines, including Arts. I met one of these students recently who remembered the course, and said that she had loved it: much better than chemistry, she thought, where they had spent their time copying down formulae. Several times I brought in a speaker, such as my brother Donald, who had studied farming methods in India for his PhD thesis. Nowadays professors at Canadian universities prepare an extensive syllabus for each of their courses on what subjects will be considered during each lecture or lab, what background work 42

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will be expected from each student, and how students’ marks will be calculated. By contrast, forty-five years ago a professor was left to his or her own devices about the material for each session. This was beneficial because subjects of special interest to a class could be studied in depth and students’ questions did not have to be cut off for lack of time. However, university students today do have a better idea of what they will be expected to learn. With research money available from the university, I decided to use some of it to concentrate on the wildlife around us in Guelph and Waterloo, since I was tied down with a family and unable to work farther afield. Little research had been done on animals living in cities, and what I learned could sometimes be included in my wildlife management course. During the summer of 1969, I hired two students and the three of us visited a total of 1,421 households in Waterloo, then a small city of 34,000 people. We asked the inhabitants what birds and mammals they had seen on their properties, noted the number of trees in the area and how near the property was to a rural or park area, and recorded whether the owners liked, disliked, or were neutral to each species. In addition, we asked if the householders gardened (if so, for example, they hated rabbits) or had a bird feeder and noted if their house was old or new and expensive or not. A cardinal is more likely to be spotted than a wren, so we gave each species a noticeability factor. Of the fifty-five birds or mammals mentioned, the black squirrel, rabbit, cardinal, and goldfinch were the most common. Most birds were liked, but many mammals were not, especially bats (although bats eat insects, 77% of respondents disliked them), skunks (66% negative), ground hogs, and muskrats (each 35% negative). A few householders were disconsolate at the changes that the rapid growth of the city had brought, mentioning increased construction, pollution of streams, recent use of pesticides, and the death of many elm trees. Two respondents were upbeat: one wrote that although birds left during the construction of buildings, they returned later on, while the other was pleased that he was seeing more birds as the trees on his lot grew bigger (Dagg 1970c). beinG a ProfeSSor

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There was huge interest in our research project, which opened up a new field of inquiry readily accessible to anyone interested in nature. For the next ten years at least, people wrote me from many cities and towns both within and outside Canada, sometimes asking for the questions I had used on my questionnaire so that they could compare their results with mine. I wrote up two further unpublished papers, “A mammal survey of an urban park” (Waterloo Park, which spread out beyond our backyard) and “Should wildlife be encouraged in urban areas?” Even the University of Guelph became excited at what I had opened up, holding a conference on the subject soon after I had been denied tenure and left its employ. Today it is great to have a benchmark of what animals once inhabited an area and which species therefore might be encouraged to return. I don’t like the thought of hunting, needless to say, but felt strongly that students should be trained and given the confidence to carry on their own research. To this end, if a student came to me with a project that excited him or her, I tried to facilitate their idea as much as possible. My first such student was Dale Whitelock, from the wildlife management course, with whom I often discussed why some people loved hunting and others didn’t. We arranged to carry out a survey of 220 Canadian male students at the university (which had previously been the Ontario Agricultural College, serving Ontario farm families). Female students were not included because few or none of them hunted. Of the respondents, 152 were hunters and 68 non-hunters (with 57% of these last noting that they hated the activity). The hunters were more likely than non-hunters to have been brought up in the country, to have older relatives who also hunted, and to fish. In general they hunted near their home, with a friend or alone, killing in about equal numbers pest species, upland game such as pheasants, migratory birds (which is illegal), predators, and game species such as deer. Only 1% listed meat as their sole reason for hunting while 2% were interested in obtaining a trophy animal (Dagg and Whitelock 1969). In the end I had done much more work on this project than Whitelock, so I put in 44

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place my principle that, when there was more than one person involved in a project, the person who had done the most work should be listed first in the authors of the research. I have always kept to this scheme, which prevents controversy. My next foray into research involved urine. I had been intrigued with flehmen in giraffe, behavior in which a male collects a female’s urine in his mouth to determine if she is in estrus. Could flehmen be important in the life of other mammals? In 1969 the Department of University Affairs granted me $1,000 to carry out further research on this behaviour. I imagined taking urine samples from a number of species at zoos and then having these analyzed so I could correlate the behaviour of males and females with the urine content. To see if this was feasible, I decided to work with the pigs that were kept on campus because of the university’s background as an agricultural college. I asked their keeper to let me know when females were in estrus so I could rush over and collect their urine. He was busy, though, and usually forgot. If he did remember, I had to somehow corral a male and put him with the female, which was not on the keeper’s agenda. Almost immediately I realized that this project was far more complex than I (or certainly the recalcitrant keeper) could manage. However, I did publish an article with a colleague on flehmen, which I had seen so often in Fleur de Lys male giraffe. Harrison Matthews had written me that this behaviour was common in giraffe at the London Zoo. We argued in our paper that the Jacobson’s organ in the male’s nasal cavity was not involved in flehmen for several reasons, but I won’t elaborate on these because later research showed that we were wrong. Again in connection with urine, I decided to carry out research on another species, a small one that would be easily controlled. A keen student, Doug Windsor, worked with me to produce a paper which, when published in Mammalia, would be called “Olfactory discrimination limits in gerbils” (Dagg and Windsor 1971a). Earlier studies had shown that house mice, deer mice, and rats could distinguish between the smells of urine from other species, but gerbils had not been studied. They live in beinG a ProfeSSor

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a dry habitat, so theoretically smell might be less important to them than in a more common humid environment. For the experiment, a gerbil was put into a T-box maze that allowed it to run down either an arm that contained gerbil urine, which the gerbils preferred, or an arm that contained either water or the urine of other species or of other gerbils. The prize for choosing the correct arm was a drop of water. The gerbils had no trouble differentiating gerbil urine from that of other species, or distinguishing between the odours of different individual gerbils. In a final test of olfactory ability, males were able to differentiate between the urine odours of different males even when the urine was diluted to one part in 10,000 parts water! This discovery was important, I suppose, but hardly earthshattering. And I anguished over the gerbils. Maybe they liked running up and down narrow corridors following their nose, but what if they hated it? That we had decided a drop of water was the ultimate prize made me uncomfortable. However, we soldiered on for one final related study of urine, we now being myself, Douglas Windsor, and Larry Bell, another student. During the early gerbil trials we had noticed that their sense of smell was less acute on days on which their bedding had not been changed; the smell of their own urine and faeces seemed to affect their subsequent behaviour. The final experiment involved putting small mammals of seven species in cages where in one corner there was dried urine of either their own or another species. Our hunch was supported, for these animals usually urinated in the marked corner rather than anywhere else in the cage. This result indicated the importance of keeping all equipment clean in every test involving olfactory sensitivity. We also found that keeping mice in visually isolated areas was terrible for them (Dagg, Bell & Windsor 1971). They jumped again and again to try to see out of their cages and pulled out hair from their backs. It upsets me even to write about such experiments. What possessed me to allow them to be carried out on sentient animals? I must have been influenced by the university mantra that animals did not matter as long as they were being used to produce scientific papers that would benefit the researchers and their university. 46

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I had spent so much time reading the literature about urine and what it means to animals of different species that after working on gerbils I decided to write a paper called “Secondary Uses of Urine” – the secondary uses being mostly communication via smell. Among the information were the following facts, with my analogies: • We keep track of friends and relatives by cellphone. A bush-baby or capuchin monkey leaves tracks of its movements by putting urine on its hands, which transfers its smell to the branches along which it travels. • We put up “Private property” signs around our real estate to keep out strangers. Animals such as lions, tigers, and hyenas indicate their territory by marking stones or vegetation around it with a spurt of urine, which tells other animals to keep away if they don’t want a fight. • When we go hiking, we sometimes put a marker on a tree to indicate our passing to friends following. Wolverines, white rhino, deer, etc. do something similar by leaving sprays of urine on protuberances to indicate to other animals their earlier presence. If they urinate on the ground, wolves, tigers, foxes, and pronghorn antelope may emphasize the urine by scratching beside it. Male wolves and dogs lift a hind leg to urinate, leaving a urine odour conveniently at nose height. (A urine mark usually elicits urination from an investigating animal, whose scent is then stronger because it is more recent, indicating competition as well as communication.) It seems certain that the scent of individual wolves communicates their sex, age, state of health, and emotional condition. A mark made by a male may be a negative indicator for other males of his species but may be positive for females; the odour of female dogs in heat, of course, attracts males from long distances away.

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• We might throw a stone into a tree to torment an animal there. Arboreal monkeys may urinate on human intruders below, in a similar safe display of aggression. • Urbane men sometimes wear a fragrance that becomes their personal statement. During the rutting season large mammals such as bison, elk, and moose often urinate as they lie in wallows, presumably also to enhance their individual masculine scent, which they then carry with them when they leave the wallow. Caribou and deer may urinate on their legs for the same reason. • One common behaviour in animals is not paralleled by men, thank goodness. By the use of flehmen, discussed earlier for giraffe, a male is able to assess if a female is near or in estrus and therefore willing to mate with him. This curious contortion of the lips and mouth, wherein the female’s urine scent is transferred to the male’s vomeronasal organ, occurs in many other species too, including cats, lions, tigers, elk, horse, antelope, buffalo, llama, and rhino. Animals also have non-communication uses for urine: • reindeer eat snow that has been laced with urine, presumably for the salt it contains. • some storks excrete dilute urine onto their legs for evaporative cooling during a hot day. • a female mouse’s pregnancy may terminate when she is subjected to the smell of a male other than the one who impregnated her. So the urine has reproductive significance. I sent my article to scientific journals and one editor declared it to be “quite fascinating” and another “very interesting,” but it 48

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was long, and none of the journals published review articles, so it never saw the light of day. I decided to carry out one last study at Guelph of animal movement, this time of swimming – a counterpart to my gait studies, although a negative one for the giraffe, which is one of the few animals that cannot swim: their build prevents sufficient buoyancy to keep their heads above water. Fortunately swimming would not upset other animals, I thought. I was helped again by Doug Windsor. To this end we put individuals of twenty-seven small species in a small tank of water, filmed their swimming efforts, and analyzed the footage to document their swimming ability over 1.2 metres or for up to one minute. The gaits of the different species varied dramatically. The larger adult animals, cat and skunk, swam using four legs alternately, as in the trot or dog paddle. The small animals with short tails also swam this way. The bulky Columbian ground squirrel also did this, but the Franklin’s ground squirrel, which is thinner with a relatively long tail, used only its hind legs. So did small long-tailed species such as house mice, brown rats, deer mice, gerbils, and jumping mice, presumably because their long tails weighed down their hind quarters. The rats turned out to be excellent swimmers, readily diving to see what was what at the bottom of the tank. The swimming abilities of animals depend on their age, experience, presence of hair and fat, and the water temperature (Dagg and Windsor 1972). Animals with thick coats are able swimmers because air trapped in their fur allows them to float high in the water. We left pelts of arctic hare, lynx, and polar bears in water for twenty-four hours, yet the leather base of the hides never became wet. The last animal that I had used for the swimming tests was a chinchilla, which a friend kindly loaned me for an hour in the name of science. When Bill Carrick, my friend and a well-known animal photographer, found this out, he was appalled. “How would you like to be picked up by a huge monster and dumped into cold water?” he scolded me. “It was only for a minute,” I tried to defend myself. beinG a ProfeSSor

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“The chinchilla doesn’t know that. She’d be flailing about for her life.” Indeed, she was a very poor swimmer, trying to hop in the water just as she hopped on land. It was fortunate she did not drown. I had returned her to her owner completely shaken. How could I have been so callous? My research on the swimming of mammals ended abruptly. I later became vehemently against all animal research, taking the side of animals themselves rather than that of inhumane human experimenters like I had been. In the future I would champion the stand that Bill had taken for the right of animals not to be harassed in senseless research. In the meantime, though, I had to keep publishing if I hoped to win tenure and a permanent job at the University of Guelph. I decided to do a non-experimental study of mammals in Canada that had been the subject of scientific research papers; this would fit in with my mandate of being involved with the mammalogy and wildlife management courses. To this end I hunted through fourteen well-known refereed journals and series for the past forty years, from 1931 to 1970, noting down what types of research had been done in each decade on which species. I grouped the 639 articles into a number of categories: types of species, involvement of provincial and federal governments, involvement of universities, number and status of authors, and kinds of research done. In each category, numbers increased with each decade, showing there was growing scientific interest in our wildlife. The most examined species were caribou (with fifty-seven papers), moose (forty), snowshoe hare (twenty-seven), beaver (twenty-five), and deer mouse (nineteen). Caribou and moose are important sources of meat in the north, snowshoe hares intrigued scientists because of their population cycles, which build up and crash every ten years, beaver have long been significant for their fur, and deer mice are useful for population studies of small mammals. In general, though, most species had hardly been studied at all, including the largely Canadian wolverine and the very common grey squirrel, which had one paper each (Dagg 1972).

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I updated this study in 1989 to determine what research had been carried out since my earlier paper. This time, on perusing eleven relevant biological journals, I found that in general the same species were still preferred. However, there were other trends: a dramatic rate of increase in the number of research papers, more authors affiliated with universities and fewer with governments, more research financed by gas and oil companies and ngos, more multi-authored articles, and more behavioural studies. The behaviour work was inspired by new methods, such as radio transmitters affixed to animals. Again, however, marine mammals got little attention, along with rabbits, bats, and insectivores (Dagg 1989). In my survey of the literature on wildlife, I had come across examples in which experts were actually using poisons in the environment to carry out their programs. In one study, insecticides, including ddt, were dumped into freshwater systems to see which would be effective in killing carp, declared an undesirable species. In another, the herbicide 2,4-D was sprayed from the air on plots where deer were present, because it killed plants that deer did not favour. This casual use of poison struck me as bizarre, so I wrote a short article on the subject for Probe, the magazine of Pollution Probe at the University of Waterloo, an organization that I supported. In the mammalogy course I gave each year, I wanted the students to have field experience, so I had the keeners set out live traps baited with peanut butter in the evening so they would know what types of small mammals came out at night – ones that they would never otherwise see. They admired each individual they captured, identified it, and then released it where it had been caught. I also had them collect road kills so we could study and dissect them in the laboratory. Eventually, a group of us decided to write a book, to be called Mammals of Waterloo and South Wellington Counties (Campbell and Dagg 1972), assisted by a $350 grant from the Zoology Department. The area to be covered included the cities

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of Waterloo, home to Craig Campbell and myself, and Guelph, where most of the students lived, especially Mary Gartshore, who provided splendid line drawings of each species considered, and Mike Dyer, who mapped the locations of individual animals. As a long-time local naturalist, Craig supplied most of the information for the book while I wrote most of the text. (Mary and Mike soon married and moved to Africa, where Mike studied bee-eater birds for his graduate work and Mary, rock-buntings. Mary has become a citizen scientist carrying out cutting-edge work with plants and animals. We remain good friends.) When our 130-page book was finished and in camera-ready form, Edwards Brothers in Ann Arbor, Michigan, printed 1,000 copies, charging $1,200; we then sold each copy for $3.50. We were all delighted with our offspring. The larger species each had two pages to themselves that featured Mary’s drawings of them and their tracks in snow, plus information on physical characteristics, habitat, and extensive remarks about the species in our area. At the back were Mary’s depictions of the droppings of various species, Mike’s maps, and a bibliography that included eighty references. When I was hired, the head of the Zoology Department had mentioned that I had a family and lived out of town, implying, correctly as it turned out, that I would be hired only for the short term. Foolishly, I did not see these factors as a problem. Despite these supposed deficits, I was on campus full-time, students’ comments on my teaching were very positive, and my list of publications was now longer than that of many tenured professors. But I was wrong to be complacent. In December 1971, after five years of teaching at the university, I was denied tenure. I was devastated. I had been working so hard, year after year, all to no avail. I asked a member of the all-male tenure committee if he had not been impressed with my list of research papers? He replied that it had not been made available to them. I was given no reason for the denial, but assumed that the department head did not want a woman with children who lived out of town to become a permanent faculty member. What a bitter pill to swallow! I contacted several newspapers, which publicized 52

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information about my demise as a professor, hoping that this might lead to other women being treated more fairly in the future. I was finally told by the department that I could teach for one more year and then perhaps be given tenure but, because the same men would still have comprised the tenure committee, I refused this offer. Soon after leaving the University of Guelph, I was thrilled to find that Wilfrid Laurier University was advertising a permanent position for a biologist. The campus was within easy walking distance of my house, which seemed too good to be true (which, as it turned out, it was). I took my curriculum vitae, naming my many papers along with a list of over 500 requests for reprints of them, my new book, and two nearly books to the member of the hiring committee who had earlier praised my teaching. Then I waited many months until I found out that a man had been hired. I soon learned that there had been no interview process at all: the committee had simply chosen one of their friends whose publishing record was much inferior to mine. The Ontario Human Rights Commission agreed to help me, as did the Ontario Ombudsman, both run by men, but neither effort came to anything. My fight, as a more than qualified woman who had not even been allowed an interview, ended with a court case featuring opposition lawyer John Sopinka, who would later serve on the Supreme Court. I lost. I also tried to obtain teaching jobs at both Western and York Universities, but without success. They say that for every door that closes, another opens. And that is what happened to me. I still found lots of work to do, as the next four chapters indicate. I completed several new projects on gaits that, I would like to think, added to the world’s knowledge. I produced the scientific book on giraffe that I had been thinking about for twenty years and began turning my attention to the environment, which led to two trips to study problems for camels in Mauritania. And I began to work on environmental concerns in Canada. (These four projects were often intertwined during my years of working on them, but I consider them in separate chapters here for ease of understanding.) beinG a ProfeSSor

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Some years later, in 1979, I had an epiphany that changed my life. For the first time I became fully aware of the huge extent of discrimination in the world. I already knew the horrors it had inflicted on the lives of my black friends Josiah Chinamano and Susan Wagi, but I had not appreciated how much most women suffered because of sexism. I myself had been fortunate – I had been able to achieve a fair amount and had not realized the full extent of sexual discrimination in the world. I describe my epiphany in chapter 9, and later my fights against other forms of discrimination, involving homosexuality and animal abuse.

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.5. Completing research on animal Gaits

When I again became a citizen scientist, I decided to carry on with my research into gaits. I was the forerunner in the field at the time, so why not take advantage of the fact that academic journals were willing to publish my articles on various types of locomotion? This research never hurt animals!

Kangaroo Gaits When I started full-time work at the University of Guelph in 1969, I had been allotted a budget of $7,000 to start my research program, a sum that, at the time, seemed to me a fortune, since I had always paid for my own research before. How to spend it? When I had been working with giraffe at Taronga Zoo in Australia, I had also used my super 8 camera to film the movements of a number of kangaroo species. It was the first time I heard about the tree kangaroo (at first I doubted such an animal could exist – a kangaroo in a tree?), so I was anxious to know how their gaits differed from those of the more common hopping varieties. With my funding I was able to pay for my former

student Doug Windsor to visit six zoos to collect more film footage of other species of kangaroos. Doug was able to use some of this research material for his master’s thesis. Our final analysis of the gaits of nineteen species of wallabies and kangaroos was the first of its kind (Windsor and Dagg 1971) and was published by the Journal of Zoology in London and also written up in a long article in Nature (anon. 1971). We identified four gaits: a slow progression (as when feeding), a walk, a quadrupedal bound, and a bipedal hop. Only the tree kangaroo used a walk similar to that of most mammals, with legs moving alternately; it enabled them to manoeuvre in trees where presumably they were safer from predators than they would have been on the ground. For all species the other gaits always involved the front and back legs moving together. Two tree kangaroo species and a wallaby used the primitive quadrupedal bound, with the two forefeet landing together followed by the two hind feet, while the more highly evolved, usually larger species that lived in open areas used the bipedal hop, which was much faster. Presumably it evolved directly from the quadrupedal bound perfected by animals in the rainforest where speed was less important.

Comparative Gaits of Mammals In 1973, I published “Gaits in mammals,” a general scientific article on this subject that involved reading vast numbers of journals dealing with a great variety of species, over one hundred in all, to discover their gaits, their habitats, and their anatomy. (My research did not include small mammals, such as voles and shrews, or little-known ones, such as tenrecs, whose gaits had not been described.) At the time, the subject of gaits was a mess. Researchers who had sometimes studied a particular species for years could not agree on how it moved: black bears were said to have, according to various experts, a walk, a running walk, a gallop, a trot, or a pace, none of which were explicitly defined. Experts used weasel words such as “trot-like run” or “semi-trotgallop.” Running usually means galloping for quadrupeds but 56

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has also been used to describe pacing, trotting, or bounding. The terms “rack” or “amble” were completely ambiguous. Based on my research in the literature, I was able to make some interesting generalizations: • Trotting animals are usually large but must have front and back legs of similar size with a straight, fairly rigid spine that is not too long (as in weasels) or too short (as in giraffe). When two legs support an animal, they are generally diagonal ones, such as front right and back left. Large animals such as moose, elk, caribou, eland, and waterbuck tend to trot more often than gallop; the trot is less tiring, more stable, and, if an animal has heavy horns or antlers, definitely less tiring because galloping requires that their heads be lifted higher at each stride than does trotting. Hippos can trot but are too heavy and inflexible to gallop. • Animals that pace are large and rare. They have a body conformation similar to those that trot, but the gait is less stable because two left and two right legs support the animal sequentially. The pace is present in the camel, which lives on flat open areas, in horses that have a recessive pacing gene, and in many large dogs. • Hopping mammals have large hind legs with long and heavy or tufted tails as a counterbalance. They can be large (kangaroos) or small (kangaroo mice), but all are herbivorous and usually live in flat areas. Large kangaroos can hop over 40 mph. • Some animals walk or run on two legs, such as ourselves and a few other primates. Light-weight monkeys may run with their arms raised above their heads, so that their centre of gravity runs down through their body.

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• Stotting mammals, which include various antelope, deer, and gazelles, progress by leaping into the air and landing on all four legs, a gait slower than the gallop but effective in climbing hills or changing direction. Social animals who use it are readily seen by their pals (especially if they have a distinctive rump or tail), may make a distinctive noise when landing, thus attracting attention, and may deposit scent on the ground from glands in the feet. After completing this paper, I was later able to film camels while trekking in Mauritania (chapter 8). I found that they had a lateral type of walk like giraffe, with the two left and two right legs moving forward almost together (Dagg 1974a). However, unlike giraffe, they have three gaits, walk, pace, and gallop: in the pace they move the legs as in the walk but much faster and in complete synchrony, like a pacing horse. This lateral type of gait is suitable in open areas where there is little danger of an individual being surprised by a predator. By contrast, a forest animal such as a deer has, in effect, diagonal gaits, which are much more stable and provide the balance necessary to pause at any time to listen or watch for possible danger.

Running, Walking and Jumping – My first British Book In February 1975, I had been thrilled to receive a letter from the biological editor of the Wykeham Science Series asking if I would be willing to write a whole book about gaits. W.B. Yapp, who had read my paper on mammalian gaits, had found it interesting and believed that senior students would be stimulated by the subject, especially because it combined elements of biology and physics which could also be discussed for athletics. The Wykeham Science Series had been founded to fill a gap in the range of literature available to students in their first or second year of university. The aim of each book was to stimulate and extend their interests beyond what they would be taught in their classes so

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each manuscript was critiqued before publication by an experienced schoolmaster (sic). In August 1975, before leaving via ship for Australia for my husband’s second sabbatical in Brisbane, I made a list of topics that I wanted to include in the book and collected as many relevant scientific papers as possible so that I could work during the month-long voyage – we had to go around Africa from London because the Suez Canal had been closed to shipping. When I had finished a first draft, I sent it by post to Anne James, my “co-author,” a schoolteacher at the Girls Grammar School in York, England, who, I had been told by the editor, “although married, is still teaching full time.” She replied in a handwritten letter along with eight handwritten pages of good suggestions for the book, noting that “I am my own secretary and not very handy with the typewriter” – such communication sounds very outdated in the computer age! Next, there arrived four typed pages of comments on the manuscript by physicist G.R. Noakes, who noted that we must be rigidly correct. For example “deer” to British readers are not forest animals, as I had indicated, but more likely red deer living on the moors of Scotland, and our North American rabbit is not the same as the English rabbit. In addition, I had not analyzed angles of joints between leg bones as an animal moved, as a physicist would have done. To me he wrote that my manuscript was “excellent,” but, in an aside not meant for me to see, he noted to a colleague that it was “good” but with “poor physics” which he hoped to help correct. He noted “One would have thought that as she writes from a physics department [letters were being sent care of my husband at the university] she could have got help, but perhaps Queensland does nothing but split atoms and knows nothing of Newtonian mechanics.” Ian was helpful, and so was Dr J. Cheney, the scientific editor of the press, who offered a final few corrections. The book had been over two years in production when it was published (Dagg 1977c), but the input by scientists to make it as good as possible greatly impressed me. It sold well, especially in Britain, going out of print by 1988.

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Walking Gaits of Large Mammals My final work on mammal gaits was a comparison of the walk of many large quadrupeds (Dagg 1979). For this research, I filmed mammals at fourteen different zoos and borrowed footage on the walking gaits of unhurried mammals of twenty-seven species (thirty-six types in total, including males, females, and/or young). At the Winnipeg Zoo the very young, inexperienced keeper asked me to follow him into the bison cage, where the male bison was most unhappy about our arrival. For what seemed a long while, he kept the two of us huddled behind a central planting, knowing that if we made a race for the door he could certainly get there first. I remember distinctly thinking that it really is best to film all animals from outside their quarters, which I did from then on. Using all the film I had collected, between 8 and 273 strides per species, I analyzed their gaits using the walk pattern method I had developed for my PhD thesis. For my thesis I had assumed that the lateral walking gait of the giraffe was an unusual one – that it was the animal’s large size that made it able to balance first on two left and then on two right legs during each walking stride. I was wrong. Almost all the animals I studied for this paper, including bear, lion, hyena, llama, bison, zebra, tapir, rhino, and elephant, had similar lateral walks. So lateral leg supports during the walk are the typical condition for large mammals, exceptions being deer, which live in forested areas and presumably have a diagonal gait because it enables them to stop at any time in response to sudden danger, and the hippo. This heavy rotund animal has legs set less directly under its body than other species. It never balanced on two lateral legs during its walk but was supported on two diagonal legs about one-quarter of the time. In general, the slower the quadrupedal walk, the greater need for stability; at slow speeds all the mammals studied spent more time on more legs, such as three instead of two and sometimes four instead of three. When these animals were supported by three legs during their walk, it was a front leg that was lifted 60

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more often than a hind leg, indicating that the hindquarters give more support than the forequarters. Should the ground be uneven, having the front leg in the air more often would be useful for an individual as it moves. Young animals, who needed more stability than their parents, spent more time with more legs on the ground. But sometimes you can know too much. Whenever I visit an art museum, for example, I am upset if an animal is depicted moving forward with its legs doing impossible things. If an animal is walking forward, its hind legs have to move before its front legs do. And horses racing at top speed never have their front and back legs spread widely apart. Such inaccuracies are much less likely to occur now that animal gaits can be captured on film, but some illustrated figures in books still get it wrong. A friend once asked me why I found things such as wrong gaits so upsetting. They tell us something about evolution and an individual’s shape, of course, she said, but who really cares? This question made me stop and think. It must be that, unlike in the arts where imagination is lauded, in science all published data have to be accurate. Later scientists will count on this and be able to build on your information, knowing it to be correct. (Although it turns out this is not how all scientists think, apparently, as in many studies, in their anxiety to have their papers published, researchers have recently fudged their results to make them more compelling [Lam 2015].)

Gaits of the Silver Gull and Twenty-five Other Birds On Ian’s first sabbatical I had occupied my days with toddler Mary, largely in the Taronga Zoo of Sydney. On our second one, this time in Brisbane, I was writing my book Running, Walking and Jumping. On our third sabbatical, in 1982–83, again in Brisbane, I was at loose ends. How should I carry on research that interested me? Ian was at the University of Queensland, Mary was doing correspondence courses from Ontario, and our COMPLeTInG reSeArCH On AnIMAL GAITS

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two boys were old enough to stay studying at home in Waterloo, so I had time on my hands. I decided to do an analysis of the walking gaits of birds, especially the silver gull that is common in northeastern Australia. Various researchers had focused on bird flight but not on their terrestrial locomotion. For this research I filmed 318 steps of twenty-two silver gulls (Larus novaehollandiae) on flat ground as well as measuring steps per second for large birds. For a walk, each gull swung its bent back leg forward, which straightened at the tibiotarsustarsometatarsus joint when it hit the ground. When this leg was the bird’s sole support under its body this joint had an angle of about 145 degrees, which increased again as the leg pushed off from the ground. In contrast, when humans walk the leg is straighter when it bears the weight of the full body, but, as the weight shifts forward, the knee bends forward (Dagg 1977a). When the giraffe walks, it moves its head backward and forward with each forward stride, and while many birds do this, many do not, which is interesting. On compiling a list of Australian birds that I filmed or watched, twenty-eight species head-bobbed by correlating their head movements with those of their legs, while twenty-one species had heads that remained steady during each walking or running stride. My films showed that the ostrich bobbed its head as it walked, but the emu and rhea, which have similar shapes, seemed not to. On comparing the birds that did and did not bob their heads, those that did not often lived near water, had a relatively erect posture, and often did little walking (such as terns). Birds that were closely related, such as doves and pigeons, had the same movements – bobbing, in this case. Many of the birds in this research were filmed on Moreton Island, just off the coast opposite Brisbane, which has flat areas of grass and sand where various species walk about. I wanted to know more about this restful place, which our family and other city folk sometimes visited on a day-trip, but could find little information. I asked the owners of the resort there, Tangalooma, if they would be interested in having me produce a guide book

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about the island. They agreed, so I read up on its history, which included the first aboriginal inhabitants and a description of a later whaling station on whose roof Ian and I played tennis. Most of the fifty-eight-page booklet I wrote described the sand hill down which Mary tobogganed as well as plants, birds, and an assortment of sea creatures, often with line drawings so that different species could be identified. I was paid a percentage of the price of books sold, which eventually, years later, totalled over $5,000. It proved to be a most interesting and worthwhile endeavour (Dagg 1986c).

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.6. first Scientific Book on Giraffe!

Since my university days I had thought about writing the first scientific book on giraffe. At that time I had used the libraries of the University of Toronto and the Royal Ontario Museum to collect virtually everything written about this species, translating relevant articles from French and German to English if necessary. Using the limited literature on giraffe, I had noted that male skulls were thought to be heavier than female skulls. To test this out, I visited several museums (on one occasion with my mother accompanying me), weighed the giraffe skulls in their collections, and found that it was indeed the case. Skulls of females (including lower jaws) averaged 3.5 kg while those of males averaged 9.9 kg (Dagg 1965). Male skulls are larger and much sturdier because they are used as weapons for hitting other males when they are sparring or involved in dominance combats. I wrote up this finding in 1965, the year my daughter Mary was born. (Later on, when I worked at the University of Guelph, I found that aquatic and semi-aquatic mammals such as otters seemed to have relatively heavy skulls too, perhaps to enable them to stay under water for long periods of time? I recorded my observations in a short paper that never found a publisher.)

