Never Cry Wolf: Science, Sentiment, and the Literary Rehabiliation of Canis Lupus.

Never Cry Wolf: Science, Sentiment, and the Literary Rehabilitation of Canis Lupus

Karen Jones

2001

A shepherd boy was watching his flock near the village and was bored. He thought

it would be great fun to pretend that a Wolf was attacking the sheep, so he cried out

Wolf! Wolf! and the villagers came running. He laughed and laughed when they

discovered there was no Wolf. He played the trick again. And then again. Each

time the villagers came, only to be fooled. Then one day a Wolf did come and the

Boy cried out Wolf! Wolf! But no one answered his call. They thought he was

playing the same games again.

The Boy Who Cried Wolf

In common with the mischievous shepherd boy of Aesopian fable, humans are profligate storytellers. Individuals recount both monotonous routines and unusual occurrences with narrative verve. The telling of tales is enshrined as a popular tradition in many cultures....Significantly, human accounts abound with references to other creatures, narrators populating their tales with a cast of beasts designed to provide sylvan sparkle, convey moral messages, or impart keen warnings. The depiction of faunal characters in popular literature also tells us a great deal about environmental attitudes. The roles apportioned to animals -- their character, motivations, and qualities -- reflect societal views of the natural world, suggesting how humans perceive nature and alluding to our relationships with other species. Behind the caution against habitual equivocation of the Boy Who Cried Wolf lurks an assumption of canine malevolence, the cunning lupine villain pitted against an embattled human community.

From Black Beauty (1877) and Kindred of the Wild (1902) to Tarka the Otter (1927) and Pilgrims of the Wild (1935), literary protesters have deployed the written word to lobby on behalf of four-legged forms. Even in the age of mass media, the book remains a key medium of environmental expression....offering emotive and cogent alternative narratives on intra-species relations, industrial progress, and human behaviour towards the rest of nature.

It is precisely this relationship between nature writing and environmentalism that I want to explore by looking at the controversy generated by Never Cry Wolf, a cardinal text of Canadian wildlife advocacy. Published by distinguished nature writer Farley Mowat in 1963, the book tells the story of a greenhorn biologist and his encounter with a wolf pack in the Canadian tundra. The title earned international renown, sold over a million copies, and made it onto the big screen courtesy of Disney Pictures in 1981.

Part of the allure of Never Cry Wolf heralded from its position within an illustrious storytelling tradition. For thousands of years, Canis lupus, or the gray wolf, has proved a popular character in folklore. Native American medicine men related how lupine protagonists dispensed hunting lore to listening warriors or guided travellers safely out of danger. Parents in eighteenth-century Europe warned their progeny of lascivious canines that preyed on red-jacketed girls in the gloomy forest. North American pioneers, themselves entranced by wolf howls in the woods, spun yarns of rapacious lupine killers with the capacity to destroy hundreds of cattle....

In the early 1900s a new breed of wolf literature emerged from the likes of Jack London, Ernest Thompson Seton, and Charles G.D. Roberts. These North American authors revered the wolf as an accomplished wilderness hunter and independent spirit, hailing the animal as a vibrant and vital symbol of an unspoiled and primitive continent. According to the realistic animal story of the early twentieth century, wolf society was moral, honourable, and benign. Farley Mowat drew heavily on such themes in crafting Never Cry Wolf. Yet, in contrast to its widespread appeal as a readable and romantic northern yarn, Never Cry Wolf was greeted with skepticism in scientific circles. High-ranking biologists...raised solemn objections to the book's idiosyncratic blend of scientific argument and quixotic prose....

This article suggests that Never Cry Wolf represents an important chapter in the history of Canadian environmentalism....The deluge of letters received by the Canadian Wildlife Service from concerned citizens opposing the killing of wolves testifies to the growing significance of literature as a protest medium. Modern Canadians roused to defend a species that their predecessors sought to eradicate. By the 1960s the wolf had made the transition from the beast of waste and desolation (in the words of Theodore Roosevelt) to a conservationist cause celebre....Never Cry Wolf played a key role in fostering that change.

The controversy over Never Cry Wolf further encapsulates a crucial divide within modern environmentalism between professional science and amateur naturalism. Opinion on Farley Mowat's tome was divided between those who based their fundamental conservationist visions on rational, scientific research and those who favoured emotional, spiritual, and intuitive engagements with nature....It also raised the problem of competing claims to ecological authority -- a theme that resurfaces today in environmental altercations over Atlantic fishing, oil drilling, and global warming.

