One of the highlights of the CSZ annual meeting in Windsor was at the banquet, where we inducted Dr. Anne Innis Dagg as an honorary member of the Society. This is the greatest honour the CSZ can bestow, and honorary membership marks achievement and service to Zoology in Canada. Honorary membership is restricted to twenty living members.

Dr. Dagg is one of the world’s foremost experts in the biology of giraffes. She pioneered field studies of ungulates in Africa (PhD at University of Waterloo in 1967), and her books on giraffe biology and behaviour have for a long time been touchstones for giraffe biologists, especially for zookeepers. Despite these accomplisments, Dr. Dagg was denied tenure at the University of Guelph (under circumstances that can only be described as gender bias), but nevertheless pursued an important career writing books and papers about mammal behaviour, based at the University of Waterloo. Dr. Dagg is also a committed and prominent feminist, and is particularly notable for calling out the gender biases inherent in human interpretations of animal behaviour, and of gender inequity in society and science.

Dr. Dagg has been featured twice (in 1975 and 2018) by the Canadian Museum of Nature as a pioneering Canadian woman scientist, and received the lifetime achievement award from the International Giraffid conference – which subsequently named the award in her honour in perpetuity. Dr. Dagg’s life and career are the focus of a 2018 feature-length documentary The Woman Who Loves Giraffes, which is currently on the film festival circuit.

At the banquet, we showed a brief trailer for the film, and Dr. Dagg was accorded a standing ovation by the members of the Society. On behalf of the CSZ, it is a huge honour to welcome Dr. Anne Innis Dagg as an honorary member.