To document the distribution, numbers, and races of giraffe in Africa, in 1961 I had written to Department of Wildlife officials in every country known to harbour this species, all of whom replied, although they offered few data. The eighteen responses contained estimates of giraffe populations by a game department official or someone interested in wildlife, because no one was actively studying giraffe at that time. There was no way of assessing the accuracy of these numbers. Scattered mentions of giraffe from books about Africa written by missionaries, explorers, hunters, or colonialists completed my report, which was published in two articles on the distribution and subspeciation of giraffe (Dagg 1962b,c). (In 1971, when the scientific book on giraffe was finally becoming a reality, I wrote again to countries containing giraffe. Thirteen replied. Sadly, three countries that had possessed giraffe ten years earlier – Senegal, Nigeria, and Angola – no longer had them.) The few scientific articles I had found were either reports on various body parts of giraffe that had been dissected after their deaths in European zoos – the presence or absence of a gallbladder was one contentious subject at the time – or described possible subspecies (races), because explorers had come across giraffe in nine separate areas of Africa. In 1971, I published, with Frank Ansell, a wildlife specialist for the Zambian government, a proposal for the rejection of a name given to a stuffed giraffe shot by an American and once exhibited at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia (Ansell and Dagg 1971). The name chosen by a Mr Rhoads, and accepted by taxonomists in 1896, was Giraffa camelopardalis australis Rhoads. The word “austral” means southern, so although this animal was described as having dark spots which were “large, sharply defined, and only separated from each other by narrow pale lines,” a description that sounds exactly like the spotting of the reticulated giraffe in Kenya, it was accepted as a new subspecies since it supposedly came from southern Africa. After all, no giraffe in that area looked like that. (At the time, little was known about animals in central Africa, so “northern giraffe” referred to animals from Kenya northward and “southern giraffe” to those from South 66

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Africa.) When we went into the history of the giraffe exhibited in Philadelphia, though, we found that actually it had been shot near Lake Rudolph in Kenya. Rhoads must have called the giraffe “southern” because it came from the southern part of the range of reticulata, rather than the southern part of Africa. Of course this would not have mattered in the grand scheme of things in the taxonomic world, but the reticulated race of giraffe was not named as such by de Winton until 1899. According to the rules of priority, if the subspecific name australis from 1896 was not rejected, then the subspecific name reticulata would be invalid because they referred to the same race. Because the word reticulata in connection with giraffe had been in use since at least 1863, the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature agreed with us that the name australis should be rejected.

Australian Giraffe I had been leery about spending Ian’s first sabbatical, 1967–68, in Australia. How could I learn much about giraffe and/or foster my own career there? But then we realized we could live two blocks away from the Taronga Zoo. This meant that each day, while Ian took a ferry to the University of Sydney to research the intricacies of infrared spectroscopy, I could spend hours with the eighteen giraffe housed in a large enclosure with several barns, all overlooking the Sydney Harbour. After sending the boys off to Infants’ School by bus each morning, I pushed Mary in her stroller down to the Taronga Zoo. She was a toddler by this time, so I had to keep constant watch on her, but despite this challenge I was able to accomplish three projects during the year: a) identifying the preferred temperatures not only of giraffe but of various zoo animals, b) recording tactile encounters between the eighteen members of the giraffe herd, and c) preparing a careful description of the external features of giraffe. More fodder for the future book on giraffe! Juggling parenting responsibilities with my work proved to be easier than one might expect. By catering to Mary’s needs fIrST SCIenTIfIC BOOK On GIrAffe!

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and her fascination with animals, I was soon able to instigate my “preferred temperature” research (Dagg 1970a). This involved a complete tour of the zoo on each sunny day with Mary sometimes walking and sometimes riding in her stroller. I was able to chat away with my daughter while also recording temperatures and noting the number and position of the many animals. The highest air temperature in January was 37 degrees C and the lowest in June, 12 degrees. Each of the twenty-nine species we visited had an unheated paddock of its own, with buildings for shelter from the sun if the inmates were too hot, and open sunny areas where they could wander as they wished. Each day I noted how many individuals in each paddock were present in shady areas and therefore subject to the air temperature, and how many were in the hotter sunny areas. This research worked well, although three species – tree kangaroos, skunks, and otters – were recalcitrant, never venturing into the open. The animals who spent most time in the sunlight were all large – horses, zebras, camels, and giraffe, as were those that preferred the sun to a somewhat lesser extent – wildebeest, rhinoceros, and eland. If one has a large mass, it takes a long time to heat up; as well, some of these animals have evolved mechanisms to withstand heat and retain water in their bodies. Giraffe, camel, and eland raise their body temperatures in hot weather, which reduces or eliminates their need to sweat. I published my results in a zoo magazine, although they proved to be of more interest to physiologists. The second “tactile encounters of giraffe” project was more difficult to carry out. It required me to sit beside the giraffe paddock and note down whenever one giraffe touched another. Easy in theory, but difficult when the human you are minding gets bored, which was all too often. Once, when two giraffe were about to mate, I gave Mary my wallet to rummage in to placate her so she would not run off. Mary remained safe but, sad to say, my driver’s licence was never seen again. However, over five months I recorded fifty-seven hours’ worth of activity, which contained 1,447 encounters when two giraffe had physical contact (Dagg 1970b). 68

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Most commonly one animal nosed, rubbed, or licked another in a companionable way, the two males in their prime being the most active. They often headed toward a female to collect her urine in their mouths to determine if she might be in estrus and therefore willing to mate, a male activity called flehmen. I was the first to describe this frequent activity of male giraffe and other species for animals in the wild. The three males sometimes sparred, hitting each other with their heads as they would have in the wild, but never fiercely. They did gang up on an eleven-year-old female named Cheeky, though, attacks of a kind (a male hitting a female) that had never been reported before. She had never borne a calf, so perhaps she had some reproductive abnormality that annoyed the males? Feisty Cheeky hit back at them now and then, but her blows were less powerful because females are smaller and less strong than males. Once one of the males, Oygle, aimed such a fierce blow at Cheeky, who managed to duck, that when his head hit a metal fence post it bled profusely. The four mothers often suckled and touched their calves, but otherwise these youngsters kept to themselves rather than mingling with the adults. The third male, who was old at twenty-four years, also kept mostly to himself, although he did bash Cheeky now and then. The third “external features of giraffe” research effort was simplistic in a way, yet useful, as no one else had taken the time to describe their general features in detail (Dagg 1968). I was able to do so because I had eighteen individuals in front of me from several different races. At first I couldn’t tell individual giraffes apart, but some simple research solved this problem: I hunted through old newspapers at the Sydney library to find out when each animal had been born and who its parents were. To commemorate each birth, there were wonderful photos of the new baby giraffe along with positive comments about the Taronga Zoo. In this research I reported, among other things, that the coats of the males and some of the females darken with age, a dark area appearing in the centre of a spot with the colour gradually spreading outward. But not always – an elderly female northern giraffe was relatively pale in colour. The spots of an fIrST SCIenTIfIC BOOK On GIrAffe!

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individual remain the same during its lifetime, but most races cannot be told apart by their coat patterns. All the giraffe had horns (indeed giraffe are the only species whose young are born with them, made of cartilage at first, for easy birthing, which then changes to bone), but those of the males were larger and the black hairs that had surrounded them had been worn off from sparring; it was possible to sex adults merely by looking at their heads. There were also smaller horn-like appendages at the base of the skull where posterior neck muscles and a large ligament were attached. The males often had a pronounced third nasal “horn” in front of the main ones, along with other bony bumps on their heads. On our return from Australia to Canada in 1968, I heard from a fellow classmate in biology at the University of Toronto, Bristol Foster, who had been studying giraffe in Kenya in the early 1960s. He had been hired by the University of Nairobi to teach students how to do wildlife research, including one method that involved driving with students through the Nairobi National Park each week for a twenty-month period, looking for giraffe. He had previously photographed each individual he saw there from the left side, 241 of them in total; because their unique spotting remains the same throughout their lifetime, he could recognize any individual giraffe once he had a left-side photo. He could even buy old postcards in Nairobi shops featuring giraffe to whom he had now given numbers; if they were not full-grown, he could estimate their age in the postcard and therefore their age when he saw them in person, as it were. The study involved noting down which giraffe were fairly close together, usually browsing, during the weekly visits. He had amassed a huge amount of data by the end of this project, but had had little opportunity to analyze it. He asked me for help and I gladly stepped in. The results of his research were startling (Foster and Dagg 1972). Female giraffe are highly social animals and are always in groups with female adults and young (unlike the large male loners, who go from group to group hoping for sex). We expected to find that these groups stayed the same but moved through large areas inside and outside the park in search of good browsing 70

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territory. We could not have been more wrong: analysis showed that the females within a group changed constantly. On average, a female was present in the same group with another specific female only 3.4 times during the long-term study. Even if they were together a few times, associations usually did not occur in successive weeks, so seemed to happen almost by chance. Calves were, of course, present with their mothers, but females with other young giraffe or two youngsters were seen together only 2.8 times during the study. (Later, we realized from research in 1999 that giraffe, like elephants and rhinoceros, could possibly have infrasound, which means that they could communicate with each other by making sounds so low that the human ear couldn’t hear them. So although individuals may not be seen together, they may still be in communication with each other. This phenomenon has yet to be studied in much detail.) I asked Bristol to be co-author of the proposed giraffe book I had been collecting information on for years because he now had far more data than I on giraffe behaviour in the wild. In addition, I corresponded with scores of zoologists, among them some of the top professionals of the day, who kindly typed out, or wrote by hand, detailed answers to our questions. These included Harrison Matthews of the London Zoo, Heini Hediger from the Zurich Zoo, Knut Schmidt-Nielsen of Duke University, François Bourlière from the University of Paris, R.F. Dasmann from the University of California at Berkeley, Miriam Rothschild, sister of Lord Rothschild II, mammalogist Richard Van Gelder and paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson from the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Prof. Dr E.J. Slijper from the Universiteit van Amsterdam, and Prof. Dr Dr Grzimek (as he signed himself) from the Zoologischer Garten of Frankfurt, Main, in Germany. We wondered about the possibility of our friend from university days, artist Robert Bateman, illustrating our book. Bristol had driven around the world in a van with him, but unfortunately he was too busy at the time to take on the project. In 1969 Harrison Matthews had been most anxious that our proposed book on giraffe be published by Weidenfeld and fIrST SCIenTIfIC BOOK On GIrAffe!

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Nicolson, but this did not work out. Nor did possible publication with the University of Chicago Press or Collins. Finally, in 1973, it fell into the hands of Van Nostrand Reinhold. Following one problem after another, it finally appeared in May 1976 and continued to sell for the next six years, earning each of us the heady sum of some hundreds of dollars (Dagg and Foster 1976). Royalties seem never to amount to much for academic books, even though they require perhaps a full year’s time and effort. It’s certainly no way to make a fortune – or even a living. Even harder is to be cheated out of that small amount of money, which is what happened next. When all copies of the book were sold, we were asked to update it, which I was willing to do. Van Nostrand Reinhold, which was apparently going out of business, arranged for the new 1982 edition to be printed and published by Robert E. Krieger Publishing, based in Malabar, Florida. This arrangement seemed to be fine until 1986, when a new printing of the book was necessary. From about that time to the present, although the book is still in print and advertised, we have received no royalties despite numerous attempts to correct this situation. We could have hired an American lawyer, but minimal royalties make this possibility uneconomical. For twenty-seven years, until 1982, I had probably thought about giraffe at least once every day. But after I had put everything I knew about them into our book, I turned (until much later) to other directions, as this memoir describes.

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.7. environmental efforts, 1972–1988

When my hoped-for career as a professor at the University of Guelph was over, I didn’t turn my hand at last to housework, especially since the children were now old enough to do many things on their own. I continued to make the meals, but never served soup, mashed potatoes, or pies – to my mind these dishes were not essential and were too time-consuming to prepare. I had the kids make their own lunches for school and do their own homework without my oversight. Beyond school, each child had to have an interest of their own every year, such as filmmaking, soccer, or basketball. If we had guests for dinner, each had to ask the guest at least one question, so that they would benefit from some sort of an interaction. When they were a little older, I arranged for each child to make the family dinner one night a week; to this day they are all proficient cooks and excellent pizza chefs. My husband, who never cooked, took us to a restaurant on another evening, so I only prepared three meals each week. After the children left home, I became a vegetarian. Evenings when we were not playing tennis or badminton, Ian and I usually worked in our offices until time for bed at ten. These offices had been created when

our two boys chose to avoid too close parental contact by moving into the third-storey attic of our old house. In the 1970s I had time, in addition to continuing to work on the giraffe book, to work locally for the environment. In the beginning, this involved meeting weekly with friends to write letters, organize projects, and do research on urban areas and birds; being editor of the newsletter of the Ontario Chapter of the Canadian Society of Environmental Biologists; and writing a number of books and articles. When I was unable to find a publisher for several of my books, I set up Otter Press to ensure they would reach their readership. Some of my activities were hands-on. My first experience in trying to recycle material rather than just throw it in the garbage involved going with a friend to smash used glass bottles in a barrel, wearing goggles to protect our eyes. I remember thinking, while sweating copiously, that this was going to be a hard way to save the world. Little did I know that this effort was among the first of an amazing series of city recycling efforts that would eventually be standard all over Canada and in other countries as well. In January of 1972, five of us in the Kitchener-Waterloo area who had similar aims – Willard Schaefer, Peter Moran, Craig Campbell, Jane Campbell, and me – formed a group called oikos Associates. We met weekly to discuss local government initiatives and write letters in response to them. We also sat on various environmental committees and carried out small research projects, sometimes with hired staff. For instance, we did ecological analyses of Kitchener-Waterloo parks to pinpoint problems such as the use of pesticides (ddt which affected bats and birds) and lead levels in urban ponds. Another adventure one spring was collecting stunned migrating birds that had hit the windows of a tall office block during the night. Some recovered to carry on with their northward flights. We also established liaisons with Kitchener-Waterloo Pollution Probe, Kitchener-Waterloo Field Naturalists, the Environmental Law Association, local professors with environmental interests, and local, provincial, and federal conservation groups 74

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in order to keep up to date on current environmental issues. The information sometimes led to appearances before local city council meetings or letter-writing campaigns. We also wrote letters to local and national newspapers to extend information about environmental problems and how they might be mitigated. One of the aims of oikos Associates was to foster projects in urban environments that would expand the research I had done earlier. City areas in general, despite their uniqueness, had been little studied. As habitat they comprise, compared to rural areas, limited vegetation (although often lots of trees), less solar radiation and wind, more heat and rain, and much more pollution by gases and particulate matter. Our research further documented the distribution of plants and animals in a city (as my students and I had done for Waterloo), created biomass studies of urban animals and plants, investigated habitat and habitat changes that affected animals and plants, analyzed the behaviour of birds and mammals living in cities, and noted the effect of pollution on these animals (Campbell and Dagg 1975). At the time, these studies seemed worth doing as a way to monitor changes taking place with the spread of urban areas. Now, they seem even more important, as they force us to remember what we have lost in cities by not carefully guarding the natural vegetation and the urban animals that thrived because of it. Millions of people watch animal activity in cities, but few channel their observations into a scientific study. For example, it may seem unimportant to document when different species of birds come to your outdoor feeder in the spring and leave in the fall, but such information could eventually be part of a large project into the changing behaviour of various birds and global warming. Today we are wonderfully fortunate to be able to list all the birds that we see on the internet at www.ebird.ca so that bird studies are now far more effective than they were in the past. To show my children what could be done, I documented feeding data for the grey squirrels in our area. Each day one autumn I put out twenty chestnuts (collected elsewhere) on the front porch. Every hour, I counted how many chestnuts had been taken away by squirrels and replaced them with others. Within a e n v I r O n M e n TA L e f f O r T S , 1 9 7 2 – 1 9 8 8

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few weeks I was able to graph the hourly activity of local squirrels in collecting chestnuts and correlate this with daily temperature, sunshine, and rain. Unfortunately, my kids were less than excited about this experiment and I no longer remember the results. For a behavioural study one winter, I made a map of the branches of trees outside the kitchen window along which squirrels bounded while travelling from one side of the backyard to the other. Before long, I knew exactly the route the squirrels would take, even though there seemed, to my eye, to be several possibilities. Apparently squirrels memorize a route they can rush along at great speed, knowledge that might sometimes save them from predators such as hawks and eagles. As well, I became familiar with which parts of the yard squirrels favoured, what time of day they were most active, and what happened when two squirrels met. These results have also been lost, underlining the importance of always keeping data well documented and in a safe place! Craig Campbell, a keen local birder, organized a comparative study of birds in Kitchener-Waterloo. I took part, although Craig’s ability to identify species greatly surpassed my own (Campbell and Dagg 1975). The survey was financed by a contract from Canadian Wildlife Service which enabled us to hire assistants. We looked at five census plots, about sixty acres each, composed of a densely wooded park, an artificially created park, a mature beech-maple forest dotted with expensive housing, a community of small houses, and a downtown area in Waterloo. Each plot was surveyed for birds seven times during the breeding season from April to July and five times during the winter, with all sightings marked on maps. Maps showing the location of trees and bushes were also made for each area. After collecting all our data, we noted correlations that one might have expected. For example, although starlings, house sparrows, and rock doves (pigeons), all species introduced from Europe into North America, thrived in the least natural downtown areas, the largest total number of birds was seen in the artificially created park – Victoria Park – where open water 76

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attracted many waterfowl. The most pairs of breeding birds were present in the expensive residential areas, while a densely wooded park – Steckle Park – had as few species as downtown Waterloo in summer but twice as many in the winter. This detailed type of research can be used to trace the effects of the further urbanization that continues to take place in Kitchener-Waterloo. Species sighted then that would almost certainly not be seen today include chimney swift, common nighthawk, wood duck, pileated woodpecker, belted kingfisher, purple martin, and brown thrasher. Over the years, people in North America and even some in Europe contacted us for more information about our data and how we had collected it that might be relevant to their own situation. In a related study called “Comparative avian biomass and diversity in Waterloo Region, Ontario” (unpublished), Craig Campbell, Willard Schaefer and I examined the biomass of birds in six designated areas of Waterloo Region; a similar study done in Helsinki, Finland, had found that the biomass of urban birds was ten times that of birds living in a nearby forest and in a field. One day a month, each of us toured two of the six observation areas, noting all the birds seen or heard within 30 m of a set 1.4-km-long route. Using average weights for members of each species kindly provided by the Royal Ontario Museum, we calculated the average yearly biomass of individual birds seen in each area. This was highest by far in Waterloo Park, which had many ducks and geese in and around Silver Lake. In urban areas without water, those with the most buildings and least vegetation had the highest biomass. The two parks had the most bird species (fifty-six and forty-seven), while the two most urban plots had the fewest (twelve and thirteen). I was part of this group for two and a half years, until I left for Australia for my husband’s second sabbatical year. It is difficult to say how effective we were with our various initiatives, but doing something to benefit the environment is surely always better than doing nothing. After our family returned from Ian’s sabbatical in 1976, I was pleased to join the executive of the Ontario Chapter of the Canadian Society of Environmental Biologists (cseb) whose e n v I r O n M e n TA L e f f O r T S , 1 9 7 2 – 1 9 8 8

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membership (except perhaps for me) comprised professional biologists from government, consulting firms, and universities. There were also chapters in the other Canadian provinces. The society’s mandate was to support outdoor resources, enhance the quality of the environment, give an ecological viewpoint on Canadian resources as a counterpart to government activities, and bring together professionals to further their common interests in resource use. From October 1977 to 1979, I was editor of the more-orless-quarterly newsletter of the Ontario Chapter and author of many letters on behalf of the chapter. The other board members were Dan Mansell, interested in agricultural land use; chair Jim Bendell, involved in chemical pollution of the environment; Harold Harvey, documenting acid rain in Ontario lakes; Al Wainio; and Lewis Yeager. At our monthly meetings in Toronto, as well as discussing recent environmental issues we arranged frequent talks for our membership and an annual conference that 300 people attended in 1978. However, it seemed to me that, through no fault of its own, the group had fatal flaws that prevented it from being very successful in its aim to protect Canadian natural environments. Nor was it clear what exactly were our aims. We all agreed that we wanted to keep as natural an environment in Canada as possible. Did we also want to discourage smoking in public places? Reconsider building codes that led to structures that required air conditioning in summer? (That dates the discussion!) Monitor the growth of urban areas? Another issue was that of providing certification for environmental biologists, which would give credibility to our members and ensure that biologically based jobs would be filled by biologists rather than by people without a biological background, as was sometimes the case; we felt that people without training could more easily be manipulated by politicians or employers. This issue might have seemed straightforward, but it would be controversial, as Dr Eidt, a government entomologist from New Brunswick, outlined. For one thing, certification would be expensive, requiring testing of candidates and yearly fees. 78

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For another, if certifications were provincial, as was expected, they might restrict biologists from working in other provinces. Thousands of people worked for the environment, but relatively few belonged to the cseb and those who did were usually interested in fisheries and wildlife. What about entomologists? And botanists? Should we encourage them to join our group? As well, competent biologists without degrees might be excluded, while less competent government individuals might be fully protected because of their jobs. Then there was the possibility of potential strife among members of the society. For example, a professor might demand that a swamp be fully protected while a biologist hired by a consulting firm might insist that building a shopping mall nearby would do little harm. Or, since there were only about one hundred wolverines in Ontario they should be considered endangered, but if they were officially given this designation, the Ontario government would be upset because a wolverine trapped inadvertently would have high consequences for the trapper. (I had previously co-authored briefs on the wolverine in Canada for the Canadian Wildlife Service so was especially interested in this species [Campbell and Dagg, 1974d,e]). This was and is the sort of dilemma with which most environmental groups still wrestle. My newsletters dealt with a number of current issues that reflect the time and on occasion were reprinted in the national cseb newsletter. One expressed the urgent need to press for protection of bats by law, both provincial (for hibernating species) and federal (for migrating species); Craig Campbell and I had presented a brief about this issue earlier. Brock Fenton from Carleton University was firmly onside while stressing the complexity of how to address the issue, while David J. Reid pointed out that bats over-winter in pack barns where their dropped faeces lower the value of stored tobacco, so tobacco farmers should be exempt from full protection of these animals. Two other issues were highlighted. One was the need to stop water transport of logs in commercial logging: decaying bark negatively affects fish and plants, while straightening rivers e n v I r O n M e n TA L e f f O r T S , 1 9 7 2 – 1 9 8 8

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damages the entire food chain both directly and indirectly via sediment and silt. The other was W.B. Ranta’s concern that elk in Ontario be legally differentiated from deer: they were both considered “deer” for hunting purposes, which meant that elk could be shot, although their numbers, about one hundred, were too few to sustain this. At the 1978 Annual Meeting of the Ontario chapter, the subjects were also varied. One member spoke about the aerial transport of pollutants from their source to an area far away: for example, New York state was showered with sulphur compounds from industries in Sudbury. Another emphasized the difficulty of publicizing the damage caused by acid rain, which was killing fish in lakes around Sudbury. The problem of sewage disposal was discussed, especially that of the disposal of phosphorus, as it was limiting the number of cottages that could be built on Ontario lakes. We talked about the issue of hydro stations and the environment, especially the intake of fish along with water and the output of hot water back into lakes. We also worried that pcbs were being disposed of irresponsibly by being dumped down sewers. An especially fervent discussion centred on the question of preventing the draining of Ontario wetlands: over fifty years, 2.5 million acres of wetlands had been turned into mostly privately owned farmlands. Wetlands are vital in preventing flooding (if they are not already saturated with water), preserving water quality, and conserving wildlife, yet experts were ignoring this fact. One of my letters to the local newspaper indicated the seriousness of the issue. I enjoyed working with these biologists, but in early 1980 I resigned from the cseb because I doubted its efficacy. I had joined because I wanted to concentrate on environmental issues in Canada. However, unlike oikos Associates, the executive of the Ontario chapter was comprised of professional people who had lots of expertise but little time to devote to the cause. The society sounded effective with Canadian in its title, but in my view it never really thrived. For example, I wrote a draft letter asking that all species of wildlife not classified as pests, game 80

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animals, or economic species be protected in Ontario, but it was vetoed by the executive as too drastic to be published. I had helped prepare briefs on bats and wolverines, yet was unable to find a forum that would even allow discussion of their protection in the wider community. Our chapter’s success was related to monthly meetings where experts discussed environmental issues of interest (although attendance was low, given that meetings were held on weekday evenings when people were tired) and the annual general meetings when many members came together to discuss common concerns. As well, this body was composed mainly of men, some of whom felt free to make sexist comments. In my Newsletter of Autumn 1978, as part of a discussion of how newspapers preferred input from scientists, I wrote: “they did not want information presented in erudite terms but in everyday language – ‘such as one would use to his wife or dog’ – as one member who shall be nameless infelicitously put it.” The Canadian Society of Environmental Biologists persists to this day, and continues to work toward sustaining or improving our Canadian environment. It does not have a high profile, so it is difficult to know how effective it is. • When I began teaching a course on wildlife management at the University of Guelph, there was no text dealing with Canadian conditions. This meant that I had to spend huge amounts of time reading scientific papers and talking to experts to gain relevant information for my lectures. After I left the university, I decided to collect the material from my lecture notes into a book. I focused on various mammals and birds in Canada, showing how, over the years, their populations had almost always been negatively affected by human activity. The book was largely a review of the articles and books that had been published on Canadian wildlife, but I also contacted a number of naturalists and biologists at universities and provincial governments, all of whom were helpful. e n v I r O n M e n TA L e f f O r T S , 1 9 7 2 – 1 9 8 8

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Amateur naturalists were especially keen to give me information. They answered all my questions, offered me tea, overwhelmed me with kindness and anecdotes. I felt they would have liked to be close friends because of our common interests, and I would have liked that too, except that I was so busy. When I left them, waving goodbye, I knew we would not meet again but I suspect they hoped that such meetings would be possible. Nowadays, when I am interviewed about my work, I experience the same sensation in reverse. The reporter is so sympathetic, so interested in everything I have to say, it seems impossible that we won’t be future buddies. But of course we never are. In the summer of 1971 I sent six chapters of my manuscript to the University of Toronto Press and to McClelland & Stewart, considered at the time the most Canadian of publishers. The University of Toronto Press was noncommittal but, to my pleasure, Patrick Crean’s response from M&S was so positive that a year later I sent him the finished manuscript. It had been a downer writing the book: virtually all the species covered had been negatively affected in one way or another by human encroachment, and although starling and house sparrows thrived, these weren’t native to Canada. M&S tried without success to obtain grants from the federal and provincial governments to aid publication; however, after a long, nervous wait, editorial director Anna Porter wrote me that a number of people had read the manuscript and because their reactions were “extremely favourable,” the company would, indeed, publish it. I was thrilled. The editorial and production process takes time, though, and the book was finally produced only in 1974. Later, in my feminist days, men would tease me about the “Man” in the title. They were right, of course, but I made myself feel better by arguing that it was indeed men, not women, who had done almost all the damage to animals and their natural environments in Canada. Canadian Wildlife and Man, billed by the press as the “first basic overall treatment of Canada’s wildlife,” received a large number of positive reviews, which used terms such as “complete

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and invaluable,” and “a valuable treatise.” One reported: “A fascinating, easy-to-read storehouse of information, the book is fully researched, supplemented by original materials, and backed up by a full range of Canadian reference sources.” However, one less enthusiastic reviewer noted: “It is a veritable storehouse of information, backed up by a full range of Canadian reference sources. Unfortunately the book is overly academic, relentlessly flooding information into the reader with the tone of a university professor lecturing a class.” This last quote was entirely perceptive, of course, as this was what I had done. Even so, I was thrilled to hold in my hands my first commercially printed book! This book flourished throughout the late 1970s, selling 2,700 copies. It cost $10 (one dollar of which came to me), which several reviewers claimed was overpriced. When copies were being remaindered in 1980, I bought them all up for $1.50 each, then resold them for $7.00. In 1972 I had set up Otter Press to publish Ian’s Matrix Optics and then my Mammals of Waterloo and South Wellington Counties. The name came from the Otter River, which flows through Otterville, near where my father had lived growing up. Students in their final years had helped prepare the mammals book, and I did not want to take the time to send the manuscript to various publishers, knowing that publication could take years or never happen at all. And I liked the idea of having full authority about what a book was to contain and how it looked. It sold well, often to members of field naturalist groups Presumptuously, I wrote to the head of the University of Toronto Press, Dr M. Jeanneret, who had been a friend of my parents, to ask for advice about managing a press, and received back a lengthy and useful response. My librarian friend Mary Williamson was also very helpful. On occasion my young children tried to be helpful too, but I was usually anxious for them to play outside instead. Our first bestseller was Matrix Optics (1972). Ian needed such a book for the many students in his second-year optics course at

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the university and the book sold for $3 so students could afford it. This did not seem excessive (although an American professor who asked to peruse a copy took it home, removed the staples, Xeroxed every page, restapled it, then returned it without payment). We contacted physics departments in universities across Canada, many of whom bought copies. They were easy to sell in bulk for student classes, since it just required delivering boxes to the optics classroom on the first day of each class. Over the years we sold at least 749 copies, along with at least 201 to the University of Windsor, whose physics department also valued it. (I say “at least” as the sales figures in the uw archives may be low.) Our other bestseller was my Mammals of Ontario, put out in both hard and soft covers (Dagg 1974c). It was immensely popular by our standards: our largest purchaser was the Board of Education in Toronto which, over time, ordered 250 copies, but other regions and public libraries ordered large numbers too. As well, hundreds of individuals bought one or two copies. During the first ten years we processed 576 orders and sold 2,202 copies. Of course each order had to be invoiced, packaged, and taken to the post office; often Ian and I had a pleasant few minutes alone while walking to send off parcels to the post office near our house. Over the years I published a variety of my other books that had either failed to appeal to a commercial publisher, seemed too arcane to make it worthwhile to even try to attract one, or needed to appear quickly; publishing with a commercial firm can take up to a year for the book to appear, even after the time it takes them to decide whether to accept it for publication. Each of these books meant a great deal to me at the time of publication because I truly believed in it. Was Otter Press successful? I think so, even though no other books were as successful as Matrix Optics, Mammals of Waterloo and South Wellington Counties, and Mammals of Ontario. For myself, at different times I felt driven to deal with a subject important to me; after I had finished writing the best manuscript I could, it felt wonderful to publish it, see who was interested, and then go on to another good cause. Nowadays, 84

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many people self-publish their own works and why not? These books are written from the heart and are often of high quality in their content and design. A downside to self-publishing is that it means a ton of work and is unlikely to make anyone much money. Publicity is also difficult – how to let the world know one’s exciting new book exists? I paid to have books listed in relevant journals, which helped somewhat. Various bookstores ordered copies (our discount was one-third of a book’s price), but it was annoying if they were returned or if the store went bankrupt leaving no mailing address, which happened several times. And we were not in a category that allowed us to receive funding from any government or other source. A second downside was having Otter Press listed in Canadian Books in Print, apparently an indication that our mission was to publish the works of other people, which was absolutely not true. Various people wrote asking if we could give them a job because they loved to work with books and desperate-sounding query letters about beloved manuscripts were all too common: • I am a poetess with a “heavy” blend of grief, love and humour ... • Working with small immigrant kids using puppet plays, I have developed ... • My grandkids love the children’s stories I have written ... Insects have always interested me, so I am the author of a small illustrated booklet ... • I have drawn an exciting collection of animal cartoons that fascinate kids ... All worthy causes, no doubt, that reminded me unhappily of the begging letters I had sent to other publishers and magazines in the past. I would write back, feeling I owed them a response, as I had been written to by other publishers: “Your work indeed e n v I r O n M e n TA L e f f O r T S , 1 9 7 2 – 1 9 8 8

