Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowat

Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowat is a book that takes a young scientist and places him in the wild, where he has to develop a new conception of and relationship to the environment. In the course of this book, the young man learns a lesson about the real nature of the wild and about the way animals that belong in a given environment fit into the larger scheme of things. He also learns that people are often intruders who make false assumptions and who introduce a damaging and dangerous external influence into the environment so that efforts human beings might make to protect the environment could have the opposite effect.

Never Cry Wolf is the story of one isolated man, a scientist, facing a world he did not understand until he found himself in it. The central character is sent to the Arctic wild by the Canadian government to prove that wolves were decimating the herds of caribou in that region. This central character is Mowat himself, for he was assigned to this task. He finds that the wolves are not the "evil" predators he has been led to believe but that they have personalities and character of their own.

Mowat is sent to the wild by a government that believes killing the wolf is necessary to protect other species, but Mowat finds this a questionable premise once he has encountered the wolf packs and experienced the life of the wild. Mowat also finds that the rationale has been promoted by sport killers, hunters who may have their own agenda and whose view has bee

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owat points out rightly that the wolves and the caribou herds have coexisted for centuries with no trouble. Only the coming of new populations of human beings has brought about a change, but the locals refuse to believe this and send Mowat to a site where some 50 deer carcasses are lying, supposedly killed by wolves not for food but out of savagery. Mowat finds the truth to be somewhat different: Unfortunately for the "proof," none of these deer could have been attacked by wolves. There were no wolf tracks anywhere on the lake. But there were other tracks: the unmistakable triple trail left by the skis and tail-skid of a plane which had taxied all over the place, leaving the snow surface scarred with a crisscross mesh of serpentine limbs (Mowat 157). The locals and the Canadian government treat the environment not as it really is but as they perceive it to be, and no evidence changes their view. Mowat finds again and again that the environment is threatened by some of the efforts of government to protect it. Wolves are targeted as the enemy, perhaps so the civilized community will not have to admit that it is the enemy and not the wolves. Clearly, human beings can coexist with the environment, for the local Indian t

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