Writing the Wolf

Born in 1921 in Ontario, Farley Mowat nurtured affection for the outdoors at an early age....At the age of fourteen, having moved to Saskatchewan with his parents, the young naturalist issued his first defense of predators in an article for the Star Phoenix newspaper protestiong the shooting of hawks by local farmers. Such youthful musings situated Mowat in a North American amateur naturalist tradition based on intimate engagement with nature, the collection and classification of species, and moral concern for animal welfare....

Following a tour of duty during the Second World War, Mowat visited the Canadian barrenlands, sensing that the remote and pristine wilderness would offer an "escape into the quiet sanctuaries where the echoes of war had never been heard." The North, in Mowat's estimation, served as a refuge from modernity....In March 1947 Mowat signed up for an expedition to Keewatin with an American ornithologist working for the Arctic Institute, and he revisited the area in 1948-9 as a student biologist under contract to study caribou with the newly created Dominion (later Canadian) Wildlife Service. His professional credentials were eclectic, reflecting personal interests in literature, ethnology, biology, and exploration. However, aspirations as a writer, a roving naturalist, and a commentator on northern issues did not marry well with Mowat's biological career, and he was soon dismissed.

When Mowat published Never Cry Wolf in 1963, his estrangement from Canada's professional wildlife authorities was obvious. The naturalist had transformed his field observations of a wolf pack at Nueltin Lake in 1948-9 into an imaginative literary plea for canine preservation. Mowat chastized his superiors at the Dominion Wildlife Service (DWS) as doctrinaire officials with military pretensions. In the gloomy and Formalin-smelling dens of the DWS, Mowat portrayed his assignments as nothing more than to...discern "legitimate grievances" against wolf outlaws in the Northwest Territories for "killing all the deer."

....The wilderness journey of Never Cry Wolf represented a route to self-discovery, a conversion project that involved the discarding of hoary preconceptions about bloodthirsty wolves. Captivated by the activities of the pack at "Wolf House Bay," Mowat offered his readers a startling epiphany: "Inescapably, the realization was being borne in upon my preconditioned mind that the centuries-old and universally accepted human concept of wolf characteristics was a palpable lie." This notion of finding truth in the material wilderness related a key trope of North American nature writing. In particular, it recalled naturalist Aldo Leopold's encounter with a vanquished she-wolf in New Mexico in the 1920s. In his famous essay "Thinking Like a Mountain," Leopold recounted how a "fierce green fire" dying in the eyes of his canine prey forced him to reconsider customary assumptions of wolves as worthless vermin....Never Cry Wolf discarded rationalist scientific protocols in favour of a more intuitive approach, with personal observation and spirituality replacing scientific dogma as axioms of truth.

....Mowat presented his lupine compatriots as a tightly knit, convivial community of mesmerising, albeit anthropomorphic characters. Wolf "George" represented the ideal father, "Angeline" the devoted yet feisty mother, and "Uncle Albert" the dependable pup sitter. Crucially, amid the jocular anecdotes, Mowat forged a vivid impression of the northern landscape, its wolves and its people, as a vibrant, pristine, and, above all, moral society....[P]ertinent comparisons can be drawn with works by Canadian precursors -- Grey Owl, Ernest Thompson Seton, and Charles G.D. Roberts. For these writers, the natural world demonstrated a natural civility, harmony, and decorum. Their literary remit involved presenting animals as sensitive, thoughtful individuals whom humans could identify with as "fellow mortals," in Scottish-Californian naturalist John Muir's famous phrase. In contrast to frontier stereotypes offering the wolf as rapacious, Charles Roberts instructed his readers as to the personality, charm, and kinship to be had with furred and feathered friends....

....Mowat learned to see wolves as worthy members of the Arctic ecosystem. Never Cry Wolf disseminated a powerful, alternative narrative on Canis lupus. Mowat presented wolves as ingenious creatures engaged in a nutually beneficial relationship with the caribou. Instead of the ferocious beasts indiscriminately slaying entire herds, the pack favoured sick or weak animals and subsisted on small rodents once the caribou migrated to summer range. This observation was not an original contention -- a handful of North American scientists from Adolph Murie to Aldo Leopold had already articulated powerful pleas for canine preservation on the grounds of ecological health. However, Never Cry Wolf played an instrumental role in bringing the rehabilitated wolf, the ecological predator, into the public arena.