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looks very interesting, but unfortunately we do not publish poetry/children’s books/cookbooks/etc. We wish you all success in finding a publisher.” I finally wrote to Canadian Books in Print asking that Otter Press no longer be included in its pages. From my teaching at universities, I knew that there were no scientific books about mammals of Ontario and decided to produce a book called just that. One of my former professors, Randolph Peterson from the Royal Ontario Museum, had published The Mammals of Eastern Canada in 1966, but it was already out of print by 1972. For my book I used the unusual format of Mammals of Waterloo and South Wellington Counties, giving every species two pages for itself to indicate that all species were important, not just the ones familiar to the reader. Roslyn (Lynn) Alexander, an artistic student of mine, drew such realistic pictures of each animal that over the years many people have written me to ask if they could reproduce them for their own books or promotions. I prepared a map of where each mammal lived in Ontario, listed its general characteristics (scientific names, measurements, characteristics, litter size, habitat, and food), and added an original item from the scientific literature to give the reader an idea of what sort of information interested mammalogists. As an example of a scientific item, for the black bear I chose the question of why cubs at birth in the winter weighed less than a pound, a tiny fraction of the weight of the mother compared to other species. This was a conundrum which I routinely asked students to consider. Perhaps as bears hibernate, their metabolism is too low to provide for the young? But these bears don’t hibernate in the true sense by greatly lowering their body temperature; as well, they still have to provide milk for the cubs. Perhaps the long time during which a youngster suckles enables it to learn more bear-like behaviour? But during the late winter both mother and young spend most of their time snoozing. Or, perhaps the best idea, the female in torpor breathes only four or five times a minutes, so cubs in the uterus might not receive enough oxygen or get rid of enough carbon dioxide via her blood for adequate

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growth. I left the reader to mull over the possibilities, since I didn’t know the answer. I had asked McClelland & Stewart if they would be interested in publishing the book as I envisioned it – they were then in the process of producing my Canadian Wildlife and Man – but, after some consideration, they declined. The managing editor at the time, David Scollard, expressed doubt about the way I wanted the book presented, although he thought the idea in general a “fascinating one.” More to his interest was noting that I had spent a summer at the Royal Ontario Museum measuring nineteen characteristics on a plethora of red fox skulls, the same skulls that he, several months earlier, “had had the strong displeasure of cleaning up!” by picking off the flesh. What a small world! Mammals of Ontario, 2,000 copies of both hard- and softcover books, was finally published in 1974 by Otter Press, using local businesses this time – Twin City Printers in Kitchener and Lehmann Bookbinding in Waterloo. In 1977, I returned to Edwards Brothers for 700 more copies, so the book was selling well. But I remember feeling rather overwhelmed when seven huge cartons arrived from the United States, each weighing far more than I could lift. Shortly after producing Mammals of Ontario, I attended a book publishing conference at Trent University. During the discussions, small literary presses were referred to by an attendee as “literary pollution.” Alan Wilson, of the Department of History at Trent University, to whom I wrote to object, invited me to write a defence of these presses, which was published by the Journal of Canadian Studies (Dagg 1975). I noted in my article that small presses accept work that is considered too local, too specialized, or too controversial to be considered by the big commercial houses and that they enriched Canadians by providing a broader range of books for their edification. Looking back at my letter to Dr Wilson, I now see evidence of a rising feminist sensibility – a new awareness for me. Two of my books would still come out with “Man” in the title, but I wasn’t completely unenlightened. I included a “Feminist

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Footnote” in my letter to him indicating that it is best not to refer to a presenting woman at a conference as “stunning,” as he had done, especially when other female presenters, presumably less stunning, had no descriptor. He replied to me that he had been “properly chastened.” While teaching the wildlife management course at the University of Guelph and writing Canadian Wildlife and Man, I was curious about how wild animals were treated in Europe, where the human population is far more dense and places for wild animals limited. Population counts in North America have soared in the last few hundred years, yet Canada and the United States still maintain the pioneering tradition that they have unlimited wilderness free for exploitation, even if this is no longer true. Could we learn anything from the Old World, which has been dealing with wild animals far longer? I decided to write a book on this subject. This involved extensive correspondence with scientists overseas, most of whom were very helpful in providing material. In the past, North American environmentalists showed little interest in how animals were managed in foreign countries, even though this might have been a way to glimpse problems in our own future. European countries seemed far away, with different species and concerns, research papers were often written in languages other than English, and it was far less easy to access information than it is now. My challenge in writing Wildlife Management in Europe involved collecting 679 recent reports from European sources and then organizing the information they contained into chapters dealing with environments, animal species, and management procedures. It seemed obvious that, at the very least, data on common species such as red deer (known as wapiti or elk in North America), elk (known as moose in North America), and arctic species should be shared, as should information on pesticides and pollution that affect all wildlife. There were a number of points of contrast between the two continents at that time, about 1965 to 1975. For example, in central Europe, where landowners rather than the state “owned” the

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game on their property and decided which individuals should be harvested, there was an understanding of and respect for animals that was lacking in North America. Tradition was important, so hunting often had more of a pageant feel. For instance, after a German hunter shot a deer, he put a twig in his hat that had been bathed in the deer’s blood. Perspectives on importation of animals were also different. Whereas in North America importation of foreign animals to the wild is taboo, it was practised liberally in Europe, even as early as Roman times when alien species such as the genet, mongoose, and crested porcupine are thought to have been brought in and liberated. Red deer were imported to the Isle of Rhum in Scotland following the slaughter of the Highland sheep there, because sheep produce less meat for export than do red deer. In Russia, entrepreneurs introduced species such as sika deer, onager, saiga antelope, European moufflon, muskrat, raccoon, American mink, and some African antelope for various commercial purposes; many of these quickly spread to new areas. All this occurred despite the fact that imported animals, if they breed successfully, have a negative effect on native species. This gratifies some people, but upsets others. In 1905, five muskrats were released near Prague, Czechoslovakia, and quickly increased to untold millions across Europe. Fur dealers and hunters were pleased, but the rodents have burst dykes, sunk highways, and undermined railway embankments. Europe is anything but a monolithic entity, though. In England, for example, many people value birds, including the 138 species sighted in Greater London by 1969. By this time over 4.6 million birds had been banded (called “ringed”) in England, mostly by amateurs, with 131,000 rings recovered, making it possible to analyze bird movements, mortality rates, and population dynamics. By contrast, in Malta and southern Italy, songbirds were being trapped by the thousands and often eaten. In West Germany, fewer than 0.4% of the population were hunters. This wealthy elite, trained and tested in hunting and related arts, spent $5,000 or more a year to buy or rent access to a hunting

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area or revier. By comparison, France and Italy had nearly two million hunters each (3.95% and 3.4% of the population). In United States, 8.5% of the population hunted. Given the manuscript’s specialized subject matter, I was not surprised when the few editors who saw it decided not to publish it. Again, Otter Press to the rescue, along with a splendid foreword by Dr Harrison Matthews of England and fine printing by Edwards Brothers. We ordered 500 copies and sold 345 of them in the first five years, but few after that. The reviews of the book were favourable, but few in number, unfortunately. Eventually we cleared out the remaining copies to biology students at a discount rate. One summer day in 1974, I happened to visit the Highway Book Shop: Booksellers and Publishers in Cobalt, Ontario, to sell it some copies of Mammals of Ontario. The owner suggested I write a small book to be called Mammals of Cottage Country, complete with tracks for each species so that cottagers could become more familiar with their four-legged neighbours. Four years later, when the time seemed right, I decided to do what he had suggested. Mary Gartshore allowed me to use some of her drawings, and much of the information was already available in Mammals of Ontario. I sent my manuscript, which included significant historical material, to the publisher who had suggested I write it and the editor was pleased to accept it, noting that the book would be about 5½ by 8½ inches and 100 pages long. Perfect. However, year after year there were excuses for why it had not yet appeared. Eventually, in 1982, I gave up on this press and unsuccessfully tried a few other publishers, so my manuscript never saw the light of day. However, cottagers need no longer be ignorant of their furry neighbours because a small book called Animal Tracks of Ontario by Ian Sheldon, published in 1997, nicely fills this niche. Although the book wasn’t published, the effort I had put into it was not wasted as it made me realize how little I knew about animals living in the Canadian north. I began to think about visiting the area, taking trips by canoe such as my father had

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done. In the 1980s, with our children old enough to look after themselves or at summer camps, I spent months in the wilderness of northern Canada, travelling by canoe with groups containing an assortment of people, including my husband, women friends, and students. Perhaps I wanted to emulate my father with his love of the north? Certainly I wanted to see as many wild animals as possible. During three summers groups of us paddled down parts of the Yukon River, covering over 1,000 miles in all. I had spoken about the idea with Pierre Berton at a Writers’ Union Conference and he had told me how to go about planning the trip, including where to rent a canoe; he had recently completed the trip himself with his family, as reported in his book Drifting Home. Other canoe trips included a twenty-three-day endurance test that ended in Rupert House, Quebec, and a fly-out trip from Baker Lake in the Northwest Territories. Much later, I was able to paddle around the Bowron Lakes in British Columbia and down the Tatshenshini River in Alaska, as well as drive the Dempster Highway from Dawson City to Inuvik. We saw many moose, caribou, brown bear, and muskox, but unfortunately no wolverine. In 1985, just back from a northern adventure, I decided to work on an article about women and wilderness. I had previously written a book of fiction for teenagers about this Yukon canoe trip, but it found no publisher; I don’t read fiction, so I guess I should not have tried to press my factual mind onto a fictional adventure. For the article, I contacted a number of canoeists, hikers, and trip camps to ask for their take on the subject, noting that information on suitable equipment and wilderness skills might be important, as well as information that dealt with fear of assault (by men but also bears, because menstrual blood was [wrongly] being bruited as an attractant for them – perhaps as a way to keep women at home?). I also noted that women sometimes suffered harassment or discrimination when they enquired about wilderness jobs. Thinking back, I remembered how my university women friends and I had not been allowed to

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take on outdoor summer jobs such as collecting mammal specimens or watching for fires. My article was published in Kinesis, a women’s magazine, with the title “A call to adventure: Risking, in safety.” We think of a city as the antithesis of nature, and often are unaware that it is an environmental community in its own right. Because most people in Ontario live in cities or towns, I decided to put together a reference book for school children about the nature of the urban environment; with luck, it would be as successful as Mammals of Ontario. I organized relevant material into four main sections. The main section “City Habitat,” for example, discussed the environmental implications of airports, buildings and wildlife, dumps, lighting, parks, roads and road kills, sewage, undeveloped land, and waterways. “City and Wildlife” dealt mostly with many birds and mammals, but also zoonoses – there are at least thirteen diseases that can spread from urban wildlife to human beings. “Vegetation” was short – only roadside vegetation, trees, lawns, and weeds – while “Pollution” was all too long, discussing twenty-four chemicals and other negative entities that undermine urban life. Otter Press published this book, A Reference Book of Urban Ecology, because I could not interest any commercial firms in it. These publishers were right in refusing it, because it did not sell well, in part because of the difficulty of advertising it. Eventually, I guiltily sent off the remaining hard- and softcover editions in response to a request for books for remote native communities; even if much of the information did not apply to northern areas, perhaps some of it would be of interest. My last effort to improve the environment directly was rather strange. In 1988, I wrote an article (unpublished) called “Dirt and washingwomen.” It was on a basic subject that interested me: should the billions of women and men in the world refuse to wear white clothes, which require constant washing, for environmental reasons? The Bible noted that cleanliness was important, yet until the 1500s few societies had the resources to keep themselves and their homes spick and span. Since

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then, a major problem has been that the more devices invented to banish dirt, the higher the standards of living have become. Meeting them means that huge amounts of chemicals are now released into the environment, which surely cannot be a good thing. Our consumption of fresh water has become truly amazing. When I was growing up, each member of my family had one bath a week, usually on Saturday night. Now, many people in developed countries assume they required a shower or bath every day. For the future, the lack of fresh water in California is an indication that this is a luxury that may not be sustainable. At the time, however, the article was refused by the one magazine I sent it to – “too broad and diffuse.”

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.8. A Potpourri of Interests, 1972–1980

Early in 1972, although I was already beginning my activist work for the environment described in the last chapter, I wanted something larger to do with my life. My job at the University of Guelph would end in April and there seemed little possibility of being employed at another university (although the University of Waterloo kindly allowed me to use its name so that I could spend the rest of the grant money for research that I had been awarded by the National Research Council of Canada). However, the joy of being a citizen scientist is that one can delve into any subject of interest rather than having to concentrate on a single issue that one has been paid to explore. I decided my time as an (impecunious) citizen scientist would be spent gaining a broad rather than a deep knowledge base. This necessary choice paid off later when, to my gratification, scientists and lay people from many different fields asked for my input and advice. In the summers of 1972 and 1973, I took two camel trips in Mauritania, ostensibly to film camel gaits; later I wrote a general book about our trips and a scientific one about camels. As well, I began a lucrative short career writing animal articles for commercial magazines, translated abstracts about mammals

from French for the Paris journal Mammalia and the American Museum of Natural History as a public service, served as a referee for school science projects, and acted as book review editor for the Canadian Field-Naturalist.

Camel Trips in Mauritania In 1971 I attended a conference on ungulate behaviour at the University of Calgary. There I met Hilde Gauthier-Pilters, who gave a talk about the camels she had been studying for many years in Africa. I was entranced by her adventures as a lone woman scientist in the Sahara, following camels as they browsed in order to document their food intake and collect their urine and samples of their faeces. Camels were a large mammal whose gaits had not been studied – maybe I could go with her to film them? I asked Ian what he thought. Probably sick of my moping about, he suggested that his mother could come for a visit from Winnipeg and look after the children while I was away. No sooner said than arranged. He wrote to his mother, who agreed, and I wrote to Hilde, who was happy to have someone to accompany her. Hilde was the quintessential citizen scientist. Year after year she left her husband and son in France and headed into either the Moroccan or Mauritian desert, hiring guides and camel men, studying what types of vegetation camels ate, how much they ate, how they kept cool, and how much water they drank under variable conditions. Sometimes she had contracts from various institutes in France and Germany that were interested in her research; if these weren’t forthcoming, she paid for everything herself. Fortunately she also had an arrangement with the longest train in the world carrying iron ore to be shipped overseas. It gave her (and us) free passage inland to the interior and back again to Nouadhibou on the coast. Her goal was to learn all there was to know about camels – my kind of woman, obviously. Hilde never liked to talk about herself. When I asked about the war years, since she was a German married to a French 96

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doctor, she just said that they had moved into the countryside to be safe. When I wrote a book about our adventures, she asked that I not use her last name. She was an excellent linguist, having worked as a translator of French, English, and German. Following our second trip to Mauritania, her husband and son, as well as Ian, Mary, and I, took a trip on a cruise ship around the Mediterranean where her facility with language was a great asset to our holiday. Our first trip to Mauritania together went so well that I arranged to go back the next summer. This time Ian took the children for a month to a resort in Muskoka. What a wonderful man! My “official” undertaking on our trips was to film camel gaits, but after I had done that I set myself other tasks. One was to estimate the importance of various wells by noting the number of fecal pellets around them. I counted those in one square metre a distance of 10 metres from the well mouth (closer than that too many of the pellets had been broken by animals crowding forward to drink) and at 45-metre intervals going directly away from the well (which gave an idea of how many camels were waiting their turn). Hilde organized a similar census of vegetation around each well. These measurements would allow the government to determine which wells were most used and therefore most worthy of being improved. Camel visits to each well varied depending on its location, the quality of its water, its appurtenances (such as a cement basin for the water and a hook-up scheme to allow camels rather than men to do the pulling), its distance from good pasture, and the traditions of the owner. Near settlements we also counted donkey faeces to measure domestic use of the well. Hilde and I wrote a paper entitled “The Wells of Mauritania” but were unable to find a publisher for it. I did publish an article about Mauritania in 1973 in the Globe and Mail and another about camels in Animal Kingdom in 1985. On my return from the second trip, I wrote up my adventures in a book, which I sent to McClelland & Stewart in 1977. After some weeks, editor Anna Porter replied that she had “really enjoyed my manuscript and the pictures,” and that our trip was A POTPOUrrI Of InTereSTS, 1972–1980

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“exactly the kind of trip that I would like to take.” Unfortunately, her assessment was not shared by the rest of the staff nor by other publishers in the United States to whom she had sent it. I put the manuscript in my proverbial bottom drawer, thinking it unlikely that another publisher would find it of interest. I was wrong: in early 1978 a new Toronto company, York Publishing, wrote to ask for possible manuscripts from members of the newly formed Writers’ Union of Canada, of which I was a member. I sent along the manuscript, which I had titled Camel Quest: Summer Research on the Saharan Camel. To my amazement, a few weeks later a contract arrived, which I signed with alacrity; within the year my book was published and I had sent copies to fifty friends and relations. I was very pleased! Quite soon, however, this new company went out of business – even before the widespread use of computers it was hard to make a publishing company profitable. The book got a few reviews, all positive, including an odd one from David Bird of the Macdonald Raptor Research Centre at McGill University: “This book is an absolute must for any conscientious, self-respecting, wildlife population ecologist, particularly one who shares an affinity for birds of prey.” I eventually reprinted the book under the imprint Otter Press. I learned four things from my two trips with camels into Mauritania. One, naturally, was more about camels, especially how they walked, paced, and galloped – I filmed hundreds of feet of film of their gaits. I admired these animals tremendously: their stoicism, their distain, their sheer survival under terrible conditions. I could see that they were treated badly by their owners, for example having one of their legs hobbled with a rope for the night so they could not move far, having dates forced down their throats as medicine despite their screams of protest, and having to carry vast loads for long distances in torrid heat. The second was how hot one could be and still survive. We trudged along our twenty-four-kilometre route for the day in torrid heat, each holding a rope tied to our rented camel’s head: the drought in 1973 was so extreme that the camels were too weak to be ridden. Our guide, Moktar, Ahmed, our camel man, 98

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and we women wore turbans, tops, knee-length baggy pants called sarouels, and sandals. The sun beat down relentlessly as we soldiered on. It is amazing how much one can put up with to carry out a dream! Fortunately, whenever a camel defecated, our whole troop could stop. Hilde and I then crouched in the sand to count the pellets produced; the entire weight for each camel would later be calculated. Then we would struggle forward again, faint with the heat. Once I suddenly felt a miraculous cooling of my right leg. I looked down in wonder to find that my camel was urinating and the urine was blowing onto my calf – mixed emotions! The cooling sensation was wonderful, but how had I got to such a state that this is what I thought of the incident? I stayed in urine range for as long as it lasted. (Hilde and I measured our own urine output too, giggling about it because it was probably a scientific first for our sex. Although we drank at least five litres of water on the hottest days, our urine output stayed the same at about 350 ml/ day no matter what the temperature. Unlike us, camels are able to concentrate their urine production and thus conserve water.) My third memory was of being consumed by a rage greater than I have ever felt, before or since. Our group of four had hired a jeep to carry us and our equipment from Nouadhibou to the oasis where we would rent camels, a long distance away. We found ourselves speeding over the desert sand at night without any headlights, violently bumped, pitched, and tossed about in the vehicle because the driver could not see the rocks and grass tussocks ahead in order to avoid them. The cooling system didn’t work, so every ten kilometres or so we stopped to allow the water in the radiator to cool while Hilde and I climbing out onto a blanket spread on the sand to catch a few minutes of precious sleep before setting off again. At sunrise we came to a nomad family in a black tent in the middle of nowhere. Over welcome tea, Moktar told us, sheepishly, that our jeep had run out of both oil and petrol. The driver had forgotten about such details. We were stuck where we were until the driver could get some. Hilde and I were beyond furious. How could we get out of there? We were well off any beaten A POTPOUrrI Of InTereSTS, 1972–1980

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track, if there were such a thing in the area. We were exhausted from our awful night in the speeding jeep, and now our guide had proved himself to be a complete idiot. We paced about venting our anger to each other, as if that would help. At least the nomad family, with amazing generosity, moved their few possessions out of half of their tent so that Hilde and I could heap our belongings and ourselves there. Then there was nothing to do but wait. All during the long hot day no vehicle passed. The Mauritanians slept peacefully while Hilde and I lay in a rage, cursing the driver. The driver meanwhile sat aloofly by himself as if our problems did not concern him, probably thinking that Allah would provide. At sunset a Citroën arrived and stopped. In it was a couple who had driven south from France “pour l’expérience.” Could we buy oil, petrol, and water from them, we asked, desperate? “Mais non,” they replied coolly. They only had twenty litres of water for themselves. (Fifteen years earlier, in the days of colonial rule, no car could have set off alone into the Sahara without special permission. Back then, cars were required to join a convoy, with all the drivers committed to carrying extra supplies and helping anyone in trouble.) I found myself longing for the mandates of the past. After sharing black tea with us, they drove on. That night the nomads and our party all slept outside the tent where we could hail any vehicle that passed. None did. By now, Hilde and I were frantic. Would we be here forever? What if we all ran out of water? “Don’t worry,” Moktar assured us. “There is a well thirty kilometres away and the nomads will send a camel to bring back water so we won’t die.” I wished I could believe him. Even today, people die in the Sahara if they run out of water. (Moktar did not speak English, but his basic French was easy to understand.) At breakfast, on hearing a car, we jumped up to find the couple who had visited the day before. We were annoyed at seeing them, but they were aghast at seeing us. They had driven all night going north, they thought, but had instead gone in a large circle and come back to where they started. When they left, this time guided by the sun’s position, we settled down for our 100

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second day of misery. I thought of walking to the nearest settlement, but Hilde assured me I would die first; it’s not possible for a person to carry enough water while walking in 50ºC heat to stay alive for long. No car passed until noon when at last, and to our great relief, a large truck appeared whose driver agreed to take us and our luggage on board – we were finally rescued after thirty hours of anguish! We joined fifteen other passengers clinging to its load high above the ground. The nomads who had given us such generous hospitality watched us depart with relief, needless to say, glad to be rid of us. They would now have their tent to themselves. My fourth epiphany of this incredible adventure was feeling completely at one with nature. It was as if the modern world did not exist. After dark, following a long day’s trek, we ate by picking up chunks of rice and bits of meat with our fingers from the metal plates that Moktar handed us after cooking our repast over a tiny fire. We drank water from a guerba or water bag, which resembled a headless animal hung upside down. Actually it was a goat’s hide, the two front and two back legs fastened with ropes that hung from a tree branch or the side of a camel. The neck opening was tied with another rope; when I wanted to drink, I untied the opening so that water could pour into my tin cup, then tied it up again. Because of evaporation through the goat’s skin, the water remained cool. We crouched behind a bush or a rock to relieve ourselves when nature called and usually slept on a sheet on the sand, the sky overhead a magnificent display of what seemed like millions of stars. Hilde continued her work with camels without me. In 1974, she applied to the German group Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (dfg) for a grant to allow her to study wild camels in the Soviet Union, so that she could compare these animals with those from the Sahara. The dfg agreed, and so did the Russian Academy of Science, suggesting that the best area would be in Turkmenistan; there was a Russian research station there in the Karakum Desert. At the last minute, however, the Russian Academy changed its mind, to Hilde’s annoyance, and invited her instead, all expenses paid, to spend a week visiting the A POTPOUrrI Of InTereSTS, 1972–1980

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University of Moscow. Having finally agreed to do this, she was subsequently pleased to meet another female scientist who had researched Turkmenian camels and to give two talks, complete with films, about our 1973 field trip. She wrote me that the Russians were suitably impressed with our work and deprivations, calling us “heroes.” In 1976 she went again to Mauritania, but conditions there were more difficult than ever: just four days after she had flown home, open violence broke out in the capital with an attack by Algerian Reguibats.

Scientific Book on the Camel In 1976, Hilde and I decided to write a scientific book about the camel. She would be first author of course, because she had years of research experience and records on camels, some of them obtained while working with the noted physiologist Knut SchmidtNielsen, whom I was fortunate enough to meet once at Hilde’s house in France. I would be responsible for checking all the scientific research literature on camels, which I could do through the library resources at the University of Waterloo. As well, I would prepare the final draft because, although Hilde spoke English well, it was not her native language. The University of Chicago Press was impressed with our book concept. An editor worked with us for five years, providing feedback on our drafts, until its publication in April 1981. I wish I could report that Hilde was pleased with the final product, but, sadly, she died of cancer in March of that year and never saw it. This was devastating to me. Nonetheless, our book The Camel: Its Ecology, Behavior and Relationship with Man sold well in hardcover and was published in paperback a year later. The book often had splendid reviews, at least twenty of them in various journals. For example Valerius Geist writing in Natural History noted, “This is an excellent book, which I recommend if only for sheer reading pleasure,” and D.W. Yalden, in Mammal Review, wrote, “There will be few zoologists, and no

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mammalogists, who will not find this a fascinating book.” It was listed in “100 Outstanding Titles for General Collections: SciTech Books of 1981.” Hilde would have been even prouder than I was, because it documented so much of her work.

Where the Money Was – Commercial Magazines About 1980 one of my students in the Independent Studies program came to me in disgust: “That book I need costs $30,” she objected, looking at me, a greedy author, in exasperation. “Why am I being ripped off like this?” She had been reading about the royalties for bestsellers by authors such as Georgette Heyer and Agatha Christie. I set her straight with unaccustomed vehemence. A scientific book takes a year or five to write, and about a year more to be published if you can find a publisher. Most will be long out of print within ten years, and the author will recoup in all perhaps $1,000, if she is lucky. Compared to book earnings, writing articles for commercial magazines at the time was incredibly lucrative. In 1978, I was asked to write an article on locomotion of animals for International Wildlife, which paid about $1,000 for each accepted piece. I was delighted. The magazine liked what I wrote, which needed no heavy research on my part, then asked for more. Over the next five years the editor accepted other articles by me, all generalizations about many animals rather than information on one specific species. My topics focused on tails, growing old, couples, olfactory abilities, and fathers. In my article about fathers, entitled “Let’s hear it for dad!,” I conclude, “Birds make the best fathers; almost all species have males who can be proud of their efforts. Fish and mammals come next, both with small groups working hard at paternal duties. Finally we have the amphibians, with a scattering of dedicated fathers, and last reptiles, with males fancy free.” Unfortunately, today there is little market for general articles such as these.

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Kangaroo Controversy In 1983, following the appearance of a film called Goodbye Joey, I wrote an article for Animal Kingdom called “Kangaroo Controversy.” The film was about kangaroos in Australia becoming extinct because they were being shot for their meat and described the cruelty of their killers (Dagg 1984d). It was a bizarre debate between pro-animal groups who wanted to stop the cruelty of shooting kangaroos by claiming they were being wiped out and ranchers who were being driven into poverty by the thousands of roos on their huge properties in the outback. The outcome would have a huge effect, as it would determine whether America, which bought much of this meat, would reaffirm that the ban it had earlier placed on kangaroo products should remain lifted. I was conflicted about the article because, although I didn’t want roos shot, they obviously were not endangered. While driving around backcountry Australia in 1982, during my husband’s third sabbatical, Mary and I had seen at least one kangaroo road kill per mile, even though traffic was almost non-existent. At one of our campsites a roo swiped a piece of cucumber from my plate of food, and I had a pushing match with another to keep it from crowding into our small tent, where it probably thought there would be more edibles. People I contacted for the article agreed heartily that kangaroos did not face extinction. Beatrice Storie, who lived on a 57,000 acre ranch in Queensland, had found her property swarming with about 8,500 kangaroos during a drought; meanwhile, her cattle and sheep had to have food shipped in for them at huge expense. Storie wrote me that if all the “Save the Kangaroo” people gave 50 cents a week for each kangaroo, she would gladly get rid of her sheep and cattle; this would have been a form of agistment, a word that means paying rent for having one’s livestock fed and looked after. At the time, when the roos had reached plague proportions, owners hired shooters to cull the largest animals and sell the meat and hides. When I contacted Dr Geoff Sharman from Macquarie University about this problem, he explained that Australia is an 104

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arid zone country with rangelands rather than an agricultural program. Large kangaroos became common after the increase in grasslands and water sources by ranchers but only during droughts did kangaroos concentrate near human-constructed water sources, to the detriment of the cattle and sheep, so that ranchers felt compelled to shoot them to save their businesses. Sharman noted that killing large kangaroos at least brought some balance to the ecosystem and helped preserve smaller marsupials, although he believed that getting rid of feral nonnative donkeys, horses, camels, goats, pigs, cats, and rats would actually be far more beneficial to both domestic and native species. Almost all Australians were against the cruelty to kangaroos, which had been described at length in the media: animals deliberately shot to wound so their flesh would not decompose before the shooters came to finally kill and collect them days later; one male “shot up slowly” with thirty-eight bullet wounds; dogs ripping up roos “to save a bullet”; drunken men declaring that it was fun to blow away kangaroos “but more fun to blow away niggers”; visitors from overseas shooting a mother kangaroo so their kids could play with her doomed joey. Despite the controversy, in 1983 the United States renewed its decision to allow kangaroo products into its country. Heartened by the money I was earning from these articles, in 1984 I contacted the Canadian Science News Service hoping for more commissions, but nothing I suggested was approved for publication. Earlier, I had tried to sell an article on Mauritania and its camels to ten different magazines, also without success. You win some, you lose some. I was thrilled when at one point I was asked to be a consultant for World Book. This involved several meetings at the head office in Chicago during the twenty years I served in this capacity, but not much else. Every few months I might be asked to suggest a reviewer for some topic or to proofread an entry dealing with biology. Consultants were rewarded with first $2,000 a year, and later $2,500 each year along with a new and updated set of World Book. What a wonderful arrangement! A POTPOUrrI Of InTereSTS, 1972–1980

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Public Service While many people had helped me with my research in the 1960s, by the late 1970s I was helping others, many of whom wanted copies of my various papers. There was no such thing as emails with attachments in those days. Instead, I had to buy extra copies of each article from the publisher when it was first printed, put them in envelopes, buy stamps, and send them off by post. Some of these requests were odd; one came from a scientist who was researching fetal material on spotted or striped “carnivals,” meaning I suppose carnivores, and another was interested in “mole-rat moralities,” presumably mortalities. Mostly they asked about giraffe, flehmen, and locomotion (such as the ability of young crocodiles to gallop). Among the journals that asked me to referee articles by other scientists for them were Journal of Mammalogy, Journal of Chemical Ecology, Canadian Journal of Zoology, Canadian Field-Naturalist, and Science.

mammalia Some of my articles on giraffe were published in English in the journal Mammalia, based at the Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. When I read each issue, I was appalled by the bad translations of the English abstracts of the French articles. I contacted editor Jean Dorst to ask if he would allow me to translate the abstracts myself. He was delighted to hand this task off to me and from 1965 to 1987 sent me a small bunch of French abstracts before the publication of each issue, which I quickly translated into English and sent back by air mail. Sometimes the editors asked me to translate longer articles, which was overly optimistic of them given that, although I had taken five years of French in high school, I am certainly no linguist.

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American Museum of natural History In the 1960s, I also signed up to write abstracts of articles from Mammalia for the American Museum of Natural History’s bulletin. I gave this up in 1973 and was officially thanked for my voluntary services to the American Society of Mammalogists. In 1970, I was asked to write a Species Paper for the giraffe, which became no. 5 in a series that now numbers many hundreds. (It was hoped I would update the information in 2014, but the rules and specifications were so numerous and complex I decided that people should just read my new giraffe book instead.)

Working with youth One of my articles on climbing Mount Kilimanjaro (which I had done successfully in 1957) was published in a Grade 8 text and an article on my work also appeared in a Grade 7 text, both published by Gage Educational Publishing. These led to requests to talk about camels and giraffe in various schools in the Waterloo and Toronto areas, which I enjoyed. The Writers’ Union oversaw this program which was underwritten by the government, making it possible for authors to be paid $100 for each talk. During 1974 and 1975 I was asked to be a judge in the Waterloo Regional Science and Engineering Fair, probably because I was a woman and might inspire girls to become interested in science too. I hope I was an inspiration for them. Various other students wrote requesting help with their studies. One optimistic learner made me laugh by asking me to give her information on the Big Black Bear within five weeks (which was presumably when her essay was due). She specifically requested that I not send along a book (as if I would have) – perhaps because she did not want to deal with too many facts?

