As a wolf biologist said, despairing of educating the public, 'We'll never get past Never Cry Wolf!'

Unfortunately he forgot to mention that they're also damn' great bloodthirsty beasts with strong territorial and dominance drives, a propensity to roam long distances, and a large appetite for ungulate flesh. Mowat helped convince two generations that wolves are sweet-natured beasts with strong family values and a natural place in the ecosystem. A wolf-handler friend of mine puts it nicely: 'wolves are the new dolphins' - all too often seen as the incarnation of Nature's goodness, wisdom and beauty. Trouble is, now that big truth is largely accepted, we're still stuck with all the little lies. Its fundamental thesis was 'wolves are okay,' and that badly needed saying at the time. As such, it probably succeeded: it sank deep into the public consciousness of wolves, and surely helped the great turnaround of the wolf's image in the western world. If I remember correctly from reading a long-ago interview with him, Mowat fully intended his book to be pro-wolf propaganda. This was in the early 1960's, when a lot of people were bent on systematically eradicating the wolf as a species. Mowat knew a lot about life in the Arctic, but he didn't know much about wolves. And quite a lot of it is, at least in terms of factual accuracy, horseshit.

Let's get one thing straight: Never Cry Wolf is fiction. I hate it's made up from start to finish, yet the tagline on the cover says, 'The incredible true story of life among Arctic wolves.' I love it because I love wolves and this is a well-written, entertaining story about wolves.

Never cry wolf author