Farley Mowat ended his literary foray into the barrenlands with an abrupt change of style. The author adopted sombre language to describe the war waged on northern fauna by Euro-American sports hunters armed with high-powered rifles....[T]he white man embodied a rapacious destroyer driven by a desire to control the environment....The fate of the barrenlands poignantly demonstrated the alienation of modern man from nature, the North emblematic of a lost kingdom where people and wolves lived in natural harmony....A brief epilogue provided a clima[c]tic end to the declentionist tale. In starkly impersonal fashion, Mowat related how federal predator control agents placed cyanide guns and poison outside the "Wolf House Bay" den during May 1959. The last line of Never Cry Wolf read: "It is not known what results were obtained."

The Scientific Critique

In a 1963 review article for the Toronto Globe and Mail entitled "To the Rescue of the Wolf," literary editor William French extolled Never Cry Wolf as a "splendid and satisfying book." Wolves, he noted, owed "Mowat a debt of gratitude for rescuing their reputation. However, officials in the employ of the Canadian Wildlife Service (CWS) articulated a different response to Mowat's treatise. Biologists were furious at the portrayal of scientific scholarship, lupine characteristics, and governmental bureaucracy in Never Cry Wolf....

The scientific community censured Mowat for presenting his sojourn in the Northwest Territories as authentic. Although an engaging yarn, Never Cry Wolf failed to offer a valid biological exposition on wolves. C.H.D. Clarke of the Canadian Wildlife Service labelled Mowat as "a wonderful raconteur posing as a scientist." Wolf researcher Douglas Pimlott categorized the work as "a satire with a factual background." The response was unanimous. Mowat represented a pseudo-scientist as well as a pseudo-wolf.

Authorities recognized that Mowat had conducted fieldwork for the Wildlife Service in Keewatin but...cited that [he] had observed wolves for a total of just ninety hours -- an indictment on his research credibility and scientific commitment....Staff contended that much of Mowat's observations regarding wolf relationships and eating habits had been "borrowed" from Adolph Murie's The Wolves of Mount McKinley (1944). A.W.F. Banfield, who oversaw the Keewatin wolf-caribous project in the 1940s, noted that Mowat had been given Murie's work to peruse as part of his orientation. "Any resemblance between Never Cry Wolf and that book is not coincidental," he urged.

Biologists took Mowat to task for his roseate portrayal of wolf society. Exacting commentators exposed the proclaimed July "love affair" between "Uncle Albert" and a female husky as a biological impossibility. Scientists criticized Mowat for forging a menagerie of "most loveable creatures," contending that wolves often killed healthy as well as weakened caribou....

Scientific unease over Mowat's depiction of lupine fellowship related a deeper concern regarding appropriate tactics to use to inspire public interest in wildlife. Although Never Cry Wolf invariably countered misconceptions about wild predators as "ferocious vermin," experts feared that Mowat was doing the species a disservice by investing it with angelic traits. The canonized wolf, a saintly figure with exemplary morals, proved as distorted (and anthropomorphic) an image as the demoniac canine of European folklore. In the 1930s and 1940s, when federal policy first moved towards tentative protection of predators in Canadian national parks, wildlife officials faced a rabid band of wolf-haters demanding the extermination of local lupines. Resource managers now feared that Mowat's treatise might rouse an equally ardent, and misinformed, cadre of wolf lovers. In such a climate, the CWS could well find its options limited. Douglas Pimlott argued: "I feel very strongly that the case for the wolf should be fought on the basis of facts and on the grounds of his basic right to be here."....

Biologists responded angrily to Mwat's allusions of the Canadian Wildlife Service as a reprehensible band of wolf haters....Certainly, government departments had presided over the killing of wolves in Canadian national parks in the early 1900s, but by the 1960s they asserted a broad preservationist mandate based on ecological science, rarity value, and historical presence....Wildlife officials prided themselves on their impartiality and commitment to natural resource management on the basis of sound research....

Seeking to disprove the contentions of Never Cry Wolf, a distinguished cadre of CWS officials ruminated over the particularities of wolf-caribou policy. Staff argued that the agency had never demanded the extermination of the wolf and that Canis lupus was recognized as a useful and integral part of the northern ecosystem. Mowat's remit had not been to research excuses for the eradication of resident wolves, but to investigate the relationship between local caribou and their lupine neighbours. As Banfield exclaimed, the "suggestion that he [Mowat] was hired to produce incontrovertible proof to damn the wolf is a woolly fabrication."....