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Canadian Field-Naturalist Because of my work with urban animals, I became, for the year 1974–75, the book review editor for the Canadian FieldNaturalist. At the time, the editor-in-chief was Lorraine Smith, a friend who, like me, had married a scientist (biologist Don Smith) and then had been unable to find a full-time job after she earned her PhD. I enjoyed this work immensely, which included writing letters to people who were negligent in returning their review in a timely manner, thinking of people who might be interested in reviewing some of the new books on natural history, asking for and acknowledging free books from publishers for review and sending them to reviewers, and writing dozens of reviews myself, which also meant adding the books to my personal library. Based on the three books and twenty-five scientific articles I had had published by that time, Lorraine included me on her list of the top eight Canadian women scientists, living or dead, for an exhibit at the Canadian National Museum for International Women’s Year in 1975. I was thrilled! As one of the honoured scientists I was informed by Ottawa that I could give a speech at the opening of the exhibit if I wished. However, since I was offered neither money for train fare nor a hotel stay, I stayed home. This was a difficult time for The Canadian Field-Naturalist. It had been founded in 1880, originally to publish observations about nature by members of the Ottawa Field-Naturalists’ Club. In time, it became an important outlet for environmental research across Canada. Some Ottawa club members had begun asking why part of their membership fees (40%) was going to a publication “that appears to have minimum relevance to the club,” while others were happy with the status quo until another publisher could be found for research articles. In 1979, when the government of Canada was contemplating giving more money to science, especially molecular and laboratory science, Lorraine Smith wrote a column urging that more money be given to fieldwork. I backed her up in a response,

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arguing that whole animal research in nature should have priority over lab studies, as these could be undertaken at a later date while, because of the continuing and increasing spread of pesticides and the degradation of the environment, research in the field was ever more important and time-sensitive. It was fieldwork that had alerted naturalists to the decline of peregrine falcons because of the use of ddt in the wild, and freshwater studies that had identified acid rain as a cause of fish decline in Ontario lakes. I agreed with Lorraine that money for field research can go a long way, especially if it provides funds to dedicated and competent amateur naturalists. It can facilitate surveys of animal or plant numbers, support travel to out-ofthe-way places, and finance the publication of the data collected. Ideal for a citizen scientist!

integrated / independent Studies About this time, my academic university life was miraculously rejuvenated. I had applied to become a resource person in a small program called Integrated Studies (later Independent Studies) at the University of Waterloo and, because of my scientific background, was hired in 1978 to work part-time, to my delight. The program was set up so that students did not have to take regular university courses. Instead, they studied, largely on their own, whatever topics engaged their curiosity. After four terms, they wrote a thesis on a topic of their choice during their final third year and, if this was successful, earned their bachelor of Independent Studies degree (BIS). The theses were overseen by professors in faculties outside the program to ensure high standards. Many students goofed off and left after a while, but others thrived, becoming professors, doctors, scientists, or authors. One student, Ardy Verhaegen, wrote a history of the institution of the Dalai Lama with a foreword by his excellency himself. Another, Cory Doctorow, left is early to become an eminent science fiction author, speaking at cutting-edge conferences around the world.

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The program was run entirely by students, who for the first six years insisted that each resource person had to be hired anew every year; this was stressful but it did keep the seven of us on our toes. It had the disadvantage that, as a part-time employee, I was not allowed to apply for grants to do research. In 1986 I became part-time director of the program, a position I kept for the next three years. In 1989 I found myself in a battle to save the Independent Studies program along with my job as director. is was in chaos. My directive when I became the head in 1986 had been to move the program into a conventional structure similar to those of other university programs and departments. We would have actual courses taught by the is faculty and more stringent measures documenting student progress. Most drastically, the students would no longer hire their own faculty members. Needless to say, these proposed changes were not well received, especially by those students who chose to loaf about rather than study. One student stole the key to the copier, then ran off thousands of copies over a weekend. Others broke into my office when I was away so that they could use my phone to make long-distance calls. Some refused to write the required yearly report of their activities. The five resource people who would likely lose their jobs were also furious. One told students that I was destroying the program by enforcing the changes I had been hired to make. Others tried to prevent the hiring of new resource people in the spring so they could keep their jobs; eventually a university lawyer had to intervene. These people objected to every new idea I suggested, but when I turned to my boss, the professor overseeing the program and the proposed changes, she insisted that I must handle the chaos on my own. “I will not have is students coming to my office and upsetting me,” she declared. Finally, the University Senate decided that the shenanigans of is’s students were giving the university such a bad name that the program must be completely renovated. A new director was chosen, all the resource people were fired, and for a time I was in limbo.

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I was distraught at probably losing my job after I had struggled so hard to follow the directives I had been given about upgrading the program. In an effort to save my position, I visited the dean of research, now one of the most prestigious chemists in Canada, to persuade him I was worthy of continuing to work in the Independent Studies program. I had checked out the Science Citation Index for academic papers published by the top professors in one of uw’s departments, and showed him that whereas I had 133 citations for the academic papers I had published, these five top professors had in comparison only 56, 46, 3, 1, and 1 citations. I had far more citations than all of them combined! The chemist replied with arguments that would have been laughable, were they not so important to my future. He declared emphatically that most of my papers had been written years before (as if that made them invalid); he wondered if my work would really stand up to scrutiny (although importance is what citations measure); he noted that there were a number of doubtful professors on campus (apparently meaning that I shouldn’t compare myself with the worst, although the worst, of course, were in some cases highly ranked male full professors). He was determined to prove that women could not cut it in academia. Surely his classic responses had been used for decades against women and other minorities? I was delighted when it was finally decided that I could continue working as an advisor in is, officially to offer continuity for the program. Unfortunately, the program finally closed down in 2016 because it had too few students. It was such an amazing venture for its time that I wrote an unpublished history of its early days. While I am now out of a job, my children are working and enjoying their own married lives. Hugh, who studied mathematics at the University of Waterloo, works for a high tech company. Ian, because of his strong mechanical bent, fits in well with Canada Post. Mary, a chartered accountant, is the financial officer of a law firm. My only grandchild, Nicholas, Ian’s son, has just finished high school.

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A family photo with children Mary, Ian, and Hugh about 1967, when I was completing my PhD.

Ian and I celebrate in 1986 my new part-time position as the first director of Independent Studies at the University of Waterloo.

On a camel trip in Mauritania, along with two guides. each animal was so large that it had to lie down if we needed to ride, so that we could clamber onto the saddle on its back.

Hugh Dagg, Ian Dagg, and Mary Dagg at a Christmas reunion, 2015.

resting after dinner in the Canadian north during a week-long canoe trip. Alan Cairns, my partner, is reading a joke.

My reengagement with giraffe in 2010 at the Phoenix Zoo. Keeper Amy Phelps had read my 2006 book Pursuing Giraffe: A 1950s Adventure and invited me to the first International Giraffe Conference as an honoured guest. I was thrilled.

An afternoon with twenty boys living in one house in nairobi who, unlike most poor children, were able to attend school. I taught some of them part of “Oh, Canada” so we could impress Alison reid, the president of free Spirit films, with whom I travelled through Kenya. The Canadian charity financing this project is Life 4 Kids.

In 2015, daughter Mary and I and the film crew visited a school for black children near Kruger national Park in South Africa. All wore uniforms; without one, a child could not attend school.

Making movies is exhausting! We are near the border of the Kruger national Park, which we visited twice to film giraffe.

.9. A Sexist University: How Bad Was It? Awful!

In the 1970s, sexism was rampant at the three Ontario universities with which I had experience, and therefore probably in all universities. However, I began to truly understand sexism and feminism in February 1979, when Carol Brooks, a fellow resource person in Integrated/Independent Studies, gave a talk on sexist language to our women’s group. “Open these copies of the thesaurus at the word ‘male,’” she told us, handing out the books. There were various entries under this word – gentleman, sir, master, yeoman, swain, chap, virility, etc., as one would expect. “Now look up the word ‘female.’” To our dismay, the words included “weaker sex, frail, skirt, broad, tomato, effeminate, unmanly, bitch, and vixen.” What a bombshell! Suddenly all was crystal clear – it was men who wrote books such as the thesaurus. It was men who were in charge of virtually everything in the world! Men were often dismissive of women, but women were not in a position that allowed them to be dismissive of men. Before this, if someone had asked me why there were no female chefs, I would have answered, “I suppose women don’t cook as well?” even though I knew that vast numbers of cooks were women. Now I realized it

was not that women lacked cooking ability but that the men who ran the restaurants hired men rather than women to be chefs! An epiphany! My mind immediately underwent a cataclysmic shift: I should not be mulling over “Poor me!” because I had lost my job at the University of Guelph. Instead I should face the fact that likely all universities were unfair to women – half the population – and in fairness they must be turned into institutions of equality. From that moment on I would no longer obsess over my own problems with sexism but fight for equality for all academic women, for women of all sorts, for anyone suffering from tyranny. Early universities all over the world served men rather than women, but once women obtained a toe-hold in these institutions, as a few did in Canada over 130 years ago, some of them have fought for greater equality with men. Unfortunately, achieving equality is taking a long, long time. For over fifty years I worked to make the University of Waterloo as open to women as possible, a particularly difficult task as Waterloo was founded for students in engineering and science, who at the time were virtually all male, so it has had an especially difficult time learning to welcome women as well as men into its portals. This chapter is a brief history of a university encountering feminism over this time, as seen through my eyes. In 1959, Ian and I had come to the University of Waterloo where Ian was hired as an assistant professor of physics. (He later became head of the department.) At the time the university was focused on engineers and science and the faculty and students were almost all men. Almost immediately Ian became a member of the University Senate, which was composed of male officials and male professors along with one woman, Dorothea Walter, who taught French. When it came time to plan a Christmas party for the senators, there was some worry: St Jerome’s Catholic College, which was affiliated with the university, was known to have an excellent bar, but Dorothea, because she was a woman, would not be allowed to attend the gathering if it were held there. What to do? The men celebrated at the party and Dorothea stayed home. 122

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Later, in March 1975, while dining at the University Club, Ian and I listened to President Burt Matthews presiding over a PHT dinner to honour the wives of students working full-time at Putting Hubby Through. In his speech, Matthews thanked the women for their work, assuring them that after their husbands graduated, they would be able to relax for the rest of their lives while the men earned their living. There was no thought that the wives were as deserving as their husbands of a university education or that women might want to do more with their lives than relax. In the 1970s, many departments at uw were still refusing to hire women professors, including the history department. Those who objected were often mocked with comments such as “We don’t need histories of women with house-maids’ knee in Belleville.” The Biology Department didn’t hire a woman professor until 1976. Earlier the dean of science, Bill Pearson, had been adamant that women should not have academic jobs at universities if they had a husband to support them. An engineering professor unhelpfully reported that when he read about “professional women,” he thought of prostitutes. In the 1980s and 1990s, things were little better, with President Douglas Wright, for example, agreeable to the university hosting beauty pageants on campus. The lone female philosophy professor argued loudly that not only was affirmative action for hiring women not needed but no more women professors should be hired. Faculty members who belonged to the university’s Professional Women’s Organization refused to help push for more female professors, given that doing so might destroy their own chances of advancement at the university. Even so, a few other university women and I kept up a steady stream of articles and letters in the university media into the 1990s, arguing that women must be allowed to become professors in the interests of fairness to them and to students. But little changed. University committees rarely had women members, few women were being hired to teach, and women students complained of sexism in their courses. In all, feminists continued to face an uphill battle, with many male students turning against them. a SexiSt UniverSity

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One anti-rape campaign for “No means NO” was parodied by a banner reading “NO means HARDER!” During this time, Dr Henry Morgentaler came to the university to give a talk on abortion, which showed that the university could be broad-minded on occasion. Before his evening speech in the Physical Activity Building about 200 people picketed outside against abortion, marching many abreast in a large circle. Five or six of us marched beside them going the other way, carrying pro-choice signs. I wasn’t sure if my husband would join us, given that this was not one of his prime interests, but he loyally did. A fellow professor soon stopped him, asking, “Why do you want to kill babies?” Ian blanched and was much relieved when the march ended. In the early 1980s, many women on campus were disgusted when strippers were featured at engineering stag parties and in the engineering students’ newspaper Enginews. Each issue was raunchier than the last – photos of a naked man, photos of nude women, talk of penises, etc. Once (4 November 1983), the Engineering Society’s official “parade” featured a stripper who, clad only in a coat and G-string, marched around campus and into several lecture halls, disrupting classes. Many women objected to this event to the president and the provost, arguing that if the university really wanted to attract women to engineering, as it had indicated, this was hardly the way to go about it. All their pleas were ignored. “We have no control over Enginews,” these top men argued piously. “It’s run by the engineering students themselves. We believe in freedom of the press, so there’s nothing we can do.” This answer seemed to me ridiculous. I made a collage of some of the most horrid photos from Enginews and paid a student to make copies and mail them to the 150 churches listed in the phone book. Enginews closed down almost immediately – apparently the head men had had more control than they realized! It was replaced by a more reputable newspaper, still extant, The Iron Warrior. The head honchos had disproved themselves. At this time the Ridgid Tool was the emblem of the engineers; it was a very large black pipe wrench carried by several hooded 124

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Tool Bearers, engineering students wearing long black robes festooned with chains. I once met the tool’s entourage stalking through the Student Life Centre and was scared; if they knew I was a feminist troublemaker, what might they do? Fortunately, they seemed to be after symbolism rather than women at the time. Feminists from Independent Studies and a few other women started slowly to try to emancipate uw from its male beginnings. For International Women’s Day on 8 March 1986, we organized a weekend museum in the Campus Centre. I set up two displays: one of female animals and their lives and the other on ten women scientists. There was also a Celebration of Hats, collected from a variety of sources, to be tried on near a mirror, and exhibits of Where Sex Began, Language, Women’s Music, and a poetry reading by my friend Bev Sawyer. It was financed by the Mary Quayle Innis Foundation, which I had founded as a registered charity in memory of my mother and which had enabled me to give scores of is women students in need $100 a month to help them through the term; both men and women students often worked part-time to keep themselves in university but men made more money than the women. In 1988, in a big step forward, I became co-editor of the newsletters of the Faculty Association of the university (fauw). This was a wonderful position in which to work for women academics on campus. For most editions, several women and I made sure that there was information about sexism on campus: for one, I wrote an article about faculty wives being refused university positions because they were faculty wives, an article that was later published in an education journal (Dagg 1993a). It did not matter that the women’s credentials were often as good as or better than some of the male professors’. Our feminist exhortations ended in 1991 when conservative professors took over the uw Faculty Association. One heated controversy had involved a professor who had announced to a female student wearing a T-shirt, “I like your chest.” The student complained to us. We women decried this personal comment, while faculty members insisted the remark a SexiSt UniverSity

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was entirely about the T-shirt, not the woman in it. When we castigated the faculty to which this man belonged, his colleagues argued that they should not be blamed for one bad apple. But if we targeted the man himself, this was seen to be too personalized and therefore unfair. Hmm. It wasn’t just about jobs. Much more was at stake. For example, when I wrote an item indicating that the Sociology Department did not hire enough women, a male sociology professor argued with me that this was because women had to look after children. He also wrote that women insist “on new approaches to research and teaching, new methods and theories, drastic changes in the content of sociology itself. Last year, for example, a female job candidate here devoted her seminar presentation to uncovering male bias in the conduct of Canadian demography. It was not because she was a woman that the job went instead to a man. It was because of the kind of woman she turned out to be.” I am sure he planned his argument to be persuasive, but instead it reeked of all that was wrong with any department – the insistence that old ways were best and no new ideas should be tolerated. Shortly after this, the leading female sociologist at uw left to become head of the Sociology Department in a university in the west. We few feminists fought hard for more women professors, but many more uw professors fought back. In 1990, eleven of them (including one female) wrote to the premier of the province, Bob Rae, opposing the push by the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (ocufa) for employment equity. One article by a male lauded “familyism,” not feminism – women’s place was in the home, raising large healthy families, rather than interfering in the work of men. A uw philosopher wrote to the Ontario Ministry of Education stating that affirmative action should not be undertaken and, against all evidence, that in any case it was men who had been discriminated against in university hirings rather than women. The University of Waterloo could have tempered some of the anger of academic women by small concessions, but it refused to do so. In 1991 the teachers given Distinguished Teacher Awards were all men,

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chosen by a committee of eleven men. A lawyer famous for the sexist jokes he told in his law course for math students was one of them. Other universities were also in turmoil because of feminism. Andrew Irvine from the University of British Columbia wrote a long article, “Jack and Jill and employment equity,” arguing that there was no discrimination against women so there was no problem. uw alumnus Grant Brown, then at the University of Lethbridge, wrote a forty-two-page, single-spaced paper denouncing preferential policies for women. For each such missive I came across, I wrote an argument to counter it to go to the author or the press, or both. In 1990, Gordon Freeman, a chemistry professor, published a guest editorial in an issue of the Canadian Journal of Physics (of all places!) that was a diatribe against women. He insisted that the “tendency to cheat correlates strongly with the absence of a full-time mother at home.” Because of all the excitement, five of us at the university, three of them women, all but me librarians, decided to form a discussion group to publish bi-monthly issues of what we called Musings: Women Talking with Men Talking with Women. Our aim was “to foster better relations and understanding between women and men in the university setting and in society as a whole.” A noble aim. I wrote an article called “Rational man” for one of the two copies we produced, indicating that men often use a single example to prove women should not be involved in male business. Unfortunately, at our last meeting there was a horrific quarrel between the two men, to which we women listened in amazement. The men marched in a rage out of the house where we were assembled, leaving the three of us thunderstruck. The group never met again. In 1995, the year I burned out fighting for women’s rights, academic men were still arguing that affirmative action for women was unfair, even though the percentage of women teaching in uw had only crept up to 15%; twenty-two years before it had been 5%. One visiting male professor raged, in an invited public lecture, about discrimination and unfair hiring practices

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against white, able-bodied men: he announced with horror that there was a chance that some inferior woman could be hired instead of a better-trained man, as if this had not already happened in reverse to hundreds of highly trained women. Sexual assaults were continuing on campus, two men on the faculty had been accused of sexual harassment, and a professor leading a trip for students off campus was fined (but not dismissed) for sexually assaulting one of the students. And I had to laugh when a professor wrote to the local newspaper pointing out that what the world really needed was more babies, which women should be at home producing. But better news recently! Canadian universities continue to be bedeviled by sexism, but the University of Waterloo has come a long way. In 2015, 27% of first-year engineering students were women, as were 15% of professors in both engineering and computer science. At the spring 2015 convocation, two of four Distinguished Teacher Awards and three of five Honorary Doctorates were presented to women. A few weeks later, two uw women professors in engineering and chemistry were admitted to the Order of Canada. And the present dean of engineering is a woman, Dr Pearl Sullivan.

. 10 . Social Activism: Working for equality for Women in the Arts I was not yet a full-fledged feminist when I joined the newly formed The Writers’ Union of Canada (twuc) in 1974 after the publication of my book Canadian Wildlife and Man, even if I had the makings of one. (I had been nominated by distinguished author Margaret Laurence, a friend of a friend of my mother.) I felt completely insignificant when I attended twuc meetings in Toronto. The men present were perfectly self-assured, speaking out and making jokes while most of the women sat silent. For my first seven years I took advantage only of the Writers-in-theSchools program, trooping off every few months to enlighten some ten-year-olds about camels or giraffe or Australia. Once I dressed up as a camel person in sarouel, shirt, and turban. The kids loved it. At the Independent Studies program, where I hung out two days a week, writer Harold Horwood from Newfoundland had also been hired as a resource person and we worked closely together, talking to students and organizing a weekly writers’ session. Students both inside the program and out brought their writing to the group to be assessed by the rest of us. uw student

George Elliott Clarke, now the Parliamentary Poet Laureate, sometimes attended. It was great! At the 1981 Writers’ Union agm, which I attended as usual, out of the blue Harold, as the past president and chair, announced that Anne Dagg had been a member of the group for many years and would now make an excellent addition to the board. I was startled, abashed, and delighted. Harold told me later that when the votes were counted I had headed the polls, with twice as many votes as the next person! Harold had set me on the path from nonentity to superstar! Had he not praised me, there is no way my name would even have been on the ballot. The board, chaired that year by Margaret Atwood, even though she was, as always, incredibly busy with her own writing, met more or less bimonthly throughout the year to discuss such issues as how authors should be rewarded when their books were borrowed from libraries, an idea which later came to fruition in Public Lending Rights; preparation of a writers’ handbook by the Book Editors’ Committee; and a change to Ontario Arts Council grants so that authors would receive more money for their work. In February 1982, Margaret Atwood came to give a talk at the University of Waterloo, which I had helped to arrange. Several months later I organized a reading by Marian Engel. Women writers were in ascendancy, at least for a bit. As a board member, I served on the Book Editors’ Committee and the Library Committee during my one-year term. What should the former group do? I suggested making the in-house rules of various publishers available to authors. For example, if a Canadian press insists on American rather than British spellings, it should inform its authors of this before the final manuscript was typed (these were pre-computer days). Another problem was money. Bristol Foster and I had had a rude shock with our giraffe manuscript when, after it had been accepted for publication in May by the University of Chicago Press, in December it was decided unilaterally that “special editing” was needed – and that it would cost us the royalties on the first 1,000 copies sold. Bristol and I were not amused, needless to say, knowing this would be

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a sizeable chunk of our reward for years of work. No one on the committee was much interested in my comments. Indeed, I was to find that when a committee usually met only once or so a year, it was very hard to get anything at all done. However, our committee did produce a new editing booklet. Being a member of the Library Committee was more interesting. The committee was involved in efforts to have libraries in Canada buy more books by Canadians. I offered to head the committee, but I could sense the unease in the group about having this unknown woman be chair. So Keith Maillard was elected with me as “co-chairmen,” he being considered by the staff to be the main person. A total of fourteen more people asked to serve on the committee, although a few were never heard from again. Nevertheless, it seemed like a good project for me and I worked hard at it. The day after the agm, I contacted four local libraries to ask if they had a policy about buying books by Canadians, whether their library would like to buy more such books, and if so, how twuc might help it to do so. They all claimed that they did buy books by Canadians but indicated that the quality of such books prevented them from buying more. “Why buy second-rate books which will only sit on the shelf?” was their attitude. Keith Maillard replied to my letter explaining this, suggesting that the best way to proceed would be to gather statistics about which books were bought by Canadian libraries and which books were borrowed. As he was busy with a rewrite of one of his own books, I decided to work ahead on my own. In early June, Keith resigned from the committee because of time commitments on his own writing, suggesting that I become the chairman (sic) based on “the enthusiasm she’s already shown.” However, it was decided that Jim Bacque, who was interested in school libraries, would be co-chair with me of the Library Committee, although I would continue to write the reports of the Library Committee to the board. The next week I wrote to all the committee members to ask what their ideas were for this committee. My suggestion

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was that members should go to their own public libraries across Canada and check if they owned a number of Canadian classics, such as Gutenburg Galaxy by Marshall McLuhan, The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be by Farley Mowat, and Swamp Angel by Ethel Wilson. Merna Summers, Carol Shields, Dorris Heffron, Alastair Sweeney, Katherine Govier, Jim Quixley, and staff member Mary Jacquest responded with long helpful ideas. Quixley would later agree to be the Library Committee’s liaison person for the Ontario Library Association and the Canadian Library Association. (One twuc member, however, noted that if a library buys her book, then the person who reads it has not bought it. Hmm.) By the end of August I sent out a missive correlating their ideas to all committee members and reported on them at a September meeting of all twuc chairmen of committees. Following this, we compiled a list of books, all published in the 1970s, of ten fiction and ten non-fiction titles that we felt all Canadian libraries should have. Unfortunately, at a meeting in Toronto of the Ontario Public Libraries Programme Review Public Hearings in September, I found that virtually nothing was reported or discussed about the need for Canadian content in our libraries. Remarkable! However, it could have been worse: a man born in the Middle East commented at the meeting that he thought libraries should have up-to-date information on various human races and noted that one book in a Toronto library defined Arabs (such as himself) as people who live in moving tents. On 31 October 1981, at the semi-annual meeting of the entire board run by Margaret Atwood (who continued sewing her daughter’s Hallowe’en costume as she listened), Jim Bacque was asked to give the Library Committee report, a decision that seemed sexist since I had done all the work so far. He announced that after he had become co-chair of the committee in June, following Keith’s resignation, “nothing happened.” Fortunately I had my report at hand, stood up, noted that actually much had happened, and explained what I had done. I continued to write the monthly reports on behalf of the committee for the twuc

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Newsletters that went out to all members, helped especially by Janet Lunn and Marian Engel. In January 1982, I sent a draft of the brief I had written for the Ontario Public Libraries Review Board to the Library Committee members asking for input. I also pushed for better libraries in Canadian embassies abroad: authors had complained that those in London, Washington, and Athens were poor. Why not offer each embassy a showcase of excellent books being published by Canadian writers? The letter I received back from Ottawa was a mastery of bafflegab, extolling the importance of Canadian writers while not promising that any of their books would be bought for embassies. I submitted a final brief from the Library Committee, “Canadian books for Ontario public libraries,” at the 1982 agm when Robin Skelton became the new head of the twuc. It emphasized the importance of Canadian culture and therefore of books by Canadians, noting that many people wanted to read them. And, of course, that writers needed to make more money from their writing. The rewards for authors of books were slim, with fewer books by Canadians being published in the late 1970s as compared to earlier periods. The 1978 median income of Canadian full-time writers was a pitiful $1,250 for novelists and $2,000 for non-fiction authors. Casual surveys of library shelves showed that Canadian books might be only 1% to 2% of total holdings in a public library. I argued that with a will this situation could be rectified. The Toronto Public Library, which had decided this issue was important, had been able to increase their holdings of books by Canadians from 7% of their collection to 16% by 1979. An understanding of the need for library books by Canadian writers stayed with me, prompting me to do further statistical analysis the following year after we returned from my husband’s third sabbatical in Australia. Whatever influence I had had during my term of office had dissipated by the time I returned to Canada, but I continued to work for change. At the 1984 June agm, following a report by a task force on porn and censorship of the Rights and Freedoms

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Committee, twuc members voted that there be no censorship of any kind in Canada. However, the vote was not unanimous. I am against censorship of the written word but felt that pornography with violence in films and videos should be banned. Some women agreed with me, but a few did not. The twuc was deeply divided on this matter, with more men than women against censorship of any kind. Because of this division, in 1984 two women sent out a questionnaire about sexual discrimination in the writing world; 36% of twuc members responded. However, the negative feedback, mostly by men, was so unpleasant that they decided not to do a numerical analysis of the results. When Janet Lynn, the chair in 1984, asked me to take on this analysis, I agreed. My data from other sources already showed that although over half of serious writers in Canada were women, they were authors of only about a third of books published, earned less than half what men earned (data from Statistics Canada), and were much less likely than men to have their books reviewed or to do the reviewing. Because our report indicating this discrimination against women writers was not taken seriously at the 1985 agm, I objected in writing to what seemed to be censorship by the twuc. Alice Munro, in a friendly letter to me, stated that she did not believe there was sexual discrimination, nor was I able to persuade her otherwise. Perhaps those who are successful don’t worry about discrimination? In 1986 I returned to an issue that had bothered me five years earlier: I enlarged my study of the purchase by public libraries of books by men and women, which heavily favoured men’s books, using as data recently published fiction and non-fiction books purchased by six public Ontario libraries. The 1984 list of books published in Canada showed that 71% were by men, although women writers were more numerous in Canada. As writers, men were still doing far better than women, so I was pleased when the Canadian Library Journal agreed to publish my article “Wanted: More books by women” (Dagg 1987). In 1986 a Women Writers’ Committee was formed for the twuc which Myrna Kostash asked me to join. I agreed 134

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immediately. Our group continued the push to have our union work toward making women more equal with men when it came to having their work published, reviewed, and bought by public libraries. Most men were either uninterested or antagonistic to this crusade, as were many women. However, we battled on. I prepared a fact sheet about sexism in writing for the 1987 agm. Our committee was thrilled when at our instigation, the membership voted that twuc should send letters to the Canada Council (later the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council), major newspapers, magazines, universities, and public libraries across Canada urging them to give women writers and their books equal attention with men writers and their books. This was to be a consciousness-raising exercise so that these institutions and groups would at least begin to consider the problem of systemic sexual discrimination in the writing industry. The twuc chair at the time was Pierre Berton, who was unimpressed with this development; indeed, he insisted at our meetings on using sexist language, talking often about the writer and “his” craft, although scores of women authors were sitting right in front of him and one member had objected openly to his language. The Women Writers Committee was ecstatic with our first triumph. All summer we waited to hear that the letters had gone out. I wrote to Berton twice to remind him that the agm had voted to do this. In October, I wrote to him again, including a page of the extensive data I had collected from my own research and that of other women, which noted that Canadian women writers were disadvantaged in thirteen different ways. I received back a disingenuous note saying “You will be pleased to know we are in the process of doing a survey of the book pages of the major newspapers for the last two years. We anticipate being able to hire an independant [sic] professional company to carry out the survey. I am sure once we have solid information we can go to the newspapers, publishers, and booksellers and get a real commitment to improve the coverage and advertising of our books.” Berton was telling us in effect that our data were suspect (perhaps he reasoned this was a given because they had been collected by SOCIAL AC TIvISM

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women), that twuc would be willing to spend money to collect other data instead, and that, really, he had no interest in working for equality for women. The letters were never sent out. We were disgusted. In the late 1980s, author Sheelagh Conway joined the fight, working not only for the equality of women with men but for the equality of non-white women with whites. Up to this point no one, including me, had thought about racism at twuc, in part because we didn’t know any non-white authors. It soon became apparent, however, when we talked with black women, that they faced even more discrimination than the rest of us. At the 1989 agm Sheelagh asked that twuc look into possible racism in the writing industry, but the agm voted down her motion. We both resigned from twuc because of this. Together we tried to start a new Canadian Women Writers’ group that would be anti-racist, but at the time either too few women were interested or too few saw the flyers we sent out to make it viable. As for the women’s group of twuc, it has long since been disbanded. As a twuc woman friend told me recently, there are lots of women in the union so we don’t need all that acrimony about feminism. Between 1980 and 2000, I worked hard as a feminist to increase equality for women in our society. Mostly, this took the form of writing articles and books and giving talks. I have always been interested in non-fiction books – things that really happened always seem far more intriguing than things made up by novelists – so in 1980 I drew up a list of seventy-five engrossing non-fiction books that I had read in the past twenty-five years. In the booklet 76 Terrific Books about Women, produced (perhaps needless to say) by Otter Press, it notes that proceeds will go to the Kitchener-Waterloo Status of Women group that I had recently helped found; unfortunately, as it turned out, a faction within the group felt so threatened by my enthusiasm for feminist action rather than just listening to women speakers that the group soon refused to consider the booklet as a fundraiser. Realistically there was no profit anyway,

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at 75 cents per copy, so there was no problem beyond my hurt feelings. The biographies were all by women, including Camel Quest by me. Years later, in 1984, I was honoured by this same group with a Human Rights Award, so apparently some of the members had valued my earlier efforts after all. In 1981, a friend and I became interested in promoting science for women as well as sports for girls, and we wondered if there was a connection between these two aims. Were girls who were given the opportunity to play sports more likely than their sedentary friends to study science in university? Before we began any research, in 1984 the document Can I Play?: Report of the Task Force on Equal Opportunity in Athletics (Sopinka Report) was published. It was an assessment of physical activities for boys and girls in public schools in Ontario, noting that boys were far more advantaged than girls in sports and exercise, and that such activities should be equal for both. In high school in the 1970s, as my daughter reported, boys could be involved in football and hockey but there was little in place for girls. By 1986, the Department of Physical and Health Education of the Waterloo County Board of Education had prepared a response to the report, indicating that things were going well the way they were and that it disagreed with some of the Can I Play? recommendations. Independent Studies student Barbara Saunders and I, who disagreed sharply with this response, prepared our own reaction to it, which we were allowed to present to the Board of Trustees of the Board of Education for Waterloo County. We noted that although responses to the Sopinka Report were requested from both teachers and parents, 164 male teachers but only 84 female teachers responded. In the parents’ survey, where the majority of respondents were female, twenty-eight questions were omitted and the wording was changed on some of the remaining questions. Most importantly, though, the parent respondents were “selected” and “identified” because their children were already active in the athletic program. There was no input from parents whose children were not active in such programs, so the parents’

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survey was heavily biased toward current practices, which had many more boys than girls involved. We hoped that our activities would make some difference to girls in school. About this time Pat Davis of the University of Waterloo Athletics Department and I delved deeper into the question of female and male participation in sport, writing a paper called “Women’s bodies in sport: Will amalgamation or integration mean progress?” It was published in 1988 by the Canadian Association for the Advancement of Women and Sport which renamed it “Going co-ed spells trouble for women” (Dagg and Davis 1988). Early on in Canadian history, only men’s sports were important. But in the 1900s girls and women became interested in sports too, forming their own groups. They were happy to be “separate but equal,” although actually they were seldom equal because they had far less money to support their initiatives. Well after the Second World War, many men’s and women’s sporting bodies in Canada and America began to amalgamate to save money, share expertise, and increase their power. This seemed like a good idea in theory, but we noted in our article that it usually did not work out well for women in practice. For each sport, theoretically either the woman or the man head could be chosen to lead a common group; almost invariably, however, it was the man who took over this task. Mainly this was because the men’s groups were almost always stronger and more entrenched, and men tended to be seen as more natural leaders. Because of this bias, decisions for the future were usually to the men’s advantage rather than the women’s. We sent our article to the Girl Guides of Canada to urge them not to join the Boy Scout movement, which at that time was considering opening its membership to girls of all age levels. I am glad to report that the Girl Guide movement is still going strong in Canada. My ire over sexism in language was aroused in 1982 when, on the ship to Australia for my husband’s third sabbatical, a few of us studied Northrop Frye’s book about the Bible, The Great Code. From Brisbane I wrote to Frye to object to some of the sexist language in his book. He replied that he would not have thought

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“anyone would take ‘men producing flood myths’ as meaning to exclude women, any more than the phrase ‘lions are found in Africa’ would be taken to exclude lionesses.” I replied tartly that if one saw three lions in the Serengeti one might exclaim “Look at the lions,” but if one saw three women, one would not say “Look at the men!” However I did thank him for the work he had done on behalf of my father’s History of Communication manuscript (which was only finally published in 2016 [Buxton et al. 2016]). Because of this communication with Frye, a famous man who I had assumed would be more sensitive to language, on my return to Canada in 1983 I decided to start a newsletter about sexist language called Language Alert Newsletter, or lan. It had two intended recipients. The first was publishers that produced books with sexist themes or language and the second was anyone interested in the subject. The newsletters were first sent free to those I felt needed to be educated, but I soon began asking for $5 a year from individuals and $10 from institutions that wanted to receive every issue, each of which averaged three or four pages. For lan’s content, I analyzed any book I happened to be reading, along with others sporting suspicious titles. At first I planned to produce an issue every few months, to be accompanied for publishers by a page of guidelines by me on non-sexist language. However, the periods between issues became progressively longer, especially toward the end of its life, until it ran completely out of steam and folded in 1991. The issues themselves are available in the University of Waterloo Archives. Language Alert Newsletter noted that sexist language was incredibly common in 1983. Here are typical examples from the first lan issues. The World Wildlife Fund asked for money to help two species: Peregrine falcon, which were described as “He can dive 250 km per hour,” and the “Burrowing Owl: Harmless to man. Would you shoot him?” In two important books, Betrayers of the Truth and The Mismeasure of Man, the authors both indicated that science was virtually entirely a male pursuit.

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In Japanese Society, women were mentioned on only two pages in the index, while there was no entry at all for men because the entire book was about them. The Fossil Hunters discussed many men and women workers but the author concluded: “It is a wholesome thing, and helpful, to remember the good work men have done, and to thank God for it and for them.” My fourth issue was an especially important one, because it highlighted the sexist language used by the Faculty of ManEnvironment at the University of Waterloo. This faculty contained seventeen courses in seven departments or divisions that had sexist titles, as did one department itself, the Department of Man-Environment. For example, various courses were called “Anthropology and the Future of Man,” “Early Man in the New World,” “Philosophy of Man,” and “Mankind and Nature.” How could female students feel welcome in such a testosteronal environment? By the summer of 1988, in issue 19, I was delighted to report that the environmental academics had smartened up. They now belonged to the Faculty of Environment and Resource Studies; as well, every single department and course had a gender-neutral name. My feminist friends and I were exultant! Sad, though, that graduates of most or all universities continue to this day to be addressed as alumni, the masculine form of the word. There had also been some good news earlier in issue 6 which described how Dr Michael Myers had written at length in the Canadian Medical Association Journal about the need for doctors to treat women properly in their language so that they no longer felt insulted, offended, and alienated. Good for him! So there was some progress. When I wrote to the Royal Ontario Museum in 1986 about sexist language in an exhibit, I received a letter saying that they had made an error and would change it. Good! Then some regression. Five years later, this museum launched an exhibit called “Mankind Discovering” in which it was explained about the polar bear that “he’s fitted for [the hostile environment].” And of course men fought back. Two wrote that “some niceties are worth keeping, simply because they help simplify a 140

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complicated language,” and “there are far more important issues to resolve in this world before altering common usage to appease one’s prejudice.” Members of the United Church Renewal Fellowship published 20,000 copies of a sixteen-page publication attacking the United Church of Canada’s move toward the use of inclusive language. One minister wrote, “Changing language is not as simple as substituting words. Such changes have far-reaching implications and in many instances have gone to the very heart and core of the Christian faith.” Exactly. One senator, Louis Robichaud, was also annoyed, as I noted in a 1986 issue, because the government planned to change the sexist name of the National Museum of Man. He argued that the name was not sexist because “a woman was a man with a womb.” An odd statement. “I want to get something off my manly chest,” he told the Senate, probably pompously. He stated that the feminist movement would “change the term horse-power to animalpower because horse-power is too sexist.” Hmm. “We talk about dog food: well, a dog is a male. What are we to then call it, animal food? Are we to do that just to satisfy the appetite of these people?” He claimed that he had many friends of the “feminine gender,” but added he would not want to be a friend of a staunch feminist because “I am afraid someone would call me a homosexual.” From a feminist perspective, it is scary to note that this man had been made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1971, the highest honour awarded in Canada. Was the Language Alert Newsletter successful? I like to think so. During its existence, it analyzed the language used in ninety-eight books and fifty-four publications. One professor, Rota Lister, distributed an issue of lan to all the students in one of her English classes. lan obviously appealed to women rather than men, as its paid list of recipients included eight women’s magazines (such as Hysteria, Herizons, Broadside, and Kinesis), eight women’s groups (especially women’s centres at universities), twenty-three women, and two men (although a few other men were also encouraging). Obviously many women were interested in the question. Certainly sexist language is far less prevalent today than it was thirty years ago. SOCIAL AC TIvISM

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The Fifty Per Cent Solution: Why Should Women Pay for Men’s Culture?

As a scientist, I had not been thinking much about women outside science and academia. Then by chance, primed by feminist zeal, I finally noticed how ignored women were in the Canadian arts. I was jolted in 1984 by four encounters. In May, I visited the National Gallery in Ottawa, the permanent Canadian collection, which had paintings by dozens of men but the work of only one woman. Yet the gallery received $8 million a year of taxpayers’ money. In July, as mentioned earlier, I had documented that Canadian women writers were far less likely to be published than their male counterparts. In October, I found that a fine arts course at the University of Waterloo studied the work of twentyfour artists, twenty-three of them men. And in December, an English literature survey course at the same university focused on twenty-nine authors, all men. Wow! How to document this male bias so that it could be countered? The best way seemed to be to gather all the information I could about those active in the various arts, then compare these numbers with the number of men and women given grant money by the Canada Council. (Other groups also give taxpayers’ money to artists, but there was no reason to think they would be less or more biased.) I therefore checked out the number of male and female participants for writing, visual art, photography, music, theatre, dance, and film and video. Then, checking out statistics for all the disciplines supported by the Canada Council, I found from its own data (1983–84) that only 37% of grants were given to women and that members of juries always comprised more men than women with the exception of dance. When men dominated as judges, women received much less money than men, but when women dominated as judges, as in dance, women did much better. For the fine arts, I also noted that although women’s paintings were often praised and lauded when first exhibited, when men later wrote books about Canadian art, they usually excluded the work of even these women. 142

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Obviously men were being given much more money on average by the Canada Council for their artistic efforts, yet all Canadians supported this body with their taxes. Why should the work of men be far more validated than that of women? The jury decisions were subject to two possible biases: women might do the same sort of artistic work as men but be judged less able by male judges, or women might do completely original work and still by judged inferior. I wrote up my findings in a book called The Fifty Per Cent Solution: Why Should Women Pay for Men’s Culture? (Dagg 1986a). This seemed to me an important work, because the bias against women artists was so clear cut. The book was not fulminating vaguely about sexual inequality but offering concrete evidence that government funding advantaged men far over women. But this was surely also why I could not find a publisher for it, even though I had had it professionally edited at a cost of over $1,000. Perhaps I should not have been surprised, given that publishers themselves received money from the Canada Council; none wanted to bite the hand that fed it. Some editors claimed the statistics were boring, while some noted that I sounded too aggrieved (although one thought I was not angry enough!). My book evoked an amazing response from newspapers, magazines, and radio when in 1986 I published it myself under the Otter Press label ($8.00 with 50 cents for postage). The Writers’ Union voted to have a letter-writing campaign to redress the imbalance of government support for male and female members (although as I noted earlier, twuc chair Pierre Berton refused to carry this out); I sent out flyers to women in universities, to women’s bookstores, and to women’s groups across Canada, and gave talks to a meeting of the Canadian Authors’ Association and a group at the annual Canadian Association of Learned Journals meeting in Kingston. This campaign actually worked for a time. Before long, many more women were receiving money for their art from the government. This change was underlined for me when I met the head of the Canada Council socially and noticed how upset he became when told that I was the author of The Fifty Per SOCIAL AC TIvISM

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Cent Solution. Sad to say, though, fifteen years later, a 2015 survey by The Writers’ Union of Canada indicated that women writers are again badly off, with the average female writer earning only 55 cents for every dollar earned by her male counterpart (Taylor 2015). Canadians everywhere were traumatized when fourteen women university students were murdered in Montreal because they wanted to earn an engineering degree and have a career in this formerly all-male field. Friends Sheelagh Conway, Margaret Simpson, and I decided to produce an anthology of women’s non-fiction writing with the motto “No more silencing.” In our book Women’s Experience, Women’s Education – An Anthology (1991) we published the work of the twenty-four women (including ourselves) who responded to the flyer we sent out to women’s groups across Canada, each of whom sent in camera-ready copy to save on expenses. None was edited. The result was an eyeopening litany of life experiences, often deeply traumatic. Non-fiction interests me far more than fiction, although in my twenties I was enchanted by all the great world novels. Now, in my feminist phase, I wanted to know more about non-fiction women authors in Canada’s early days. In 1984 I had helped prepare a bibliography of eighty-five books by notable feminist women for a proposed dictionary/encyclopedia of Canadian women, a project headed by English professor Rota Lister and sociologist Hugh Miller. They noted that the Dictionary of Canadian Biography was woefully lacking in information about women: from 1900 to 1980, the then most recent date in the series, there were about 2,800 entries, of which only 4% were women. Their project was never completed, but it gave me the idea that I would follow up a few years later. I had another reason, too, to be interested in early women writers. My mother had edited three books about them: Mrs Simcoe’s Diary, a history of nursing education in Canada, and The Clear Spirit: Twenty Canadian Women and Their Times, under the auspices of the Canadian Federation of University 144

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Women. I felt it would be a fitting tribute to her memory if I carried on such work. I didn’t really think there would be all that many women writers of non-fiction, given the harsh conditions they faced in early Canada. Perhaps twenty-five or thirty? In 1988, I applied to the Canada Council for funding to write such a book, asking for $4,700 for research and $700 for travel, but this was denied. Silly me – as if the Council members wouldn’t remember the annoyance I had so recently caused them. No matter, I began to collect information, checking out all books that listed early writers and the books themselves from libraries across Canada. By 1992 I had lists of many hundreds women writers of non-fiction, far more than I had expected. The Journal of Canadian Studies published my article about the work, entitled “Canadian voices of authority: Non-fiction of early women writers” (Dagg 1992a), and even more names and leads were given to me to follow up. Good sources of information were archives at the Heliconian Club of Toronto (where my mother had been a member), Canadian Dictionary of Bibliography, and Biographical Scrapbooks 1911–1969 with eighty-nine volumes. Female authors were a varied lot: visiting Brits, doctors, nurses, mothers, aboriginals, social workers, mystics, volunteers, religious women, scholars, teachers, local historians, professors, professors’ wives, and upper-class women with titles or married to titled men. Eventually, I had a list of 650 women writers; these names, along with information about the authors and their books, became the basis of my compendium The Feminine Gaze: A Canadian Compendium of Non-fiction Women Authors and Their Books, 1836–1945 (2001b). I had expected to finish this research quickly, but this was not to be. On 29 January 1993 my world fell apart when, at the end of our regular Friday mixed doubles game at the Waterloo Tennis Club, Ian suffered a massive heart attack and died on the court. I knew I should rush to do something, as my friend Helen Nethercott did, summoning an ambulance. But I was so traumatized, so filled with disbelief, that I could only stare down at his still body in horror while another friend applied cpr. Ian was rushed to the nearest hospital by ambulance, but nothing SOCIAL AC TIvISM

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could be done. My children were equally devastated. Because of his status as chair of the Physics Department, he was given a funeral service by the University of Waterloo. My world and that of my children would never be the same again; he will always be remembered by us as a wonderful husband and father. For the next few years, I worked quietly away on this women writers’ project, finally sending the finished manuscript to the University of Toronto Press in 1996, after a request from an editor. It was then shipped to Ottawa to see if it merited funds from the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program. It took some committee two years to decide it was unworthy of this money. By mistake, when the manuscript was returned to me, a negative review by a feminist in the Maritimes was included (reviewers are always supposed to be anonymous). I shall not name her, but was disappointed that a female academic would be against such a book. At this point Sandra Woolfrey, editor of Wilfrid Laurier University Press, asked if she could see the manuscript. I was surprised, because wlu had received negative publicity after I had sued it for not holding interviews for an advertised teaching position as described earlier. But Sandra explained that the press was a separate entity over which the university had no authority. She read the reviews of my manuscript, found out who the reviewers were, and told me that their negativity may have arisen from positions in English departments that did not want competition. And Wilfrid Laurier Press published the book! I was thrilled that my years of work would not be wasted after all. The book’s many reviews were wonderfully positive. Books in Review noted, “This well-written, well-organized compendium is a lively read, and easy to access as a reference tool. It is an excellent starting point for literary, historical, and bibliographical research about the little-explored area of non-fiction writing.” Richard Cavell (2003), the reviewer for Biography, wrote, “Dagg has provided future scholars with an immensely important research base in this volume, and in doing so has made a signal contribution to the tradition about which she writes.” Clara Thomas (2002) for Canadian Woman Studies noted that “Anne 146

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Dagg has always been a committed feminist; her dedication and scholarship are constantly evident in the collection she has produced, one which will be endlessly useful to present and future investigators.” This was a wonderful end to my career as a feminist author. At this point in my life, I decided to go back to the behaviour of animals, my first love. I would write several books about the behaviour of male and female animals including human beings, then return to writing strictly about non-human animals, especially giraffe. I felt that the more people came to know about these many marvellous species, the more they might be willing to work against their possible degradation or extinction.

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. 11 . follow-Up: Homosexuality, Taxonomy, and mammalogists Almost all my biological research has been undertaken because of earlier work that piqued my interest. I saw homosexuality for the first time in wild giraffe, then decided years later, largely because of input from lesbian students, to see if this behaviour was common in other species as well. My confrontation with interesting taxonomic questions when I was an undergraduate made me decide to learn more about this science in a few other species later on. My analysis of research being done by mammalogists in Canada (Dagg 1989) made me eager to write about this question for a proposed encyclopedia, which unfortunately never saw the light of day.

Homosexuality My first experience with any sort of homosexual behaviour had been with the male giraffe I had watched at Fleur de Lys Ranch. Three years after I left Africa, Julian Huxley, a world famous zoologist travelling through Africa to report to unesco on the conservation of wildlife and natural habitats there, was intrigued

by the findings reported in my paper on giraffe. He wrote to me that “some of your observations are extremely interesting, not to say surprising, and I would like to have a look for myself.” I replied after checking with Mr Matthew that he would be welcome at Fleur de Lys, but he never had time to go there. Griff Ewer also wrote to me of Huxley’s interest in my “worldshattering observations” (her words). The observation that most excited him was the homosexual behaviour of the males. Although I had studied biology at university, the word “homosexuality” was never mentioned. Had I ever heard the word – and had time to think what on earth it might mean – I would have assumed there was no such thing, given the mandates of evolution. I remember, at university, a girl (we all called ourselves girls then) waving a limp wrist and going on about pansies, but I had no idea what she was talking about. In Africa a year later, when I saw a male giraffe mount another male, the word flew into my mind. This must be homosexuality. But why would they do this? I was shocked. I drove home for lunch to the house where I was staying, my mind in a turmoil. Should I tell the two men I dined with what I had seen? But what would they think? What would they think of me? I decided not to. Too embarrassing. I never told anyone. When I wrote up my observations of giraffe for publication, though, I knew I had to mention the frequent homosexual mountings I had observed, always between males, never between females (although in 2013 in Soysambu Conservancy, Kenya, I photographed one young female mounting another young female, a behaviour also observed in zoos). I felt that in science the truth must be presented no matter how unlikely or unwelcome. The editors at the Zoological Society of London who published my giraffe paper had not mentioned this part of my manuscript, nor did the many friends and colleagues to whom I sent the paper, although some said they had read it. Homosexuality was then a taboo subject; it must have been observed myriads of times in both captive and farm animals, but no one had written about it in the biological literature.

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My aunt, who lived on a farm, did object when she read my paper, though: I overheard her say to my uncle, in annoyance, “They should not allow young girls to see such things.” I didn’t hear the response of my uncle, who was deeply religious. But I often pondered later, with amusement, how such a prohibition could be organized. Would young women be forbidden to watch wild animals that lived in groups in case they got up to no good? Should men be hired who were prepared to scare animals off if they became too sexy while a young woman was looking their way? I had thought I was the first to observe homosexuality in the wild, but found recently that this was not so. Murray Levick, who was part of the 1910–13 Scott Antarctic Expedition, saw male Adelie penguins engaged in such behaviour, but he was so abashed by this discovery that he described what he saw in Greek so that only educated gentlemen would know “the horrors he had witnessed” (Toronto Globe and Mail, 11 June 2012, A16). Valerius Geist, with whom I had corresponded now and then when he was studying the behaviour of mountain sheep in western Canada, also noted homosexual behaviour among the rams he was observing – lots of it, actually. But he called it “aggressosexual” activity. I remember, on reading his scientific results, trying to figure out what on earth that meant. In his 1975 book, Mountain Sheep and Man in the Northern Wilds, however, he came clean, bravely, if with his former prejudice showing, writing about his past comments: “To state that the males had evolved a homosexual society was emotionally beyond me. To conceive of those magnificent beasts as ‘queers’ – Oh, God!” He repudiated his earlier “drivel” (97–8). (If I had been a man, would I, like Val, have been less likely to have reported male homosexual behaviour among the giraffe in my research papers?) Actually, and ironically since at the time I first saw it I knew little about any kind of sex, it seems that giraffe are poster animals for homosexuality. When I read that “in one study area, mountings between males accounted for 94 percent of all observed sexual activity,” I wondered who had documented this.

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I finally realized that the author, Bruce Bagemihl (1999, 392), was writing about my own report on giraffe in South Africa; 94% seemed like a lot, but then I had only seen one heterosexual mating and loads of the male/male kind. Fast forward to 1982–83 on my husband’s third sabbatical, when we were again in Brisbane, Australia. On Ian’s first sabbatical I had studied giraffe and other animals at the Taronga Zoo, on the second, written a book, Running, Walking and Jumping, and completed a study on the gaits of silver gulls and other birds. Now, I flirted with the possibility of researching alien species introduced into Australia but decided instead to document homosexual behaviour in mammals. I knew it existed in giraffe and a few other species, but was it common? About 1980, when I was working with students at the University of Waterloo, several of them had told me they were lesbians. They talked about the nasty conduct of other students toward them – being shunned if they walked hand-in-hand, or having men jeer at them: “Too ugly to get a man?” “I can straighten you out, honey!” “You’re unnatural!” We talked at length about such hatefulness, which brought to my mind the male giraffe who often mounted each other in the wild. Giraffe weren’t unnatural. Maybe lots of other animals practised homosexual behaviour too? I decided to research the topic, reading scores of books and articles about various species and their behaviour in the wild. After completing a six-month literature review, I sent my final paper “Homosexual behaviour and female-male mounting in mammals – a first survey” to the British journal Mammal Review. The editor, Derek Yalden, was delighted with its documented “unnatural” activity in 125 species. He published it immediately, not bothering to send it to a second reader because at the time there was no one else involved in the subject (Dagg 1984a). My research showed that homosexual behaviour with erections in the males tended to occur in four contexts. First was in play, especially among young animals, and often in zoos, where I had observed it in male and female young giraffe. Second was excitement; if an animal watched a male and female copulate, it 152

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often became excited enough itself to mount a nearby animal, of either the same or the opposite sex. The third involved dominance in species that have strict hierarchies in which some individuals are dominant and others subordinate. In the house mouse, for example, dominant males will mount subordinate males to confirm their position at the top of the hierarchy. Finally was greeting/grooming, which occurred when animals have been apart for a period but then come together again. Female lions may greet each other with mountings, as will male baboons. Talk about homophobia! In response to my article, a longstanding member of the American Society of Mammalogists wrote to the editor, Dr Yalden, “I am surprised that a reputable journal like Mammal Review would allow itself to be so easily politicized” by publishing my article. He continued, “Statements such as ‘In human beings, homosexuality occurs in many, and perhaps all, societies, so it cannot be thought of as abnormal,’ are transparent homosexual disinformation, designed at the very least to create indifference to homosexual activity or, more likely, to encourage support of it. The fact that dwarfism, transvestitism, and hyperthyroidism occur in ‘perhaps all’ societies is hardly justification for calling them normal.” Yalden sent me a copy of his own response, noting that my paper was not an apology for homosexual behaviour but rather “a very straightforward, even boring [he apologized in the margin for using this word] listing of cases where homosexual behaviour has been recorded in mammals. She finds such behaviour to be very widespread – I presume you are not challenging that finding – and that, it seems to me, is a very important scientific point. I trust you are not suggesting that I should, as an editor, attempt to suppress scientific facts? That would be a victory for politics.” My study was written up in Canadian Science and in several newspapers, I gave a talk about it at the University of Queensland and a radio interview, but when I wrote to various popular magazines (Toronto Life, Psychology Today, The Atlantic, Esquire, Harper’s Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, and Science 83) asking if they would like a non-technical article on H O M O S e x U A L I T y, TA x O n O M y, A n D M A M M A L O G I S T S

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the subject, all refused. I was indeed before my time. However, individual people were interested because I received over sixty mailed requests for reprints of my paper from all over the world. Homosexual behaviour seems to be almost universal in mammals, but we still do not know why this evolved to be so; true homosexuals by definition do not usually breed and therefore have no offspring to carry on any homosexual genes, if such there be. One hypothesis for people is that homosexuals come from larger than normal families. Human grandparents apparently evolved personal longevity because of the help they gave to their grandchildren; perhaps in the same way homosexual individuals helped their birth families so that more of them (who presumably had recessive homosexual genes) survived to reproduce. Or perhaps a homosexual recessive gene in birth families of homosexuals confers extra resiliency in heterozygous individuals so that they have large families? Or perhaps there is no gene involved at all? No one knows. I discussed these various possibilities in a paper which I sent it to eight refereed journals, but all refused to publish it. The subject remains contentious to this day. In 1999, Bruce Bagemihl published an excellent 750-page book entitled Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, noting in this book (as I am pleased to report) that I had produced “a ground breaking survey of the phenomenon among mammals in 1984 that was light-years ahead of her contemporaries.” He wrote that even scientific information about animal homosexuality was “a nearly unending stream of preconceived ideas, negative ‘interpretations’ or rationalizations, inadequate representations and omissions, and even overt distaste or revulsion toward homosexuality – in short, homophobia.” The bias against acknowledging that homosexuality exists among animals has various sources. Most importantly for biologists, homosexuality apparently has no evolutionary purpose. (However there are exceptions. Male black swans in Australia sometimes team up as a couple and, after chasing away the female who had laid the eggs one of them had fertilized or usurping the 154

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eggs of a heterosexual pair, may raise this brood to maturity. Because two males are stronger than a male and a female, they are better able to protect their young so that more of them survive [Bagemihl, 1999].) Perhaps observers see males mounting other males, but then decide that they must have been wrong. Or researchers may not have reported the activity because they feared they would be seen as gay or as having kinky ideas. When Linda Wolfe wrote about observing Japanese macaques in the field who exhibited homosexual behaviour, the referees of her work accused her of making up facts and of doctoring her photographs that illustrated them (Vines 1999). Until recently, homosexuality was not a subject discussed in polite society, but since animals do not know this, they continue to do it as the spirit moves them. It must have been observed in many zoo animals, but keepers presumably thought it was caused by the abnormal conditions of captivity. Or perhaps they didn’t want to admit to observing it and possibly losing their jobs? Even the Bible itself is wrongly used to justify gay-bashing. Thank God for bonobos! Behaviourists dealing with homosexuality have it far easier now than they used to, all because of bonobos (who are, along with chimpanzees, our closest genetic relative) (Dagg and Harding 2012). Bonobos love all sorts of sex, male-female, male-male, but especially female-female. The more the better. In fact, the sex lives of females seem to give them so much self-confidence that, although they are smaller than males, they dominate them. Sex begins early for female bonobos. When a young one moves away from her birth group to join another, she focuses on one particular female in the new group, with whom she instigates multiple genito-genital contacts (called G-G rubbings). She does this by loitering near her projected partner, then standing in front of her and extending her hands toward her while looking into her eyes. If this partner is willing, which is virtually a given, she lies down on her back while her friend climbs onto her stomach where they embrace with their arms. Then they make quick, rhythmic thrusting motions of their clitorises which are touching. Their faces show great emotion before their activity H O M O S e x U A L I T y, TA x O n O M y, A n D M A M M A L O G I S T S

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ends with a scream, similar to that often emitted during human copulations. These females have sex with other members of the group, too, which makes for a stable community. There is no denying that homosexual behaviour is rampant among bonobos, with individuals partaking of it every few hours. Any sentient person has to admit that such homosexuality is present in non-human animal species, especially in our close relative the bonobo. Homosexuality is now broadly accepted for animals in general, but the religious right tends to insist that people are different from animals. Many African and other small nations may punish or kill people who have homosexual relations. The situation is becoming worse in these places, perhaps because hiv and aids are still rampant. In Western nations, where safe sex practices have become common, homosexuality has become increasingly accepted. Canada was the fourth country in the world to legislate for same-sex marriages, well ahead of the United States, which caught up in 2015. lgbtq (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, questioning) groups are now common in most large communities in the Western world, with over one million people, including me, celebrating World Pride Day in Toronto in 2014; this festive occasion drew so many people to the city that it added $791 million to the city’s economy.

taxonomy Taxonomy, the science of naming and classifying animals and plants, is intriguing because it is so integral to the study of evolution. If a species is widespread and successful, peripheral groups often become separated over time, which may give rise to subspecies/races or eventually new species. But until recently taxonomy was also a science of death. In the past, people who worked with animals professionally had to know their exact status: certainly their species and, if relevant, their race or subspecies as well. To obtain this information, collectors trapped and killed often hundreds of similar animals. Their corpses were then prepared (skins stuffed, skulls cleaned) so they could be compared 156

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to make sure they were as alike as possible to the one animal for whom the species or subspecies was named. (These type specimens, kept at museums and collections throughout the world, are invaluable as they can never be replaced.) Fortunately, as we shall see at the end of this section, killing is no longer a necessity because of advances in dna technology. In the 1950s, male classmates in my courses in biology at the University of Toronto were hired each summer to drive around the Ontario countryside each evening setting snap traps loaded with peanut butter. In the mornings they collected the dead peanut-butter-loving animals, eviscerated them, replaced their insides with cotton baton, and labelled the result with date, sex, location, and their own initials. Females were never hired for the job, although at one of our university summer field camps we were taught to make such “skins,” as they were called. “Poor little thing,” I would think as I struggled to mould the cotton baton so it resembled the mouse’s body and could be inserted into the furry casing. “Look, she has nipples,” I might say. “She was nursing, she had babies, and now her babies will have died.” But no one else was worried about this. One female classmate was fretting instead about not being hired to work along with the men in collecting the small mammals, since this job paid far more money than most. “Why does it matter if I’m not a guy?” she asked the organizer for the yearly expeditions each May. He went away, talked to his superior, and came back. “Because there are no washrooms for ladies in the field,” he said primly. My friend rolled her eyes. “I don’t remember seeing any for men either,” she retorted. “Sorry about that, but this is the way it is. Girls can’t be fire wardens in the field either,” he added in a more gentle tone, to make her feel better. While at university my low-paid summer work at the Royal Ontario Museum involved taxonomy. It was under the curator of mammals, the affable Dr Randolph Peterson, whose PhD topic – moose – seemed entirely suited to his large frame. I was asked, in part, to organize the huge number of dead carcasses from earlier times, many hundreds of which bore the initials H O M O S e x U A L I T y, TA x O n O M y, A n D M A M M A L O G I S T S

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awfb, for Frank Banfield. I thought this man must be ancient, given how many animals he had killed, but later learned that he was only fifteen years older than me and a friendly person. Most of the rest of my time was spent cleaning skulls that had belonged to these same small animals. I gently boiled each in a shallow pan of water over a small flame, then carefully teased all the flesh off the bones. This was done in the basement of the Royal Ontario Museum, next door to the “insect room” where large dead mammals were laid out on shelves to have most of their flesh consumed by legions of dermestid beetles. (On a quiet day I could hear the munching of their thousands of tiny jaws.) When a skull was dry and clean, it was catalogued along with its stuffed body and placed in shallow drawers with scores of other specimens. The most accurate information from these specimens was of course their location. They had been captured on such and such a town line road on a certain date. Presumably there was a population of the same species right there, or certainly near there. A triumphant dot could be made on a map. Not that anyone was actually putting dots on maps, since the general locations of the various species was already known, given the habitat in which they had been trapped. The idea seemed to be that the information would always be available, even if conditions should change in the future. And if they did change, so much the better, as any shift could affect the animals and be of interest to science. Perhaps it was a new subspecies? If so, taxonomists were delighted to be able to write yet another paper to let the world know. This involved, of course, sending out men to kill even more individuals of that subspecies/species in a large number of areas, so that all the individuals could be compared to discover their differences; by definition, subspecies must be separated from each other geographically. It seemed to me a travesty that so many animals had to be killed for such a small aim. At the time, I didn’t understand all the nuances of taxonomy because I was too lowly to be involved in such important work. Later, when I taught mammalogy at the University of Guelph, it became a problem. Differences between individuals of different 158

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subspecies – and sometimes even those between full species – can be amazingly small. Take Peromyscus maniculatus, the deer mouse, and Peromyscus leucopus, the white-footed mouse, for example, either of which my students sometimes brought to the classroom to be identified. These sometimes occur in the same areas, although deer mice in general live further north than white-footed mice. They are only known to be different species because they don’t interbreed in captivity. The definitive The Mammals of Canada by Frank Banfield, the same diligent mammalogist mentioned above, helpfully notes that the tail in P. leucopus, when compared to P. maniculatus, “is much more thinly haired and less contrastingly bi-coloured, being brownish above and cream-coloured below.” My heart always sank when I saw a student approaching with one of these mice from the university’s mammal collection. “Would you say the tail is thinly haired?” I’d ask, taking the offensive as I peered intently at the appendage. “I don’t know,” she would reply tentatively. How could she know without a comparison? “These two species are difficult to identify even for an expert,” I’d then opine. “Just give your opinion with a query beside it. That’ll be fine.” This always ended the matter. In the mammalogy course, the class members and I never killed any animals. Instead, we gathered up road kills when possible or set live traps that held a hungry animal for a few hours, after which it would be identified and released. My interest in taxonomy was piqued again some years later, in the 1990s. I had earlier noticed that in an important new book, The Mammals of North America (1959), the authors, E. Raymond Hall and K.R. Kelson, had listed eighty-six species of brown bears. This bothered me because bears have huge ranges: how could there possibly be so many species whose members would never have encountered and mated with each other over thousands of years? It was ridiculous! I knew the skulls of brown bears varied more than those of most species and that many decades ago zoologists had been overly enthusiastic in their naming of bears, but in 1963 a careful new classification had H O M O S e x U A L I T y, TA x O n O M y, A n D M A M M A L O G I S T S

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found definitively that there was only one species of brown/grizzly bear in Canada and the United States, Ursus arctos (Rausch 1963). What was going on? I decided to find out, in the process writing an article entitled “Prestige, power, and the naming of brown bears” (Dagg 1997). The man at the centre of early bear research was Clinton Hart Merriam, born to wealthy parents in 1855. From his youth, Merriam was intensely interested in wildlife, carrying out surveys of birds and mammals for the government at a time when the western areas of the continent were being explored by Europeans. In those days surveys consisted not of documenting all species observed, as it would today, but of killing animals encountered so their remains could be cleaned (bones), stuffed (skins), and often deposited in the Smithsonian museum collections. Merriam became a close friend of Theodore Roosevelt, an early president of the United States, who was also a keen hunter, and was a founder of the Boone and Crockett Club, a riflemen’s group that kept records of big game to see who could kill the animal with the biggest size, the largest antlers, or the longest horns. It is counterproductive to kill the largest males in wildlife populations rather than leaving them to mate in the wild, so this club was not a scientific one. Indeed, it had stipulated that all Alaskan bears killed within seventy-five miles of tidewater were “brown bears,” while those further inland were to be known as “grizzly bears.” This was not a rational solution, needless to say, because bears move freely from one area to the other. Merriam was an experienced outdoorsman, who spent many years travelling through every state in the Union as well as in Canada and Alaska. Among other honours, he was an original founder of the National Geographic Society in 1888. He must have known that bears foraged over large areas, so why did he get the taxonomy of brown bears so wrong? Various reasons are possible, all of which reflect how easy it is for error to creep into the scientific endeavours of taxonomists. In earlier research, Merriam had studied the taxonomy of shrews, weasels, and pocket gophers; these small animals have small home ranges, so perhaps he failed to think about the far larger 160

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ranges of bears? He was also a friend of philanthropist Averill Harriman and his wife, who underwrote some of his trips and provided a trust fund that enabled him to carry out wildlife research for the rest of his life without having to confer with other zoologists. Science in the early days was unorganized, with each collector free from any scientific review of what information they were publishing. The Journal of Mammalogy, for example, was founded only in 1919. Those who discover a new species have the right to name it, so Merriam was able to please many of his new rich friends by naming species after them, such as Ursus eltonclarki, my favourite, for the wealthy Elton Clark of Boston who killed his bear on Chichagof Island in Alaska. Merriam also had many other friends in high places, including John Muir, Alexander Graham Bell, Rudyard Kipling, and Sir Baden Powell, all of whom would have accepted without question his analysis of bear taxonomy. Maybe they would have a bear named after them if they were lucky? Undoubtedly most zoologists were appalled by Merriam’s multiplicity of bears but the rules stipulated that the person who names a species is the first expert who, on studying all the relevant information about such things as distribution and anatomy, decides that it is indeed a new species previously unknown to science. That man, for bears, was Merriam. When Raymond Hall, a much younger friend of his, coauthored The Mammals of North America, he accepted Merriam’s results rather than wonder if they could really be correct. That is not the last of bear taxonomy, however. For our taxonomy course at the University of Toronto in the 1950s, we were taught that brown bears were Ursus arctos while polar bears were Thalarctos maritimus. They were deemed to be so different that they belonged not only to different species but to different genera. Soon after this the polar bear was renamed Ursus maritimus, indicating that it was indeed more closely related to the brown bear. Recently, the two species have interbred in arctic areas now that a warming climate is enabling brown bears to wander north and polar bears south. The hybrids may have brown spots among their white fur or a buffy whitish coat. One H O M O S e x U A L I T y, TA x O n O M y, A n D M A M M A L O G I S T S

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man with a licence to shoot a polar bear was relieved to find that his kill on Banks Island, nwt, was indeed a hybrid: had it been a brown bear without polar bear genes, he would have had to pay a fine of $1,000 and perhaps been jailed for a year. I wrote up my bear discoveries in what I thought was a scintillating article but had trouble finding a publisher, given perhaps that it was part biology and part history. Finally it was accepted by Queen’s Quarterly. I wrote to the National Archives of Canada for a photograph of this species to accompany my article, but was sent instead one of a Himalayan black bear, Ursus thibetanus, which has a prominent white V-shaped mark on its chest. The archivist apologized for this error and refunded the $18 I had paid for it, and the editor himself provided bear pictures. Our brown bear needs to be better known! Over the past 110 years, many millions of birds have been banded. Each banded bird has had a tiny ring fastened around a leg so that someone in the future, finding the bird dead or alive, could send the date of finding, location (now gps), and band number back to the banding station. From this information, researchers know where the bird had flown to and when it was at that location, possibly during migration. In the spring bird migration season of 2013, my daughter, Mary, and I went on a birding trip near Port Rowan in Ontario. We were upset to watch bird banding operations at close hand. A female cardinal was brought to the station in a cloth bag. As a volunteer gently picked her up in one hand, she gave loud squawks, her beak opening and closing in distress at her imprisonment. The woman blew on her chest, parting the feathers to determine the fat deposit there, then fixed a tiny metal ring on her leg. Then she slipped her into a slim container to be passed to another woman who noted down her condition and weighed her before setting her free. “It only takes a few minutes,” the volunteer told us. “We do hundreds every day. The birds don’t really mind. We often catch one yellow warbler, even years apart, who spends the summer here in the park.” 162

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“Do they ever die from being handled?” Mary asked, perturbed, but the volunteer ignored her question. “They don’t mind being banded,” she repeated. “Without banding, we wouldn’t know that many populations of species are decreasing; we can then try to prevent this. By banding we learn where birds migrate to when they leave the park. The whole aim is to preserve bird life.” Certainly almost all banded birds survive, and it is obviously impossible to work for the preservation of various species if one has no idea of their status and where they are found. But it is still distressing to watch the birds undergo the whole operation. In our case, after the cardinal, we watched as a yellow warbler, a magnolia warbler, a red-winged blackbird, a rose-breasted grosbeak, and a blue-winged warbler were banded. The latter bird is of taxonomic interest because it is so closely related to the golden-winged warbler that they often interbreed in the wild. The resulting hybrid has been called Brewster’s warbler and can mate with birds of either of its two parents’ species, creating a backcross. These hybrids sing the song of either parent, or a medley of both. Taxonomy is no longer tainted with mass killings, thank goodness. In 2012, I had the pleasure of writing a scientific book on the giraffe (Dagg 2014), emphasizing the need for conserving all nine subspecies, most of whose populations are now devastated by over-hunting and loss of habitat. These races had first been described definitively in 1904 by Englishman Richard Lydekker, based on where the skins and skulls stored in European museums had come from. His was a difficult task because some specimens indicated only that they were from places such as Egypt or Mombasa, the ports from which they had been shipped north. He found that a few races had distinctive coat patterns, such as the reticulated giraffe with its spots separated by thin cream-coloured lines, but most had similar spotting and colouration. He therefore divided them based on their distribution in Africa. Much later, I wrote to all the African countries with giraffe populations asking them about the distribution and number of H O M O S e x U A L I T y, TA x O n O M y, A n D M A M M A L O G I S T S

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their animals (Dagg 1962b, 1962c). Giraffe were less numerous than they had been in Lydekker’s time, and present in fewer areas, but in general his classification was still fine. More recently, zoos around the world have prevented hybrid giraffe (with parents of different races) from breeding, so that soon their collections will have only individuals of pure subspecies, of which reticulated giraffe are the most common. Forty years later, for his PhD thesis, Russell Seymour (2001) carried out a complete reanalysis of the nine races, visiting museums in a number of countries to photograph the seventytwo complete or partial skins in their collections. Then he compared forty characteristics that might apply to, and possibly vary on, the skins for each race – for example the spotting between the eye and ear, the width of between-spot lines on the rump, or the varying size of spots on the neck. He found that only two races were completely distinctive – the reticulated giraffe with its smooth-edged spots and the Masai giraffe with its jagged spotting. The other giraffe were almost impossible to tell apart, although, after staring and measuring the scores of skins and checking out many photographs, Seymour began to think he could actually distinguish a few other races. His friends were sceptical. “Why don’t we test you,” one of them suggested with a laugh. Seymour cheerfully accepted the challenge, so they set up a slide show of a large number of giraffe photos he had never seen before. Seymour gave his opinion for each slide as it appeared on the screen and was vindicated in part at the end of the test. He had correctly identified the giraffe’s race in over 70% of the photos, but of course was wrong over 25% of the time. For the rest of us, most races of giraffe look the same. Fast forward to today. Taxonomy is no longer necessarily correlated with killing. For example it is now possible to fire a dart into the body of a giraffe and have the missile fall to the ground with a small piece of the animal’s tissue at its tip. This tissue can then be analyzed for its dna, which can identify each giraffe as an individual as well as its race. Although there is still some racial confusion for giraffe in northeast Africa (wide-scale

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warfare prevents the collection of dna samples from various populations in this area), dna samples are distinctive for either eight or nine races which are separated and whose members have not interbred, sometimes for over a million years. One interesting case is of giraffe populations from two separate races, Giraffa camelopardalis thornicrofti from Zambia and G. c. tippelskirchi from Tanzania, living within 400 km of each other. Males from either group could easily walk this distance to mate with females of the other group, but apparently none has done so for a very long period of time, if ever.

early Canadian Mammalogists – An exercise in futility In 1972, in connection with a course I taught on the management of wildlife at the University of Guelph, I had published an analysis of who was publishing research papers on Canadian mammals, my interest piqued by our study of the mammals in Waterloo and South Wellington Counties. These studies indicated that some mammals were worth studying, it seemed, while others were not. In effect, mammalogy became a scientific enterprise with the founding, in 1919, of the quarterly Journal of Mammalogy. Before that time explorers and settlers had seen and often documented information about mammals they encountered, but their observations had not been drawn together in a scientific way. And long before that time, of course, First Nations people, who lived among mammals during their entire lives, had developed a wealth of information, most of which has not been written down. In 1974, Dr Keir Sterling, an American, wrote to Frank Banfield at Brock University, the same man whose myriad stuffed mice and shrews I had handled twenty years earlier at the Royal Ontario Museum. Sterling reported that the First Theriological Conference (therio being Greek for “wild beast”), held in 1974 in Moscow, had proposed a book with chapters on

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the development of the science of mammalogy in countries around the world. The content would deal primarily with the years since 1758, when Linnaeus published his taxonomic framework for all living creatures. Banfield was the obvious choice to be senior author on this project because his magnificent volume The Mammals of Canada had just been published. At the time, though, he was deeply involved in other matters so, knowing about my recent research on Canadian mammalogists and their work, he asked if I would be willing to be senior author with him. I was thrilled to be asked, agreed, prepared a summary of how I thought we should proceed, and set to work. He wanted his contribution to cover mainly his knowledge of early explorers and naturalists as well as mammalogists active between 1960 and 1975. I collected all the other relevant information. By the end of July, 1975, I sent our sixty-one-page manuscript to Sterling. I next heard from Sterling in April 1976, when he noted that the chapter could be enlarged because the project was now a twovolume venture. When Frank and I met in London in August, while I was en route with family to Canada from our sabbatical in Australia, we agreed to send along a larger report, which was required for September. But then it appeared that December would be fine, so we made that the deadline. We heard nothing more from Sterling until August 1978, when he apologized for the long delay, then nothing until July 1983. The authors from other countries were apparently much slower than we had been. Then, in 1985 he asked, could we update the manuscript to include recent research done by mammalogists? Aagh. This involved a huge amount of work, with me sending letters to universities as well as provincial and federal wildlife departments across Canada. In 1987, Sterling asked for maps to accompany our chapter, along with paleomammalogical material. He subsequently reported that these additions had been misplaced, but then they were luckily found by him, as reported in April 1988. In June 1990, our manuscript was finally in proofs, which I edited and returned. But in November 1991, there was trouble 166

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with the printer, which had gone out of business. Sterling reported that he was negotiating with another printer, which would take time. We never heard from him again. The book never appeared, despite the thousands of hours of effort by contributors such as ourselves. But at least I had become good friends with Frank and by chance I noticed in early 2016 that our manuscript has now appeared magically on the web! We had started this ill-fated project, evidence of which, weighing over two pounds, sits in the archives of the University of Waterloo, in 1974. While we had worked away, my friend Don Smith from Carleton University had been writing a similar article. His excellent paper, “Mammalogy in Canada: A historical overview,” was published in 1981. Sigh.

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. 12 . Women and Science at Canadian Universities

In 1978, two years after my failed attempts to find a university position, an unemployed academic friend and I decided to form a group to be called “Canadian Unemployed/Underemployed PhD Scientists”; at the time, there were about 2,000 new PhDs graduating each year in Canada, yet many or most of them were unable to find suitable employment. We both had PhDs, had worked together at the University of Guelph, and, along with a third woman with a PhD, had taught large first-year courses, then been denied tenure and terminated. Like me, she was never again able to find a permanent position. Because she continued to live in Guelph, she was aware that the Zoology Department already had sixty graduate students, but professors had been phoning undergraduates to urge them to enroll in their PhD program. Biologists at the Biological Council of Canada, the University of Waterloo, and the University of British Columbia were all insisting that more PhDs were needed to fill the demand for them (Dagg 1985a). At the time it cost taxpayers over $100,000 to train each new PhD student. Why did they do this when so many trained but unemployed scientists were at hand, both male and female? Most professors

weren’t interested in that, it seemed, but instead wanted graduate students funded by the government to help with their own research. By publishing many papers, written by themselves with these students, they would be promoted and earn more money and prestige. Disconcertingly, though, these same professors often hired scientists from outside Canada as permanent colleagues rather than those they had trained. Not finding a job after years of training affected women more than men, of course, because so many women were routinely passed over anyway, but some males also contacted our group (which was really just the two of us) to describe similar scenarios. One postdoctoral research chemist had spent six years training graduate students in the area of his expertise, all the time wondering why more people were being trained when he, who already had the training and expertise, could not find a job. Three other PhDs had each written to over one hundred companies and universities asking for work, but none was offered a job. To introduce our new group more widely, we sent out flyers to other scientists who might be interested as well as letters to the media, which were published in Science Forum, the Globe and Mail, and University Affairs. Our main point was that the government, rather than funding PhD students who could not find jobs once they graduated, should fund postdoctoral scientists in permanent positions so that they could contribute to the future of Canada and their training and talents would not be wasted. Our efforts did not amount to much in the long run, but the stories of the women who contacted us enabled me to write a short article called “Are women scientists worthless?” It was refused by major Canadian magazines but published in This Magazine (1983b). Over the years, I had been asked to give lectures in a number of courses by various professors at the University of Waterloo, so I knew many of them personally. I decided to organize a petition aimed at the president, Doug Wright, asking that more women professors be hired. Waterloo, presumably because it was heavily dominated by scientists and engineers – fields in which women 170

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had always been under-represented – had only 8% women faculty members, about half that of other Canadian universities. I sent the petition to all the women teachers, many of whom were not on tenure track but just filling in for a term or two. Most of them, nineteen in all, agreed to sign it, but little changed. This seemed to be one of the first efforts to prod Canadian universities to treat academic men and women equally. (And in my heart of hearts, I wished not only for more female professors but for more professors who were feminists and would therefore work for change on behalf of women.) Between 1981 and 1985, I researched the status of women scientists with PhDs across Canada, using published information and the results of a survey I organized to which 196 women responded (Dagg 1985a). (Ironically, I wanted to apply for government money to carry out this research to help women, but could not do so because I was only a part-time employee at Waterloo, a status which was almost certainly because I was a woman!) Were universities outside Ontario as woman-unfriendly as those within? This was a huge undertaking and the answer, unfortunately, was yes. The percentage of women professors in biology was highest at 7%, while those in geology and physics were the lowest, at 1% each. A few universities had no women science professors at all! No wonder relatively few young women were being attracted to this discipline. To help the cause along, I also published notes about sexism and science (Dagg 1984c, 1986b). In another preliminary venture, several of us prepared cards that asked female science students at uw if they had been subject to sexism in their courses or their textbooks. Only a few were filled out. Some students replied that they had been and gave various examples, but others were content with what they were learning. (We liked to think that these were unfortunate students who hadn’t yet been awakened into feminist consciousness.) Three other ideas we tried to implement at this time weren’t productive either. One was to form a network of feminist science professors across Ontario or Canada to share information, but few such women were interested, probably because they were too busy being professors. Another was to consider the abolition W O M e n A n D S C I e n C e AT C A n A D I A n U n I v e r S I T I e S

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of tenure in case this might be useful for women academics. Granting tenure was a very important decision in that it gave professors, in effect, a job for life. As such, they were free to say what they thought, no matter how upsetting to others. I believed that tenure committees were especially unwilling to give tenure to women, especially those who espoused feminism, which meant that their careers were cut short. The third, which Shelly Beauchamp (now Rachelle Sender) and I discussed at length, was to establish a Women’s College that we would initiate by offering a feminist course at Conestoga College. No one enrolled in the proposed course, but over the years, as a complete optimist, I continued to dream about the possibilities of a wonderful university where men and women were equal. To make myself feel better after these initiatives failed, I wrote up a description of a possible feminist college for Ontario, the word “feminist” being defined as “a person who believes that women should have political, economic, and social rights equal to those of men.” It had seven points: Brief for a Non-Sexist College 1 Academic women and men should be hired equally. [At the time, only 15.5% of university faculty in Canada were women.] 2 Women students should have models to help them reach their full potential. Many women are turned off science and engineering for lack of women professors. 3 All students deserve unbiased contents in their courses. Often recent information by and/or about women is not being added to courses. 4 Men and women need to know more about women, who make up over half of the world’s population. Women must not be depicted as unimportant or second-rate.

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5 Women need a supportive atmosphere at universities, which should include child-care and exclude sexist behaviour. 6 Women should have full equality in other academic spheres, such as refereeing research proposals, judging academic papers, and sitting on funding juries. 7 Far more research must be funded for women and from a feminist perspective. [At the time there was almost none.] Because of the intransigence of Canadian universities, academic women made little progress toward equality in the next decade (Dagg 1990b). To push matters along, I suggested in a note in Science that the research of both men and women be rated on the number of citations their articles received, rather than the actual number of papers they had published. It is often easy to publish papers in inferior journals (increasingly so now that many new journals are being created on the web) but these are far less likely to be cited by other scientists. This idea may not have interested men, but various women, many from the United States, wrote me about this possibility, which would value quality rather than quantity. As another example of lack of progress, in 1991 I published an article, “Jane Doe in science” in Women’s Education des Femmes, describing the difficulties Canadian women faced if they wanted a career in science (1991c). Sadly, over ten years later this same article was still considered timely enough to be reprinted in a book aimed at all Ontario high school students. Because Shelly and I were pushing for more women in science, we wondered if women did science differently than men. Science is assumed to be a neutral occupation carried out by unbiased experts: researchers address a problem that piques their interest, then do what they can to figure out how to understand it. It is a straightforward process of making a hypothesis, then testing it by experiments that can be replicated. At least

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this is how it is supposed to work. That there was only one way to do science was the general consensus. Shelly and I, both feminist scientists with doctorates in biology, wondered if this were in fact true. Would women scientists address different issues than men? Would they work in different ways? We decided to find out what other women scientists thought by sending out two sets of questionnaires. The first group included female faculty members in Ontario universities, and the second, female graduate students at four large Canadian universities specializing in a science. We used a broad definition of “science” to include the disciplines of mathematics, engineering, agriculture, and health fields. Our questionnaires were answered by 337 women, with an average return rate of 43%. Almost half of these respondents believed that women do science differently, at least to some extent (Dagg 1991c). In general, women felt they were more likely than men to work collaboratively, while men tended to be more competitive. Some women chose to work harder than men to show they were serious scientists, some chose topics of special interest to women, and some noted that, although they worked fewer long hours due to family commitments, their final results were every bit as good. Many respondents focused their work on social concerns, especially if these involved women, because men had been uninterested in such areas. Women are socialized to find human health and relationships important, so these were also in the forefront of their experimental and environmental research. Some felt that they valorized qualitative aspects of their research more than men did and were more cognisant of the rights of research subjects. Female scientists continue to do vital research in all areas of research, including contraception, postpartum depression, environmental work, peace research, and social relationships. Because of our feminist work, in May 1991 Shelly and I were invited by Dr Hilda Ching to give several speeches and an open discussion session at Simon Fraser University in British

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Columbia. Spurred by our positive reception, I wrote a paper called “Feminism reviled: Academic non-freedom at Canadian universities” which was published in Canadian Woman Studies (Dagg 1992b). This was a compendium of many horrid statements and views that had been expressed against feminist ideas. (They would surely be more muted today.)

Discrimination against Women by Canadian Universities So far, I have considered problems in universities connected with science, given that, as a biologist, these were closest to my heart. However, it was always obvious that scientists were not the only ones facing discrimination. Universities in Canada and around the world had been founded by men for men, so any effort to introduce more female scholars and administrators might be expected to face opposition by many men. In early 1984 my university women friends and I were excited because the Ontario government was setting up the Bovey Commission on the Future Development of the Universities of Ontario, its mandate being to make suggestions that would “contribute to the intellectual, economic, social and cultural foundations of society.” The government must have heard our complaints! Surely this will help women gain equality with men in universities, we thought. Silly us. Despite our hopefulness when this academic inquiry was announced, the early evidence was not good. Five men and no women were appointed to the Bovey Commission, and its initial extensive document, produced before any hearings had been held, mentioned women only once: “With respect to the participation of women in our universities, the Commission notes that there has been a steady and gratifying improvement.” What planet were they coming from? Still, we had to do what we could. I asked to speak to the commission about our concerns and was granted this privilege

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by Edmund Bovey himself (who addressed me as Ms although I had indicated I was a Dr). We also sent along a written brief describing women’s inferior position in Ontario universities. At the September hearings, when I had finished my presentation, I looked expectantly at the three commissioners – Edmund Bovey, Fraser Mustard, and Ronald Watts. All men. Did they have any questions? No. Looking bored, they quickly asked for the next speaker. Their report, The Commission on the Future Development of the Universities of Ontario, was released in December 1984. Despite its broad social mandate, and despite our presentations, it left out all mention of women and of sexual bias. Discrimination against women had been well documented in Ontario universities but the commission ignored it entirely. What a travesty! Sixteen years later, in 1990, Stuart Smith headed a similar hearing: the Commission of Inquiry on Canadian Universities. This time Shelly Beauchamp, author Sheelagh Conway, and I all repeated information about the lack of women professors, much of which had been presented to the Bovey Commission: our brief was about how women and their concerns are often ignored by universities. Many women from across Canada supported us by sending telegrams and faxes to the Skyline Toronto Airport where the hearings were held, but Smith would have none of it; he included little about women in his report. Nothing had changed. One of my students at Independent Studies, Patricia Thompson, was amazed when she arrived at the University of Waterloo to realize how sexist it was. She was even more upset than I (who had become somewhat inured to the discrimination) and began railing against all the inequities she saw: female students unwelcome in engineering classes; graduate students denied research grants for topics about women in science; highly qualified, top-notch professors passed over for permanent jobs because they were women; feminists working for change being censored and scorned for their efforts; a general university environment tainted by sexism, sexual harassment, and even sexual assault; and the general perception of almost everyone 176

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that women’s lower status was part of the natural order of things. Pat found a huge discordance between what was actually going on and administrators’ insistence that uw was making great headway with equality for women. When I suggested we write a book about sexism at Canadian universities, she was delighted. Women in Independent Studies such as Sharon Chimming and Vivian Neal were already working on such issues and we were able to use their data. Our aim was to describe sexist bias at Canadian universities, expose their misogynist ambience, and propose ways to improve conditions for women. We eventually chose not to champion quotas as a solution for professors but instead urged that any universities that discriminated against women should suffer financial cuts from the government. I had previously done some work to collect information on this topic: beginning in 1982, I had visited twenty-five university campuses across Canada. At most of them I talked to feminists about their perceptions, collected pamphlets from the women’s centres that existed, copied down endless anti-women graffiti from library desks, and amassed other relevant material. And already at hand were various journals that had published charts listing male and female differences in the following areas: student enrollment; numbers and categories of teachers, administrators, and staff; pay scales and benefits for these categories; awards and scholarships given to students; and money for athletic events. These data, which formed the core of the text of our book, are currently available in my archival collection at the University of Waterloo. MisEducation: Women and Canadian Universities (1988), published by the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (oise, a group that later affiliated with the University of Toronto), was a snapshot of what was happening at this time in universities across Canada. We had intended to include the graffiti targeting women that we had collected from university libraries as reflection of the visual violence that daily confronted women, but oise finally censored these as being politically too sensitive. For the first time after having a book published, as senior author I was showered with requests for radio and tv W O M e n A n D S C I e n C e AT C A n A D I A n U n I v e r S I T I e S

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interviews and queries about where to purchase MisEducation. Most satisfying. In general, female interviewers were supportive and men bemused. For one ctv interview, the organizer explained to me that a male professor would be backing me up, saying it was good to have a man corroborating what I said. That evening a woman on the street stopped me to ask if I had been on tv that morning. When I said yes, she fell back, literally, and announced it was so exciting to meet a “Famous Person!” Lest I become swollen-headed, Le Devoir called me Bagg instead of Dagg, and in one instance the book was called “Miss Education,” which rather undercut its aim. At least sixteen reviews of our book appeared in newspapers and journals, most positive but with a few criticisms, too: for example, we did not have much information about Quebec in our book and a woman was sad that we had not addressed the sexual harassment of staff (which I hadn’t known existed). The powers that be at the University of Waterloo were surely unhappy with our book, but I had noted in it: “I do not have tenure. I hope its lack will not cost me my job when this book is published,” which I think kept my part-time position safe. Along with other talks I gave about feminism and our book, Pat and I were pleased to be invited, all expenses paid, to give a noon-hour talk at the University of Winnipeg; 120 people came. I gave the perspective of a teacher and Pat that of a student; she was given a tremendous ovation for all she had accomplished despite her youth. Later I was asked to speak at a conference at the University of Manitoba on “How to Hire More Women” at universities. As I now had a high profile because of my various earlier endeavours, in 1988 I was asked to join the Status of Women Committee of the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (ocufa), on which I served for two years. It was wonderful to work with female professors from various universities, writing articles and pushing for equality with men. We all were annoyed that the government gave grants for research it wanted done but left many professors without access to money for their own research interests. My article “Squeezing out 178

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graduate options,” published in University Affairs (Dagg 1990c), received lots of feedback. Shortly after, I also became an editor of the UW FORUM, where a few of us at Waterloo, both male and female, raised similar issues that were obviously highly controversial, given the amount of angry confrontation we received. I was pleased to give a number of talks about women and universities and have more articles accepted for publication. “Hiring women at Canadian universities: The subversion of equity” was included in the book The Illusion of Inclusion: Women in PostSecondary Education. Jackie Stalker, who co-edited it, had begun the difficult hunt for a publisher in 1992, but the book came out only in 1998 (Dagg 1998a). By the late 1980s, I had been involved with the University of Waterloo for thirty years, first as a faculty wife, then a PhD student, and finally as a part-time advisor. Because I knew many professors and their academic wives, I was aware of the problem the wives had in getting jobs and used it to write my paper “Academic faculty wives and systemic discrimination – antinepotism and ‘inbreeding’” (Dagg 1993a). At the time, the Council of Ontario Universities was ranting about the problem that professors (male of course) were expected to retire shortly with too few academics to replace them. Giving statistics, I reported on the large number of women who were every bit as qualified as men to become future professors. At present, in 2016, it is good to know that there are proportionately far more women professors than there were in the early days, although they are still far outnumbered by men. On the internet, there are websites that encourage women in science, such as wiset (Women in Science, Engineering, and Technology) and stem, which advocates for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. The most pressing current problem is that there are far too many PhD scholars, both men and women, who would like to become professors, compared to the relatively few university openings. Most of these scholars will have to enter other professions.

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. 13 . follow-Up: University Life, Sociobiology, Infanticide, and rape University Life Having read a huge amount of research about universities for my book MisEducation, it occurred to me that I could put together another book that would deal with not only how universities were short-changing women but how they could be improved in other ways. Tentatively (and presumptuously) I called my first effort Universities and Knowledge, later changing the title to What Universities Teach. The manuscript discussed what was taught, how it was taught, and how knowledge was constructed in research. To ensure that the material in the book was as accurate as possible, I had it vetted by a number of sources. A black friend commented on the Black Studies section, while a group of lesbians and feminists based at Independent Studies met a number of times with me to discuss content. Finally, to make it as professional as possible, I paid a freelance professional to edit it. Black Rose Press was interested in my manuscript but declared it would need an Aid to Scholarly Publications publication grant from the Social Science Federation in Ottawa (or

$3,500 from some other source) before it could make a decision. University publishers, which would have professors vet the manuscript, were not interested, presumably because its content criticized much of what universities were currently doing. I hated to waste all the effort I had put into this controversial project. I thought, why not make it into a book for students? I revised the format, eliminated much of the content, and published the seventy-six-page stapled tome myself, now called User-Friendly University: What Every Student Should Know (1994a). The book dealt not only with course contents but also with other problematic university characteristics, including racism, biased courses, misogynist textbooks, and support for students with disabilities. For the idealistic reader at which it was aimed, it was stuffed full of cutting-edge information on twenty-nine topics such as black studies, classism, classroom inequity, and course content, to list the first four. There were 260 references where readers could find further information. For me, as I had read article after thoughtful article about how we could improve our universities, it had been exhilarating to realize that so many authors were involved in this process. For those who wanted more equitable universities, it was a good guide. In its lone review, however, a female UW computer science student made fun of all the documents I had cited as well as the book itself, pronouncing it a foolish waste of time. I guess it takes all kinds. Otter Press priced the book at only $4 so that students could afford to buy it, but how to let them know it existed? Most Canadian university bookstores refused to stock it as the low mark-up would have made it uncommercial for them – I had not thought of this at the time. Ironically, however, a number of universities accepted the donation of a copy I sent them for their libraries; this enabled me to earn far more money from yearly Public Lending Rights than I earned from sales of the book. (Public Lending Rights, begun in 1986, evolved as a way for the federal government to subsidize authors. Every year, the holdings of about five different libraries are checked to see if they contain books written by any of the Canadian authors enrolled 182

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in the program. For each copy of such a book held by any of these libraries, the author receives a fee of about $30. Based on the number of User-Friendly University books held in the selected libraries, over the next five years I received $626 from Public Lending Rights, far more than I would have earned from royalties!)

Sociobiology A cell biologist friend once told me her theory of the sexes: “The mammalian egg is a large, inert, bloated cell whose function is to nourish the future embryo. By contrast, the male sperm is a small, active, energetic cell that joins with its larger compatriot to initiate development of a youngster. By analogy, it is clear that females are by nature passive and nurturing while males are active.” I was amazed. “We have trillions of cells in our bodies; why would our future be dependent on only two of them?” “Well,” she said, “mothers stay home to look after their young while fathers bring them food.” Her scenario was certainly a tidy one but completely inapplicable to most mammals other than some human beings. True, mammal mothers look after their young with milk and care, but few mammal fathers help with food or much else. Female mammals, in general, are far more involved in raising their family than are males. Sociobiology, also called Darwinian psychology or evolutionary psychology, is the study of the social behaviour of animals and people based on their evolution. The basic premise with regard to humans is that our modern-day behaviour has evolved genetically during the two million years since our apelike ancestors split into two lineages, one leading to ourselves and the other to chimpanzees and bonobos. I don’t believe this. I think during evolution our ancestors developed complex brains that were increasingly able to react in appropriate ways to their environment based on reason rather than instinct. As many hominid groups spread into different regions around the world, S O C I O B I O L O G y, I n fA n T I C I D e , A n D r A P e

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their intellectual ability resulted in the development of many diverse behaviours and cultures. Sociobiology became widely popular after E.O. Wilson published Sociobiology in 1975. In it Wilson argued that evolution was not just a matter of genes but also of societies. Social behaviour, however, can be described in a variety of ways, although for years social groups of mammals had been portrayed by men as male dominated. That seemed odd: I had read a large number of recent books and articles on the social behaviour of animals, but in them the behaviour of females was just as important as that of males, and usually more so, given that it was the females who were raising the next generation. My first public foray into this topic began in 1981, when the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation paid me $500 to be part of an Ideas program in which I argued against the tenets of sociobiology with sociobiologist Sarah Hrdy, a former graduate student of E.O. Wilson. I don’t remember receiving any feedback from our program, so it was probably of little interest to the general radio listener. Even so, I decided to look into this issue more deeply. In 1982, I wrote a paper building on my radio presentation in which I argued that recent data being collected in the wild for monkeys, gorillas, chimpanzees, and lions were being altered to fit with the theories of sociobiology, a “science” that glorifies the male. Books and articles by sociobiologists presumed, for example, that a dominant male does all the breeding in social groups, which is not the case (females choose their own consorts; rape is virtually non-existent among these and all other non-human animals), and that infanticide can be an evolutionary strategy. Men are deemed to be dominant over women in human societies, so sociobiologists felt free to extend the concepts of dominance and aggression to males of all species. This is incorrect. What determines dominance in a species is size: if one sex is larger than the other, such as the females in the four Hs (hares, hamsters, hawks, and hyenas), then that is the dominant sex. What determines aggression is inborn, with females more 184

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aggressive than males in a variety of species, including hyenas, wild dogs, captive pigtail monkeys, and talapoin monkeys. It makes sense for females to be aggressive for four reasons: they need to feed their young, protect their young, protect resources needed by their young, and fight for anything else they or their progeny require. In general, the aggression of females had not been well documented because zoologists, who were not expecting to find it, tended to ignore it. I couldn’t find a publisher for my article, so I incorporated many of its ideas into a book, Harems and Other Horrors: Sexual Bias in Behavioural Biology (1983), which I published myself, extending its main question. I asked, given that females are arguably the more important sex in the animal world – some species may have only females but none has only males – why are women less than equal in human society? Discussions on the equality of the sexes had already been dealt with from the perspectives of history, anthropology, sociology, and psychology; I was adding biology to the list. My thesis was that before 1960 (when L.S.B. Leakey sent out the first of three women to learn about wild apes) social behaviour or sociobiology of animals had been studied almost entirely by men. When these men observed animals in the wild, because of their gender and the importance they gave to it, they watched primarily males and attributed more weight to their activities than to those of females. My favourite captive example is a study of the behaviour of many rhesus monkeys in a cage. The males were named D1, D2, D3, etc (D for Dominant) while the females had no names. Needless to say the researcher concluded that the social life of the monkeys centred around the males (Chance 1956). I couldn’t find a publisher for this manuscript; all felt, as one so delicately phrased it, that “a book of this type does not fit in with our publication plans.” Good old Otter Press was pleased to print it, although as had been foreseen by the other publishers, it was too far ahead of its time to sell well. However, it was used as a university text in at least two women’s studies courses. Soon after this I turned a condensed version of my book into a scientific paper entitled “Sexual bias in the literature of S O C I O B I O L O G y, I n fA n T I C I D e , A n D r A P e

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social behaviour in mammals and birds,” which I sent to four mainline journals for possible publication, hoping that my ideas would reach a wide audience. All refused it for various reasons. One editor wrote, “I think the issue you raise is a serious one,” but thought terms such as males “possessing” females – which I had argued against – quite appropriate. A second noted that “in general the paper is well written and presented,” but suggested that I was using selected material to attack all ethologists. He agreed that other scientists were sexist but refused to be lumped in with them. A third noted that “the author does us all a service by pointing out the heavy hand of male bias laid on by the male scientists of previous generations,” but then refused the article. And the fourth refused it as well, although one of his reviewers was most sympathetic with issues I had raised. Finally it was published in the International Journal of Women’s Studies (Dagg 1984b).

Infanticide by Males In 1983, I read zoologist George Schaller’s book The Serengeti Lion, describing the behaviour of the lions in Tanzania that he had studied for four years, from 1966 to 1969. I was in my ferreting-out-sexism-in-animal-behavioural-studies mode, and I wanted to see if he had used sexist language or ideas in his book, but he had not. Shortly after this, in 1984, Craig Packer and Anne Pusey, who had studied lion prides from the same area that Schaller had, reported on data collected over seventeen years that indicated seven cases of infanticide by males. The great interest in this subject centred on the hypothesis that a male killed the young of a female, waited until she came into estrus again, then mated with her himself so that he would be the father of her next litter: a new example of sociobiology, with data from the field made to fit into the evolutionary theory. This seemed odd – I didn’t remember Schaller writing much about infanticide in his book, but I read it again to make sure. 186

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I found nine cases cited by him: four cubs had been killed by males while five had been killed by females. Schaller’s book had been written before the infanticide theory had been formulated, so his data could not have been influenced in any way by it. And, strangely, Packer and Pusey did not include the number of cubs killed by females in their tally, since this obviously would be counterproductive for their theory. Because Packer and Pusey seemed to be misrepresenting the lives of their subjects, I wrote an article arguing that lions did not fit into the male/infanticide theory after all, citing Schaller’s data. I called it “Lying about lions” (perhaps a bit aggressive, I now realize). I argued as well that many more cubs were killed by females than by males if we included those whom the mother allowed to die of starvation in lean times. Males shifted from one area to another and even if a cub was killed by one, there was little or no evidence that this male then hung around waiting for that specific female to be willing to mate again. In any case, female lions in heat are not only polygamous, but they love sex; after they have exhausted one male (which can take many hours), they may prance up to another to begin a new round of copulation. I sent my article to several journals, but none wanted to print anything rebutting this exciting new theory. Finally I received a letter from Packer himself, stating that I was wrong, period. At this time he was in Africa, so I thought perhaps he had more data that I did not know about to bolster his case. I put the article away in my desk, figuring there was nothing more to be done. Meanwhile Marc Bekoff, a professor thousands of miles away at the University of Colorado in Boulder, had somehow received a copy of my paper and been impressed by it. He too filed it away in a desk drawer. Fast forward fifteen years, when Bekoff was talking to a friend, Robert Sussman, from the University of Washington in St Louis. Sussman and two colleagues, doubtful about the infanticide theory in primates, had collected and analyzed all the documented records of infanticide in monkeys and apes; of the forty-eight cases, only in six of them was there evidence S O C I O B I O L O G y, I n fA n T I C I D e , A n D r A P e

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of male infanticide. They concluded that infanticide was not a widespread example of evolutionary strategy in primates (Bartlett et al. 1993). Sussman wondered aloud to Bekoff if there had been any work done on other social species – possibly in lions, who like monkeys and apes also lived in groups? Yes indeed, Bekoff retorted. He told Sussman about my article, who immediately phoned me in Waterloo. He asked if I would update my paper to include the most recent data on lions and provide possible implications that infanticide had for people. As editor of the American Anthropologist, he indicated my article was likely to be published if I was agreeable. I definitely was. My paper “Infanticide by male lions hypothesis: A fallacy influencing research into human behavior” (1998b) was read and approved by five reviewers and a number of other readers connected to American Anthropologist to make sure it was completely accurate. When it appeared, it caused an uproar among sociobiologists, including Packer and Pusey. Many anthropologists were furious at having their theory rebuffed, even though they had no background in biology, let alone lion behaviour. Dr Joan Silk and Dr Craig Stanford, both noted anthropologists from Californian universities, wrote a critique of my paper which they sent, along with a petition, to over ninety scholars, hoping they would append their names to it. In 1999 they also published an edited version of their critique in the monthly Anthropology News, along with seventeen signatures of the non-biologists who had signed their petition. My response was published later that year (Dagg 1999a). By this time there was so much rancour at large that our controversy was written up in Lingua Franca, a journal devoted to academic controversies. Packer (2000) wrote a critique of my original article, which I in turn rebutted (Dagg 2001a). Later, he wrote me directly stating that if I continued to write about my views of infanticide he would “be very harsh in dismissing you as a fringe scientist with some sort of bizarre obsession with a subject you seem to know nothing about.” So much for rational scientific discourse!

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Recently, in connection with the new book on giraffe (2014) I was writing, I came in contact with one of Packer’s graduate students who was doing research on giraffe in Tanzania, a fine young woman and scholar. I have never mentioned her PhD supervisor to her, nor has she mentioned him to me, but I sometimes wonder if there is an elephant in the room as our emails fly back and forth. What can one make of this flurry of activity? Certainly it shows that facts were irrelevant. In my 1998 article I had backed up my data with source material, yet seventeen academics were still willing to sign a petition that I was wrong. Did they check out the fifty-two scientific references I had cited? There would not have been time for them to do so. And in any case they would find that my facts were correct. These people were among those to whom Silk and Stanford had sent their petition, sociobiologists (and probably anthropologists) for whom a biological hypothesis was more important than the facts. My hypothesis, right or wrong. Can this be a proper way to conduct scientific debate? Although the sociobiological hypothesis of infanticide by males has never been more than conjecture, and in known cases is obviously untrue, it unfortunately lives on. When Lee Harding, co-author of our book Human Evolution and Male Aggression (2012), was visiting a park in Malaysia, he watched silvered leaf-monkeys, the quietest and least aggressive species he had ever seen. A troop of about forty members foraged peacefully on the abundant leaves of trees. The females looked after their young or the young of others, if necessary. There was frequent sex, as well as friendly gestures and vocal interactions that maintained group cohesion about decisions such as where to forage, when to rest, and where to sleep at night. Because of such euphoric encounters, Harding was amazed to read later in an article about this species, “Infanticide results from an adult male coming into the group, killing the resident adult male, and killing the infants dependent on their mothers so that the adult females will begin to ovulate again” (Dagg and Harding, 2012, 183). His gut feeling was that this was impossible.

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If infanticide were at all common, one would expect lower infant survival rates in the wild than in zoos, where “potentially infanticidal” males were kept separate from the females. However, the rates were essentially the same, at 70%. As well, it is now known that female primates do not necessarily stop ovulating while nursing their young. Harding dug more deeply into the infanticide issue for this mild-mannered monkey. The one instance reported had been by a student who, on visiting a group she had seen earlier, found that a new male had replaced the old and that there were no longer infants present. Could there have been an epidemic of disease or an accident to the old male which had left the group at the mercy of predators? We don’t know. The student decided instead that this was an example of infanticide. And proponents of the theory accepted this as proof. Similarly, various other species of gibbons have also been listed as having infanticidal males, although actual killings have never been seen. What a bizarre theory to be propped up by so much wishful thinking! The contretemps about this theory have been written up in a book by Amanda Rees called The Infanticide Controversy: Primatology and the Art of Field Science (2009). About 2000, all the excitement around male infanticide and sociobiology, including contact with fierce rejectors such as Bob Sussman, Marc Bekoff, and Brian Ferguson, made me dig deeper into the subject, which resulted in my writing “Love of Shopping” Is Not a Gene: Problems with Darwinian Psychology (2005). The first chapter dealt with infanticide, needless to say; I had thought of having “lion” and “infanticide” in the book’s title but am glad I didn’t, because a reader later told me she loved what I had written except for the lion part. “What was that about?” she asked. Chapters dealt with a number of topics, such as homosexuality, aggression, crime, and race correlated with iq tests, a particularly pernicious subject, but the most compelling was rape. I critiqued a book called A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion (2000) by entomologist Randy Thornhill and anthropologist Craig Palmer. By definition, rape is sex unwanted by females, but how does one prove this for nonhuman beings? 190

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The authors had listed eighty-one titles of articles dealing with rape in animal species, a statistic that made my feminist heart sink; I had no idea it was that common. But when I checked the references, rape wasn’t common at all. Most of the articles were about a few insects, captive animals behaving badly because of their incarceration, a very few birds, and a very few mammals. Setting aside the few insect species discussed (how to check the willingness of a female mosquito to have sex?), virtually all birds mate with a “cloacal kiss,” male and female cloacas touching for a second or two when sperm is transferred to the female. Exceptions are some primitive colonial and waterfowl species, such as drakes, who develop a sort of penis during the mating season. For evolutionarily advanced birds, rape is either very rare or unknown. What about mammals in general? For species without arms as such, if a female does not want to mate, she walks away. I have seen this often in giraffe and other ungulates. How could the male hold her still? Chimpanzees do have arms, but females in heat are so libidinous that they copulate as many as fifty times a day; the only possibility of rape in this species seems to be a female who would not want to mate with a close relative (as Goodall 1986). Apparent rape has been reported only for young male orangutans, sea lions, and a few other seals, but really, how can one determine the true feelings of these females? Thornhill and Palmer state that rape is an evolutionary strategy for men, but this is not true either. Human beings are a social species; women and many men fight back when someone is raped, warning their friends against the rapist. In one study in the United States, young premenstrual girls were shown to be twice as likely to be raped as women, and post-menstrual women have been raped too; obviously most rapes were not about reproduction at all, but rather male rage. The authors state that “rape is not universal across animal species. It is, however, common.” This is false, because it is virtually unknown in nonhuman animals. The authors were anxious to publicize their new message that rape is an evolutionary strategy for men. Because they claimed S O C I O B I O L O G y, I n fA n T I C I D e , A n D r A P e

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that their findings were backed by science (which was false, as we have seen), the only opposition to them was, they said, political – from right-wing creationists and feminist groups who were socially irresponsible. Various radio and tv personnel asked them: then what should women do? Their answer: women should not wear short skirts or be out alone at night. This is what science has to tell us?

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. 14 . focusing again on animals

Toward the end of the twentieth century, I stopped working for women’s rights. It was time to move on. My children, all flown from the nest, had been happily engaged in their lives while I had been raging about sexual inequality in an academia which seemed as omnipotent and unassailable as ever. I decided to return to animals, remembering the horrors I had observed while working at the Banting and Best Medical Building in Toronto in the 1950s. Once I had been asked to hold a young rat while a scientist pushed a tube down its throat so he could administer some fluid. I was completely appalled, as was, I am sure, the rat. Indeed, I was so upset that I had to sit down, shaking, to recover; I was never asked to do anything like that again. But I realized then that the building was a place of horrors for the animals imprisoned there, who had no one to save them. It was the memory of this experience that led me into documenting unnecessary research using animals. I wanted to stop it! Most biomedical researchers seem willing to hurt animals in any number of ways, even if no one else will be the least bit interested in the results of their experiments. In order to see if scientific papers involving animal research were useful, I used

a database called the Web of Science, which documents, years later, how many times a research paper has been cited by other authors. Taking a random sample of articles based on research involving animals and their citations, I found that usually few or none were included in the reference lists of later researchers. Obviously animals had been mistreated and killed for no good reason. Well, actually there was a “good” reason and that was to enhance the publication list of the researcher. If he or she had many published papers to their name, their chance of promotion and of earning more money would be greatly enhanced. It did not matter if their papers were worthless to other scientists and had involved the mistreatment and/or death of many animals. They were gold to the authors and their careers. As an example, one exceptionally stupid experiment asked if tobacco caused cancer of the mouth. It was already known that this is the case, because such cancer is frequent among tobacco-chewing men on baseball teams. Yet two researchers divided forty perfectly healthy male golden hamsters into four groups of ten each. Three times a week, the mouth of each hamster was forced open so that a person could paint their inner cheek pouches with sesame oil (control group), nicotine dissolved in the oil (group 2), a carcinogen dissolved in the oil (group 3), or with both the nicotine and the carcinogen solution in the oil (group 4). After twelve weeks of probable pain for the hamsters when they tried to eat, they were killed so that their cheek pouches could be cut out and examined. Sure enough, the presence of nicotine did increase “tumorgenesis.” But surely the money and time involved in this barbarous experiment could have been better used to warn human tobacco chewers against their habit? Nor were other scientists impressed, because the paper describing this torture received only four citations in the following years (Dagg 2008). For a study of animal use in cancer research, I analyzed 220 animal-based research articles published ten years earlier, which meant much lugging of heavy medical volumes from the university to my home to read them, then back the next day. (Now this 194

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work can all be done on the internet, thank goodness!) Much of the research was of the “Do and See” variety, where a scientist had an idea, any idea, then gathered animals together to see if it worked. If the idea did not pan out, too bad and no problem – but awful for the animals involved. Scientists seemed to consider animals as being rather like test tubes, which were easily purchased, but at least the test tubes could be washed and reused, whereas animals suffered and then died. For comparing articles, I assumed that a value of the number of animals used over the number of citations (an/cn) would give a rough estimation of the status of any one article. A high value indicated a very negative value for the animals involved and virtually nothing for science. A low value indicated that some animals had suffered but at least many scientists found the work to be of some importance. What to do with these numbers? I decided that comparisons would be a good way to go. Maybe researchers and organizers would take notice if their outcomes were shown to be far worse than those of rivals? I published charts showing, for example, that Norway had the most effective and France the least effective researchers in terms of an/cn values; similarly I showed that foundations in general financed the most effective research and universities the least effective. Even journals could be compared with regard to the cruelty and efficacy of the papers they chose to publish. Cancer and Journal of the National Cancer Institute were the most effective, while Nutrition and Cancer was the least so, with an average of sixteen animals suffering for every citation received. Following my analysis and the publication of my three papers in the Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science, I envisioned meetings where researchers were exhorted not to bring shame on the financiers, foundation, and journals involved in their research, but that was surely fantasy. Although I sent my three papers to the groups and to researchers I had castigated with my analysis, perhaps it was not surprising that my results seemed to be completely ignored. The few researchers whom I knew personally never spoke to me again. It would have been interesting fOCUSInG AGAIn On AnIMALS

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to see if my papers themselves received any citations, but the journal that published them had too small a circulation to be included in the Web of Science database. Were my papers on the subject of useless experiments that harmed animals worthwhile? They were important in theory, but apparently not in practice. As far as I knew, they made no difference at all in the world of biomedical research; we already knew that people and mice/hamsters/rats are very different from each other biologically. Almost no research studies performed on non-human animals have been important in solving health problems of humans, as Ray and Jean Greek (2000) document in their definitive book Sacred Cows and Golden Geese: The Human Cost of Experiments on Animals. But wait – perhaps there is hope after all? In March 2014, I found that a few people had taken heed of my analyses. I was amazed to be asked to moderate a session at an animal care conference at Queen’s University, organized largely by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka. My research had been noticed after all. It was incredibly heart-warming to find other people equally interested in trying to stop the suffering of millions of animals in useless experimentation. Fifty or so people attended the conference, all of them appalled at the horror of biomedical research that tortures and kills over three million animals in Canada each year. One idea was to consider all animals in a university’s research program as members of that university’s community. Would a university want to hurt its own members? With luck, those universities with the most cruel and pointless use of animals would be embarrassed enough because of this that they would rethink their experimentation practices. Eight months later the group at Queen’s University, ever active, decided to put posters around campus featuring people who cared about animals along with a note indicating why they felt strongly about preventing their exploitation. Along with my picture, my notation recalled the chinchilla whom I had put into the water to see if she could swim. No, she couldn’t. I had saved

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her from drowning, but always regretted the fear I had caused her. I have never done experiments with animals since that day. Soon into the new century, I decided that from now on I would write books about animals to please and enlighten readers. I had completed my encyclopedia of women writers and Canada, discussed in chapter 10, and my book about sociobiology was almost finished too (chapter 13), although it had yet to find a publisher. Maybe books that people read with pleasure would be effective in spreading respect for animals? Certainly they would be less frustrating for me. As well, I had become close friends with Alan Cairns, a retired political science professor from the University of British Columbia, whom I had known when we were students at the University of Toronto in the 1950s, and with Rosemary Rowe, a high school friend with whom I now go bird-watching every Sunday. The future was looking brighter for me than it had since Ian’s death. Most importantly, I became involved again with giraffe in the new century, bringing my relationship with this wonderful creature full circle in my life, an experience I discuss in the next and final chapter of this book. After completing the book Pursuing Giraffe, I decided in 2007 to write a book dealing with the behaviour of old animals. I am not sure where this idea came from: perhaps because I myself was getting older and thinking about how this physical process was changing my own behaviour? This project was entirely a literature review, so I read hundreds of books and articles, hunting for descriptions of the activities of oldsters, which might or might not be discussed; most indexes do not include entries such as “old individuals,” so there were few short-cuts. When I had collected loads of information on the topic, I contacted Johns Hopkins University Press about possibly publishing my proposed book. Maybe I chose this press because it was the oldest in North America? In any case, the editor was interested but suggested I organize the chapters not by species but by themes, such as leaders, the importance of grandmothers,

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and sexy seniors. He also insisted the title of the book must be The Social Behavior of Older Animals rather than “old” ones. (Did I detect a bias there against aging in general?) Given my feminist nature and advancing age, I was thrilled to find that old females were hugely important in most animal societies. For example, ancient female elephants continued to be natural leaders because they had been looking after their relatives for most of their lives. After forty years of service they knew where water existed in times of drought, where the best food grew at different times of the year, and what dangers must be avoided. Grandmothers in other species, too, just like those of our human ancestors, were incredibly important in helping to raise their daughters’ infants by providing extra food and wisdom from a long life. Old female animals were often sexy as well, chosen by males because of their experience and feistiness. Aged males were present for each species, but were little involved in relationships within groups. Unfortunately, despite good reviews, this book did not fare as well as we had hoped, given that it covered an area of zoology that had never before been addressed. As well, it was published in 2009, when the recession was in full swing and universities around the world were buying few or no books for their libraries. It remains of interest though, because in 2014 I was contacted by a filmmaker who is making a documentary about old animals. He has been happy to have me read his proposal and offer him suggestions on how he might proceed. As well, a man in South Korea has contacted me about my book. Because he enjoyed it, he thought other Koreans would like it too; he contacted a publisher who agreed to produce a Korean version, which he has now translated. While reading reams about animal societies in the wild for my book on seniors, I had come across all sorts of amazing information about the social behaviour of animals of other ages too. I decided my next book, to be called Animal Friendships, would be about animal friendships in general. This was psychologically easier to write, because death did not loom over the various participants. Again, I organized the material into theme chapters, such as typical behaviours among sisters, brothers, mothers and 198

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daughters, and family groups. I sent the finished manuscript to a Cambridge University Press editor who was pleased to publish it, with one photograph for each chapter. This enabled me to include one of the many animal photographs I had taken over the years, of two beautiful Icelandic ponies grooming each other. More universities were buying books by 2011, so it sold well and had good reviews. A filmmaker recently expressed interest in this book as he is planning a documentary on the topic of nonhuman friendships. While hunting the internet for a new topic to write about, I chanced upon Lee Harding, a zoologist living in Vancouver who had studied caribou in the arctic. I had thought to focus on biology and global warming, but he suggested another topic that interested me more: Were our human ancestors war-like or peaceful? Many books have described them as killers, which explained our own warring natures. But both of us disagreed with this. Why not write a book together explaining why we were sure our forebears were peaceful hunter gatherers? We agreed that the first author would be the one who contributed the most chapters. This turned out to be me, because I did not have a full-time job like Lee, who ran his own biological consulting business. We called our book Human Evolution and Male Aggression: Debunking the Myth of Man and Ape. We put forward our theories about Homo sapiens ancestors in a number of chapters: the four-million-year history during which they lived in small nomadic groups, the friendly behaviours of our two closest relatives, bonobos and chimpanzees (except when the latter had been driven to combat over limited banana treats dispensed erratically by people), the pacific demeanor of primates in general related to the various appeasement behaviours various species have evolved, the fallacy of male animals being said to kill the young of females so that they could mate with the mother, and the idea that aggression in human beings is cultural rather than innate. We contacted a number of publishers before deciding to go with Cambria Press. The book, published in 2012, had good reviews, although those who disagreed with our thesis would surely be antagonistic. fOCUSInG AGAIn On AnIMALS

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In 2014, I received an email from filmmaker Philip Hendel in France who was producing a documentary to show that our ancestors were not killers but peaceful nomadic peoples. This was exactly what Lee and I had described in our book. After reading it, he hoped that I might be willing to state my views on camera. I was happy to do this, so he visited the University of Waterloo campus where he and I were filmed strolling among its lovely trees while discussing issues of our distant ancestors. Later we were filmed talking at the African Lion Safari near Toronto with giraffe in the background, and at the Toronto Zoo near a grizzly bear and a polar bear, both of which I could point out were polygamous and therefore not species that would fit into the male infanticide theory as some had proposed.

. 15 . return to Giraffe

In the new century, at loose ends for a project, l had decided to turn again to giraffe by writing up my adventures during the year I had spent in Africa when I was twenty-three. I wasn’t sure though: I had earlier tried describing the experience as a fictional story, but the result was feeble. Few people had ever expressed interest in my trip, and on the few occasions I had mentioned it, listeners thought I was lying. A man who played badminton with Ian and me didn’t believe Ian when he said I had studied giraffe in Africa. (We knew this because several weeks later he admitted he had gone to the library, borrowed a book about animals, and found in it a giraffe chapter which was in part about me.) On another occasion, I had a heart-to-heart with a friendly woman at a summer resort and told her about my giraffe adventures while we were waiting for our children to finish swimming. “That sounds interesting,” she said, nodding her head dutifully. Two weeks later she wrote to tell me she had seen my recent book in a bookstore and now knew I really was an author. It is disappointing to be thought a liar – no wonder I usually chose not to mention any of my scientific interests with casual friends. Ian understood this: whenever someone asked him

what he did, hoping to start a conversation, his reply that he taught physics at the university and studied infrared spectroscopy stopped them cold. I had lots of material for such a book. Along with my extensive journal entries about my daily encounters with giraffe, I had written long letters home each week to my mother, to Ian, and to a few friends who had kindly kept them for me. This time I would describe my own adventures rather than those of a makebelieve character. After nearly fifty years I now felt more confident that what I had done at the age of twenty-three was worth recounting. This was a wonderful book to write because every chapter recalled for me some episode or excitement that I was thrilled to relive in my memory – driving alone for 1,000 miles to see my first wild giraffe; photographing these giraffe with Mr Matthew, the manager in South Africa who allowed me to live on his ranch; working in Dar es Salaam to earn money to continue my giraffe research; climbing Mt Kilimanjaro, around whose base giraffe then flourished; and travelling by rail, ship, bus, car, and plane half the huge length of Africa. I felt once again that I was the luckiest person in the world to have been able to do all this. I contacted a few publishers to see if they were interested in my manuscript, but with no success. Then, by chance, I happened to talk about it to a member of the Wilfrid Laurier University Press. “Why not try us?” she asked. Several weeks later, I had a telephone call from the editor. “We like it,” she said. “But I think you can make it even better. Would you be willing to give some context to your story? Note what was happening at the time with racial relations? Why were whites and blacks enemies? Anything about Mandela?” Fortunately, I had been so horrified by the treatment of native Africans by white people that I had kept a scrapbook of political clippings from newspapers. By going through these and reading books about apartheid and South Africa, I was able to greatly enrich Pursuing Giraffe. After six months I returned this enlarged manuscript to the press, which published it in 2006.

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This book continues to sell today, with strangers emailing me now and then to report that they love it. A number of keepers looking after giraffe in zoos liked it too: in 2009, out of the blue, I had an email from Amy Phelps, a giraffe keeper at the Oakland Zoo who, together with two other giraffe workers, was setting up an organization to be called the International Association of Giraffe Care Professionals (iagcp). Would I come to Phoenix Zoo for the inaugural meeting of the new group to give a talk about my giraffe research described in my recent book? Yes, I would! I was ecstatic! I began immediately to put together a PowerPoint presentation with the photos I had taken so long ago. A few days later, I received another email from Amy. “Would you be willing to accept a trophy for being a pioneer in working with giraffe?” she asked. “Take a few days to decide,” she wrote, “then let me know.” No time needed. That would be wonderful! I thought. “Yes!” I replied immediately. So in February 2010 I flew to Phoenix with my partner, Alan Cairns. We were met by Amy and her friends, and taken to a swish hotel, and then we joined the 150 giraffe attendees at the Phoenix Zoo, mostly people from zoos but also a smattering of wildlife researchers, anatomists, physiologists, and genetic experts. To my amazement, I was treated with great honour. Most of the people attending this conference owned our 1982 book on the giraffe, and many were eager for me to sign their copy and have their photos taken with me. My speech was well received, and when I was called up to be awarded the Pioneer Trophy, henceforth to be known as the Anne Dagg Pioneer trophy, I received a standing ovation. It was the thrill of a lifetime. This experience, which led to becoming friends with Amy Phelps, a driving force behind the new giraffe organization, and with other strong women and men working with giraffe in zoos around the world and in the wilds of Africa, changed my life. These young and middle-aged giraffe enthusiasts, both women and men, seem oblivious to the gender of their peers; female and male giraffe are equally important, so surely must also be

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women and men. It is a wonder and joy for me to be working with them, especially given my advanced age. In 2011, a new scientific book on the giraffe was badly needed. The first such book, by Bristol Foster and me, which included everything in the fifty or so scientific studies of giraffe published before 1975, had been a great success, purchased by so many zoo keepers and field researchers (who called it “their bible”) that it had soon gone into a 1982 second edition, but this was now sadly out of date. When I was asked by Cambridge University Press to write a new book on giraffe in 2012, I agreed, because I now had scores of giraffe experts to consult with, thanks to the new giraffe association. My other major source of information for the book was the Web of Science on the internet, which at the time listed 359 recent academic papers about giraffe. It was a huge effort to peruse each of these, then offer a synopsis of its content in the eleven chapters devoted to such things as evolution of giraffe, feeding, social and individual behaviours, anatomy, physiology, zoo animals, and conservation. Two major new ideas are included in this new giraffe book. One is that giraffe live in fission/fusion societies as we do. Friends are together one day, perhaps elsewhere the next, but apparently always aware of each other’s presence. This sort of society may be possible because of communication between individuals by infrasound – sounds so low that they cannot be heard by human ears, as occur among elephants and rhinoceros, although this has not yet been proven. The second is that giraffe apparently evolved their long necks not to be able to eat at taller trees but because males with long, strong necks win fights with less well equipped males and so are the ones likely to mate with females. This last chapter is especially important because of the current illegal killing of giraffe to be sold as bush meat. If more is not done to protect this species, before long, with the possible exception of the two southern races, giraffe will no longer be present in the wild in Africa. Over the past fifteen years, there has been a 40% reduction in their numbers in Africa, from 140,000 to 80,000 animals. This number is far less than the current number 204

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of wild elephants in Africa, yet elephants, unlike giraffe, are well-known to be in danger of extinction. The future of giraffe in Africa is desperate unless more is done to protect them. Because of this I have recently written a children’s book, called 5 Giraffes (2016), which showcases five individuals living in the wild or in a zoo. It encourages children to work toward helping to save the giraffe from extinction in the wild. In part because of my extensive work with giraffe over many years, in 2011 I was awarded the “Old Girl of the Year” trophy representing all graduates of my high school, Bishop Strachan School in Toronto. My friends reminded me that I had been talking about giraffe for over sixty-five years! Initially, there hadn’t been much interest in my book Pursuing Giraffe: some reviews, appreciative emails from Canadians and from people as far away as Africa, and exciting contact with the family of Mr Matthew. But in 2011, a freelance radio broadcaster, Sandy Bourque, produced an hour-long interview about my giraffe visit for the cbc program Ideas, calling it “The Wild Journey of Anne Innis.” She did a wonderful job. Over fifty people contacted me to say they enjoyed it.

further Interest in giraffe Inspired by this radio program, Toronto filmmaker Alison Reid of Free Spirit Films is making a documentary called Pursuing Giraffe: The Anne Innis Dagg Adventure which follows my present-day expeditions while also retracing the story of my past. We have filmed giraffe and me in Kenya, on a Texan Ranch (for World Giraffe Day) and in South Africa where I first saw wild giraffe. In addition, I had a bit role in the 2015 cbc Nature of Things program called Giraffes: The Forgotten Giant as well as in programs related to giraffe filmed by two other professional companies. In May 2016 I was honoured at the International Giraffid Conference, held at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago where I saw my first giraffe eighty years ago. I was asked to re tUrn to Giraffe

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present a prize – the Dr Anne Innis Dagg Excellence in Giraffe Science Award – for the best research-based presentation at the conference and was delighted when the award was won by my friend Zoe Muller, who had completed years of research on the endangered Rothschild’s giraffe. I was also deeply touched to be honoured with the first-ever lifetime achievement award in giraffe science bestowed by the conference committee and presented by the keynote speaker, John Doherty, who coordinates the Reticulated Giraffe Project in the north of Kenya and has been my friend and colleague for many years. John and his team work locally, nationally, and internationally to protect the reticulated giraffe, whose numbers have declined by more than 80% over the past twenty years. If you would like to make a contribution to giraffe conservation, I suggest that you might do no better than to support this important work. You can get in touch with the team at [email protected] and can make a contribution directly through their website: www. reticulatedgiraffeproject.net/RGP/People_Donations.html.

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. 16 . Conclusion

Looking back over my long life, I seem to have inherited the work habits of my parents. If I am not involved in some academic occupation or project I believe in, I am intensely unhappy. Even as a young girl I had no wish to loll about or do feminine things. In my spare time I always thought up something I considered worthwhile to do, mostly studying, reading books to learn about the world, or playing sports. I admired the authors of scientific books and papers that I read, so it was exciting later to realize that I also could produce original work that interested other biologists. The topics I chose to study as a professional were almost always connected either with animals, which, as a biologist, I loved, or with fighting discrimination. It upset me greatly to confront unfair inequality of any sort – in my life I saw this first against blacks in South Africa, then against women in academia and the arts, and always with animals, almost all of whom are treated poorly around the world whenever they have come into contact with human beings. I was often upset by never being able to be a real professor with a full-time job despite my scores of published scientific

papers and my very good teaching record. To be married and bringing up children is surely a worthy enterprise, yet because I was a woman doing this, I was denied a regular scientific career. I was born too early, perhaps, although men are still more advantaged in universities than are women. A huge opportunity for me was being hired in 1978 by students in Independent Studies at the University of Waterloo to guide them in their research activities. This amazing, cutting-edge program produced over 400 graduates, although because it gradually attracted fewer students, it was closed down in 2016. My other wonderful fortune was reuniting with giraffe and giraffe people, which began in 2010 and continues to this day. But best of all throughout my lifetime I have been able to pursue scientific problems that interested me and that seemed important. It has been a privilege and joy for me as a citizen scientist to have shed light on a variety of subjects that had never before been studied or understood. This is an impossibility for billions of people who do not have the educational background, resources, or good fortune required. I have been blessed indeed.

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– 1974a. “An annotated bibliography on the status and ecology of the wolverine in Canada.” Canadian Wildlife Service Report. – 1974b. “Numbers and distribution of the wolverine in Canada and the northern United States.” Canadian Wildlife Service Report. – 1975. “Studies in urban nature.” Conservation Council of Ontario Bulletin, 10–14 January. Carson, R. 1962. Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Cavell, R. 2003. “Review of The Feminine Gaze.” Biography 26,1: 167–70. Chance, M. 1956. “Social behaviour of rhesus monkeys: Social structure of a colony of Macaca mulatta.” British Journal of Animal Behaviour 4: 1–13. Dagg, A.I. 1959. “Food preferences of the giraffe.” Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 135: 640–2. – 1960. “Gaits of the giraffe and the okapi.” Journal of Mammalogy 41: 282. – 1962a. “The role of the neck in the movements of the giraffe.” Journal of Mammalogy 43: 88–97. – 1962b. “The subspeciation of the giraffe.” Journal of Mammalogy 43: 550–2. – 1962c. “The distribution of the giraffe in Africa.” Mammalia 26: 497–505. – 1962d. “Giraffe movements and the neck.” Natural History, New York 71: 44–51. – 1965. “Sexual differences in giraffe skulls.” Mammalia 29: 610–12. Dagg, A.I., and A. de Vos. 1968a. “The walking gaits of some species of Pecora.” Journal of Zoology, London 155: 103–10. – 1968b. “The fast gaits of some Pecoran species.” Journal of Zoology, London 155: 499–506. Dagg, A.I. 1968. “External features of giraffe.” Mammalia 32: 657–69. Dagg, A.I., and D.E. Whitelock. 1969. “A survey of student hunters and nonhunters.” Ontario Field Biology 23: 30–1.

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–1969. “The gallop of the wildebeest.” Journal of Mammalogy 50: 825–6. –1970a. “Preferred environmental temperatures of some captive mammals.” International Zoo Yearbook 10: 149–52. – 1970b. “Tactile encounters in a herd of captive giraffe.” Journal of Mammalogy 51: 279–87. – 1970c. “Wildlife in an urban area.” Naturaliste Canadienne 97: 201–12. Dagg, A.I., & D.E. Windsor. 1971. “Olfactory discrimination in gerbils.” Canadian Journal of Zoology 49: 1–6. Dagg, A.I., D.E. Windsor, and W.L. Bell. 1971. “Urine marking of cages and visual isolation as possible sources of error in behavioural studies of small mammals.” Laboratory Animals 5: 163–7. Dagg, A.I., and D.E. Windsor. 1972. “Swimming in northern terrestrial mammals.”Canadian Journal of Zoology 50: 117–30. Dagg, A.I. 1972. “Research on Canadian mammals.” Canadian Field-Naturalist 86: 217–21. – 1973. “Gaits in mammals.” Mammal Review 3: 135–54. – 1974a. “The locomotion of the camel (Camelus dromedarius).” Journal of Zoology, London 174: 67–78. – 1974b. Canadian Wildlife and Man. Toronto, on: McClelland and Stewart. – 1974c. Mammals of Ontario. Waterloo, on: Otter Press. – 1975. “In defense of small publishers.” Journal of Canadian Studies 20, 2: 83. Dagg, A.I., and J.B. Foster. 1976. The Giraffe: Its Biology, Behavior, and Ecology. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. Expanded edition 1982. Dagg, A.I. 1977a. “The walk of the silver gull (Larus novaehollandiae) and of other birds.” Journal of Zoology, London 182: 529–40. – 1977b. Wildlife Management in Europe. Waterloo, on: Otter Press. – 1977c. Running, Walking and Jumping – The Science of Locomotion. London: Wykeham Science Series, Taylor and Francis Group.

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– 1978. Camel Quest: Summer Research on the Saharan Camel. Toronto, on: York Publishing. Reprinted by Otter Press, 1989. – 1979. “The walk of large quadrupedal mammals.” Canadian Journal of Zoology 57: 1157–63. – 1981. A Reference Book of Urban Ecology. Waterloo, on: Otter Press. – 1983a. Harems and Other Horrors: Sexual Bias in Behavioral Biology. Waterloo, on: Otter Press. – 1983b. “Are women scientists worthless?” This Magazine, December 82–January 83, 11–12. – 1984a. “Homosexual behaviour and female-male mounting in mammals – a first survey.” Mammal Review 14: 155–85. – 1984b. “Sexual bias in the literature of social behaviour in mammals and birds.” International Journal of Women’s Studies 7: 118–35. – 1984c. “Sexist language and science.” Resources for Feminist Research 13,3: 32–3. – 1984d. “Kangaroo Controversy.” Animal Kingdom, February/ March, 12–19. – 1985a. “The status of some Canadian women PhD scientists.” Atlantis 11: 66–77. – 1985b. “Harold Innis as Naturalist.” Harold Innis Foundation. – 1986a. The Fifty Per Cent Solution: Why Should Women Pay for Men’s Culture? Waterloo, ON: Otter Press. – 1986b. “Scientists vs females.” Resources for Feminist Research 15,3: 19–21. – 1986c. Moreton Island: Its History and Natural History. Tangalooma Resorts, Moreton Island, Queensland, Australia. – 1987. “Wanted: More books by women.” Canadian Library Journal 44,2. Dagg, A.I., and P.J. Thompson. 1988. MisEducation: Women and Canadian Universities. Toronto, on: oise Press. Dagg, A.I., and P. Davis. 1988. “Women’s bodies in sport: Will amalgamation or integration mean progress?” The Starting Line. 7,1: 10–12. (Canadian Association for Advancement of Women and Sport). 212

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Dagg, A.I. 1989. “Research publications on Canadian mammals, 1971–1986.” Canadian Journal of Zoology 67: 779–84. – 1990a. “A Call to Adventure.” Kinesis July/ August: 4–5. – 1990b. “Women in science – are conditions improving?” In M.G. Ainley, ed., Despite the Odds: Essays on Canadian Women and Science, 337–48. Montreal: Véhicule Press. – 1990c. “Squeezing out graduate options.” University Affairs, August/September, 21. – 1991a. “Memories of Innis.” This Magazine, June/July 33–4. Dagg, A.I., and A.W.F. Banfield. 1991. “A History of Mammalogy in Canada.” Unpublished. In University of Waterloo archives and on the Web. Dagg, A.I., and S. Beauchamp. 1991. “Is there a feminist science? Perceived impact of gender on research by women scientists.” Atlantis 26,2: 77–84. Dagg, A.I. 1991b. “Do women do scientific research differently from men?” Chemistry 13 News, 11. – 1991c. “Jane Deer in science: Sample case.” Women’s Education 9,2: 57–60. Dagg, A.I., S. Conway, and M. Simpson, eds. 1991. Women’s Experience, Women’s Education – An Anthology. Waterloo, on: Otter Press. Dagg, A.I. 1992a. “Canadian voices of authority: Non-fiction and early women writers.” Journal of Canadian Studies 27,2: 107–22. –1992b. “Feminism reviled: Academic non-freedom at Canadian universities.” Canadian Women’s Studies 12,3: 89–92. – 1993a. “Academic faculty wives and systemic discrimination – antinepotism and ‘inbreeding.’” Canadian Journal of Higher Education 23,1: 1–18. – 1993b. “Toward a feminist academy.” Policy Options 14,2: 13–18. – 1994a. User-Friendly University: What Every Student Should Know. Waterloo, on: Otter Press. – 1994b. “Memories of my father.” Queen’s Quarterly 101,1: 79–91. BIBLIOGrAPHy

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– 1997. “Prestige, power, and the naming of brown bears.” Queen’s Quarterly 104,1: 97–106. – 1998a. “Hiring of women at Canadian universities: The subversion of equity.” In J. Stalker and S. Prentice, eds., The Illusion of Inclusion: Women in Post-Secondary Education, 108–18. Halifax: Fernwood. Dagg, A.I. 1998b. “Infanticide by male lions hypothesis: A fallacy influencing research into human behavior.” American Anthropologist 100,4: 1–11. – 1999a. “Sexual selection is debatable.” Anthropology News 40,9: 20. – 1999b. “Responsible animal-based research: Three flags to consider.” Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 2,4: 337–46. – 2000a. “Animal experimentation in cancer research: A citation analysis.” Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 3,3; 239–51. – 2000b. “Mary Quayle Innis (1899–1972).” In R.W. Dimand, M.A. Dimand, and E.L. Forget, eds., A Biographical Dictionary of Women Economists, 223–7. Cheltenham, uk: Edward Elgar. – 2001a. “The infanticide hypothesis: A response to the response.” American Anthropologist 102,4: 831–4. – 2001b. The Feminine Gaze: A Canadian Compendium of Non-fiction Women Authors and Their Books, 1836–1945. Waterloo, on: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Dagg, A.I., and T. Seidle. 2004. “Levels of citation of animal studies conducted at a Canadian research hospital.” Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 7,3: 205–13. Dagg, A.I. 2005. “Love of Shopping” Is Not a Gene: Problems with Darwinian Psychology. Montreal, qc: Black Rose Press. – 2006. Pursuing Giraffe: A 1950s Adventure. Waterloo, on: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. – 2008. “Blame and shame? How can we reduce unproductive animal experimentation?” In J. Castricano, ed., Animal Subjects: An Ethical Reader in a Posthuman World, 271–84. Waterloo, on: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. 214

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– 2009. The Social Behavior of Older Animals. Baltimore, md: Johns Hopkins University Press. – 2011. Animal Friendships. Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press. Dagg, A.I., and L. Harding. 2012. Human Evolution and Male Aggression: Debunking the Myth of Man and Ape. Amherst, ny: Cambria Press. Dagg, A.I. 2014. Giraffe: Biology, Behaviour and Conservation. Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press. – 2016. 5 Giraffes. Toronto, on: Fitzhenry and Whiteside. Dagg, I.R. 1972. Matrix Optics. Waterloo, on: Otter Press. Foster, J.B., and A.I. Dagg. 1972. “Notes on the biology of the giraffe.” East African Wildlife Journal 10: 1–16. Gauthier-Pilters, H., and A.I. Dagg. 1981. The Camel: Its Evolution, Ecology, Behavior and Relationship to Man. Chicago, il: University of Chicago Press. Reprinted 1982. Geist, V. 1975. Mountain Sheep and Man in the Northern Wild. Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press. Goodall, J. 1986. The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behaviour. Cambridge, ma: Belknap Press. Greek, C.R., and J.S. Greek. 2000. Sacred Cows and Golden Geese: The Human Cost of Experiments on Animals. New York, ny: Continuum. Hall, E.R., and K.R. Kelson. 1959. The Mammals of North America. New York, ny: Ronald Press. Hannah, E., L.J. Paul, and S. Vethamany-Globus, eds. 2002. Women in the Canadian Academic Tundra: Challenging the Chill. Montreal, qc: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Innis, A.C. 1958. “The behaviour of the giraffe, Giraffa camelopardalis, in the eastern Transvaal.” Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 131: 245–78. Innis, H.A. 1956. Essays in Canadian Economic History. M.Q. Innis, ed. Toronto, on: University of Toronto Press. Irvine, A.D. 1996. “Jack and Jill and employment equity.” Dialogue 35,2: 255–92. Lam, B. 2015. “The new science of bad science.” The Atlantic, September 19. BIBLIOGrAPHy

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index Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. academic wives, 179 acid rain, 78, 80, 109 Africa, first trip to, 22–9, 52 aggression, 48, 184–5, 189, 190, 199 Aid to Scholarly Publications Program, 181 American Anthropologist, 146, 188, 209 American Museum of Natural History, 71, 96, 107 American Society of Mammalogists, 35, 107, 153 amphibians, 103 Animal Friendships, 198–9 Animal Kingdom, 97, 104 antelope, 36, 37, 47, 48, 58, 89 arctic hare, 49 arts, the, 142–4 Atwood, Margaret, 130, 132 Australia, 55, 59, 62, 67, 77, 104–5, 138, 154 baboon, 153 Bagemihl, Bruce, 152, 154, 155

Banfield, Frank, 158–9, 165–6 Banting and Best Medical Building, 8, 21, 193 baseball players, 194 Bateman, Robert, 71 bats, 43, 51, 74, 79, 81 bear: brown, 56, 60, 86, 91, 107, 200; polar, 49, 140, 161–2, 200; taxonomy, 159–62 Beauchamp, Shelly, 172–4, 176 beaver, 50 Bekoff, Marc, 187–8, 190 Berton, Pierre, 91, 135, 143 Biological Council of Canada, 169 Biology Department, University of Waterloo, 38, 41, 123 biomedical research, 193–7 bird banding, 76, 89, 162–3 birds: Kitchener/Waterloo area, 43, 75–7; migrating, 74, 79; no longer in Kitchener/Waterloo area, 77; Queensland, 62 Bishop Strachan School, 5, 9, 59, 205

bison, 48, 60 Black Rose Press, 181 Black Studies, 181 Board of Education, Waterloo County, 137 bonobo, 155–6, 183, 199 Bourque, Sandy, 205 Bovey, Edmund, 176 Bovey Commission, 175–6 Brief for a Non-Sexist College, 172–3 Brookfield Zoo, Chicago, 21, 205 buffalo, 48 bush-baby, 47 Butler, Len, 23 Buxton, William, 13, 139 Cairns, Alan, 197, 116, 203 Cambridge University Press, 199, 204 camel, 53, 58, 68, 95–103 Camel: Its Ecology, Behavior and Relationship with Man, The, 95, 102–3 Camel Quest: Summer Research on the Saharan Camel, 95, 98, 137 Campbell, Craig, 52, 74, 76–7, 79 Canada Council, 135, 142–3, 145 Canadian Authors’ Association, 143 Canadian Field Naturalist, 96, 106, 108–9 Canadian Journal of Zoology, 23, 106 Canadian Society of Environmental Biologists, 74, 77–81 220

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Canadian Unemployed/ Underemployed PhD Scientists, 169 Canadian Wildlife and Man, 81–3, 87, 88, 129 Canadian Wildlife Service, 76 Canadian Woman Studies, 175 cancer research, 194–7 canoe trips, 7, 8, 91 capuchin monkey, 47 cardinal, 43, 162 caribou, 48, 50, 57, 91, 199 Carrick, Bill, 49 Carson, Rachel, xi cat, 48, 49, 105 cheetah, 37 chimpanzee, 183, 184, 191 Chinamano, Josiah, 24–5, 54 chinchilla, 49–50, 196 church, 4, 11, 15, 24, 124, 141 citations, for articles as a measure of importance, 111, 173, 194–6 citizen scientist, x–xi, 52, 95, 109 cleanliness, 92–3 Commission for Inquiry on Canadian Universities, 176 Conway, Sheelagh, 136, 144, 176 Council of Ontario Universities, 179 crocodile, 179 crow, 10 Dagg, Hugh, 17, 34, 36, 73, 111, 112, 115 Dagg, Ian, Jr, 17, 34, 36, 73, 111, 112, 115 Dagg, Ian, Sr, 24, 30–1, 33, 38, 59,

61, 63, 67, 73, 83–4, 96, 97, 112, 113, 122–4, 145, 201–2 Dagg, Mary, 17, 36–7, 61, 65, 67–8, 73, 97, 104, 111, 112, 115, 119, 162–3 Dagg, Nicholas, 111 deer, 22, 36, 37, 44, 47, 48, 51, 58, 59, 60, 80 deer mice, 45, 49, 50, 159 Department of University Affairs, 45 de Vos, Anton, 37 DNA sample, 165 Doctorow, Cory, 109 dog, 15, 36–7, 47, 57, 105 dominance, 65, 153, 184, 185 Donaldson, Sue, 196–7 donkey, 97, 105 dove, 62, 76 duck, 77 eland, 57, 68 elephant, 60, 71, 198, 204, 205 elk, 48, 57, 79, 80, 88 emu, 62 Enginews, University of Waterloo, 124 environmental activism, local groups, 74–5 Ewer, Griff, 23–6, 29, 150 Ewer, Jakes, 23–6 experiments: on animals, 8, 9, 46, 109, 193–7; on connection between tobacco and cancer, 194 Faculty Association of the University of Waterloo, 125

faeces, 3, 32, 46, 79, 96–7, 99 fathers, 103, 183, 186 Feminine Gaze: A Canadian Compendium of Non-fiction Women Authors and Their Books, 1836–1945, The, 145 feminism, 9, 87–8, 121–2, 126–7, 136, 172, 175, 178 feminist college, 172 Fenton, Brock, 79 Ferguson, Graeme, 12 ferret, 10 field work, 109 Fifty Per Cent Solution, The, 142–4 film enterprises, 198, 199, 200, 205 filming, of gaits, 33, 36–8, 60–1, 199, 200 fish, 44, 51, 79, 80, 103, 109 5 Giraffes, 205 flehmen, 45, 48, 69, 106 Fleur de Lys Ranch, 23, 26–9, 35, 149–50 Foster, Bristol, 70–2, 130, 204 fox, 47 France, 90, 102 Frye, Northrup, 138–9 gaits, of mammals, 33–6, 37–9, 55–62, 98 Gartshore, Mary, 52, 90 Gauthier-Pilters, Hilde, xi, 96–103 gazelle, 37, 58 geese, 77 genet, 89 gerbil, sense of smell of, 45–7, 49 inDex

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Germany, 89, 96, 97 gibbon, 9, 45–7, 190 Giraffa camelopardalis australis, 66–7 Giraffe: Biology, Behaviour and Conservation, 204–5 Giraffe: Its Biology, Behavior, and Ecology, The, 71–2 giraffe, wild: behaviour, 27–9, 32, 70, 191; distribution and races, 163–5, 66; endangered, 204; filmed movements, 33–6; homosexual behaviour, 149–50; scientific books on giraffe, 65–72, 204; skulls, 65 giraffe, zoo: external features, 69–70, 164; tactile encounters, 68–9 goat, 101, 105 goldfinch, 43 gorilla, 184 grandparents, 154, 198 ground hog, 43 ground squirrel, 49 gull, silver, 61–2, 152 hamster, 184, 194, 196 Harding, Lee, 155, 189–90, 199 hare, 49, 50, 184 Harems and Other Horrors: Sexual Bias in Behavioural Biology, 185 Harold Innis Foundation, 13–14 hawk, 76, 184 hippo, 57, 60 homophobia, 152–3 homosexuality, 29, 141, 149–56 222

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horse, 3, 15, 34, 48, 57, 58, 61, 68, 105, 199 Horwood, Harold 129–30 house sparrow, 76, 82 housework, 9, 15, 18, 38, 73, 149–56 human ancestors, 198–9 Human Evolution and Male Aggression: Debunking the Myth of Man and Ape, 189, 199 hunters/non-hunters, 41, 44, 66, 89, 90, 120 Huxley, Julian, 149–50 hyena, 47, 60, 184–5 infanticide by males, 184, 186–92 infrasound, 71, 204 Innis, Harold Adams, xv, 3–19, 20, 90–1, 139 Innis, Mary Quayle, xvi, xix, 3–10, 14–19, 23–4, 65, 125, 144–5, 202 innovation, by women, 126 insectivores, 51 Integrated/ Independent Studies, University of Waterloo, xi, 109–11, 121, 129 International Journal of Women’s Studies, 186 International Wildlife, 103 International Women’s Day, 125 International Women’s Year, 108 Italy, 89–90 Johns Hopkins University Press, 197–8 Journal of Canadian Studies, 87, 145

Journal of Mammalogy, 106, 161, 165 Journal of Zoology, 56, 106 kangaroo, 55–7, 68, 104–5 kangaroo mice, 57 Kitchener-Waterloo Status of Women group, 136–7 Kymlicka, Will, 196–7 Language Alert Newsletter (lan), 139–41 leaf monkey, 189–90 Leakey, L.S.B., 22, 90, 185 lesbians, 149, 152, 181 LGBTQ, 152, 156 Library Committee, Writers’ Union of Canada, 131–3 Lingua Franca, 188 lion, 47–8, 60, 139, 153, 184, 186–8, 190 llama, 48, 60 logging, 79–80 Love of Shopping Is Not a Gene: Problems with Darwinian Psychology, 190 lynx, 49 macaques, 155 magazine articles, commercial, 103–5 male bias, 126, 142, 186 Mammalia, 45, 96, 106–7 mammalogists of Canada, 165–7 mammalogy course, University of Guelph, 42, 158–9 Mammal Review, 102, 152–3

Mammals of Cottage Country, 90 Mammals of North America, 161 Mammals of Ontario, 84, 86–7 Mammals of Waterloo and South Wellington Counties, 51–2, 83–4, 86–7 marine mammals, 51, 191 marsupials, 105 Mary Quayle Innis Foundation, 125 Matrix Optics, 83–4 Matthew, Alexander, xxii, 23–6, 28 Matthews, Harrison, 30, 45, 71, 90 Matthews, Burt, 123 Mauritania, 95–102, 105 McClelland & Stewart, 82–3, 87, 97 Merriam, Clinton Hart, 160–1 mice, 9, 23, 45, 48–9, 57, 159, 184–5, 187–90 mink, 89 MisEducation: Women and Canadian Universities, 177–8 mongoose, 89 monkeys, 47–8, 57, 184–5, 187–90 moose, 48, 50, 57, 88, 91, 153, 157 Moreton Island, Brisbane, 62–3 Morgentaler, Henry, 124 mountain sheep, 151 Mount Kilimanjaro, xxiv, 31, 107, 202 Mugabe, Robert, 25 Munro, Alice, 134 muskox, 91 muskrat, 10, 43, 89 Mustard, Fraser, 176 inDex

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National Gallery, Ottawa, 142 National Research Council of Canada, 31, 95 Natural History, 35, 102 Natural History of Rape, The, 190–2 non-sexist college, 172–3

OIKOS Associates, 74–7, 80 OISE Press, 177 okapi, 33, 39 older animals, 197 Ontario Arts Council, 130 Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA), 126, 178 Ontario Human Rights Commission, 53 Ontario ombudsman, 53 Ontario Public Libraries, 132–3 orangutan, 191 ostrich, 62 otter, 65, 68 Otter Press, 74, 83–7, 90, 92, 98, 136, 143, 182, 185 Packer, Craig, 186–9 Pearson, Bill, 41, 123 penguin, 151 pesticides and poisons, 43, 51, 74, 80, 88, 109 Peterson, Randolph, 86, 157 petition re hiring more women professors, 170–1 pheasant, 44 PhD on animal gaits, 36–9 224

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Phelps, Amy, 203 pig, 45, 105 pigeon, 62, 76 pocket gopher, 160 porcupine, 6, 89 Porter, Anna, 82, 97 presses, small, 87 Professional Women’s Organization, University of Waterloo, 123 pronghorn antelope, 47 Public Lending Rights, 182–3 Pursuing Giraffe: A 1950s Adventure, 197, 202–3 Putting Hubby Through (PHT), 123 rabbit, 10, 43, 51, 59 raccoon, 89 racism, 5, 24, 30, 136, 182 radio, 5, 31, 51, 143, 153, 177, 184, 192, 205 Rae, Bob, 126 rape, 124, 184, 190–2 rat, 45, 49, 105, 193, 196 recycling, 74 red deer (elk), 22, 59, 88–9 Reference Book of Urban Ecology, A, 92 reindeer, 48 requests: for help, 107, 177, 196; for reprints, 53, 154 rhea, 62 rhinoceros, 47–8, 60, 68, 71, 204 robin, 33 Royal Ontario Museum, 21, 61, 65, 77, 86–7, 140, 152, 157–8, 165

Running, Walking and Jumping, 58, 61, 152 Schaller, George, 186–7 Science, 106, 173 science by women, 173–5 science citation index, 111 science fairs, 107 Science Forum, 170 sense of smell, of small mammals, 46 76 Terrific Books about Women, 136 sewage, 80 sexism, 24, 54, 81, 87–8, 121–8, 157, 185; in sports, 137; in universities, 10, 121–2, 123–8, 140, 171, 176–7; in Writers’ Union of Canada, 135 sexist language, 138 sheep, 89, 104–5 shrew, 56, 160, 165 skulls, 21, 42, 65, 70, 87, 156, 158–9, 163 skunk, 6, 43, 49, 68 Smith, Lorraine, 108–9 Smith, Stuart, 176 Social Behavior in Older Animals, The, 197–9 Social Science Federation, 181 sociobiology, 183–6, 190, 197 Sociology Department, University of Waterloo, 126 Sopinka, John, 53, 137 sports, 5–6, 11, 39, 73, 137–8 squirrel, 43, 50, 75–6 starling, 76, 82

Sterling, Keir, 165–7 stork, 48 stot, 58 Sussman, Robert, 187–8, 190 swan, black, 154–5 swimming, in mammals, 49–51 tapir, 60 Taronga Zoo, Sydney, 55, 61, 67–9 taxonomy, 156, 65–7 television, 36, 38, 177–8, 192 temperatures preferred by captive animals, 67–8 tenrec, 56 tenure, 52, 172 tern, 62 This Magazine, 170 Thompson, Patricia, 176–7 tiger, 47–8 To Tell the Truth, 38 Traill, Catharine Parr, x trophies, for giraffe work, 203, 205 unemployed PhD scientists group, 169–70 University Affairs, 170, 179 University Life, 181–3 University of Chicago Press, 72, 102, 130 University of Guelph, 37, 39, 41–56, 65, 95, 156, 158, 165, 169; teaching and research at, 39, 41–6, 49–53 University of Toronto, 21–3, 31, 65, 146, 157, 161, 177, 197 University of Toronto Press, 82–3, 146 inDex

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University of Waterloo, 31–2, 41, 95, 102, 121–8, 140, 142, 146, 169 urban bird research, 43, 76–7 urban environments, 75, 92 urban wildlife research, 43, 74–5 urine, secondary uses of, 45–8, 69, 96, 99 User-Friendly University: What Every Student Should Know, 182–3 UW Forum, 179 vole, 56 wallaby, 56 warblers, 162–3 waterbuck, 57 waterfowl, 77, 191 Waterloo Lutheran University, teaching at, 36 Watts, Ron, 176 weasel, 57, 160 Web of Science, 194–6, 204, 167 wetlands, 80 wildebeest, 68 wilderness and women, 91–2 wildlife management course, University of Guelph, 42, 50, 81, 165 Wildlife Management in Europe, 88–90 wildlife research, in Canada, 50–1 Wilfrid Laurier University, 36, 53 Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 36, 53, 146, 202 226

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Williamson, Mary, xviii, xix, 5, 83 Windsor, Douglas, 45–6, 49, 56, 84 wolf, 47 wolverine, 47, 50, 79, 81, 117 women science professors, at Canadian universities, 173–4 women scientists: do they do science differently?, 175; status of, 171 Women’s Education des Femmes, 173 Women’s Experience, Women’s Education, 144 Women Writers’ Committee, Writers’ Union of Canada, 134–6 woodpecker, 77 World Book, 105 Wright, Douglas, 123, 170 Writers-in-the-Schools Program, 129 Writers’ Union of Canada, 98, 107, 129–36, 144 Yalden, Derek, 102–3, 152–3 York Publishing, 98 zebra, 60, 68 Zoological Society of London, 30, 150 zoology general course, University of Guelph, 42–3 zoos, 155