With caribou populations plummeting from 3 million animals in 1940 to a mere 670,000 in 1948, the Wildlife Service had been forced to act to save the herd. Wolf control had long been viewed as an appropriate tool in wildlife management, and authorities looked to this option as a way of mitigating caribou decline. The prevalent scientific assumption was that wolves, as carnivorous hunters, exerted considerable pressure on ungulate herds. Whenever herbivore populations dipped, Canada's wolves became legitimate targets. In the early 1940s, control activities in Banff and Jasper National Parks continued under the rubric of whitetail deer preservation.In the Northwest Territories, 16,000 tundra wolves succumbed between 1952 and 1962. Yet wildlife managers proved keen to stress that this attack was not a rapid witch-hunt of Canis lupus....Control measures tapered off after 1959 -- the same year that wolf-killing activities ended permanently in Canada's national parks -- when caribous numbers began to recover.

Science Versus Sentiment

....Mowat's irreverent attitude towards established knowledge and authority jeopardized the reputation of the Canadian Wildlife Service as a specialist in lupine matters. In offering their assessments of Never Cry Wolf, staff biologists remonstrated their learned status by categorizing Mowat's fable as fictional. Reviewers fashioned an unbridgeable divide between rational inquiry (embodied by their research) and entertaining fiction (as represented by Mowat's discourse)....

The presentation of animals in popular literature had raised hackles in the naturalist community before. In the early 1900s, Seton and Roberts...had been castigated by an angry crowd of scientific and sporting luminaries who took issue with their blend of natural history and artistic licence. The furor -- which played out in the pages of literary and sporting journals in the eastern United States -- involved President Theodore Roosevelt, who famously lambasted Seton and his cohorts as "Nature Fakers."....

....Farley Mowat remained unruffled by the professional backlash against his lupine rfable. Keen to assert the validity of "subjective experience over objective data or statistics," the unrepentent writer issued a fervent battle cry: "Never Let The Facts Interfere with the Truth." "Deliberately unscientific," Mowat freely admitted that he crafted the work to foster a positive impression of Canis lupus. He was operating within a different, storytelling, tradition, perceiving imagination and literary verve as key routes to converting his audience to an environmental cause. The emotive epiphany of Never Cry Wolf positioned it squarely within a North American amateur naturalist tradition. The book related a spiritual awakening and an intuitive environmental narrative that deplored the decimation of resident fauna at the hands of a bureaucratic elite. It was consciously designed as a piece of propaganda, employing natural history, humour, and tragedy to fashion an affecting tale. Lupine biology proved a malleable tool in the hands of the storyteller, much to the consternation of government biologists, who viewed science as absolute and infallible. The fervent debate over the efficacy of Mowat's modern morality tale illuminated a struggle between two authorities working according to different rubrics of knowledge. Disputed notions of fact and truth reflected a deeper contest over the relative role of science and sentiment in constructing human perceptions of the natural encironment....

Inciting Public Howls

In a review of Mowat's book published during the spring of 1964, A.W.F. Banfield concluded: "It is certain that not since Little Red Riding Hood has a story been written that will influence the attitude of so many towards these animals. I hope that the readers of Never Cry Wolf will realize that both stories have about the same factual content." In comparing Mowat's tale with the famous European story, Banfield adroitly recognized the impact of powerful storytelling on the reputation of Canis lupus. His prediction about the popularity of the work also proved highly pertinent....Captivated by the story of George, Angeline, and Uncle Albert, citizens roused to defend the wolves of nonfiction.

Staff at the Canadian Wildlife Service faced a deluge of correspondence from all over the world about Never Cry Wolf....Missives...typically expressed heartfelt admiration for the book and praised its conservationist tenets....Anxious citizens seemed particularly concerned about the portrayal of Canadian government policy...and proved eager to discern whether predator control schemes remained in force....

Never Cry Wolf steadily gained popular currency as a credible source on lupine conservation. Herbert Huwarth from New York described the book as "fabulously well-written, but most important, it is telling the truth." Letter-writers eagerly stressed the accuracy of Mowat's lupine portrayal and admonished the CWS for its irrational stance. Popular critics emphasized the negligence of the Canadian Wildlife Service, reproaching federal authorities for their prejudiced perceptions of wild carnivores and issuing acidic attacks on the department for subscribing to "old wives tales." Government cadres were repeatedly instructed to use Never Cry Wolf as an educational tool. Raymond Bock insisted: "I respectfully suggest that you make it required reading for every member of your Service -- and for that reason I have sent you a copy!"....In an intriguing inversion of the biological debate over Never Cry Wolf, citizens cast Mowat as a knowledgeable, reliable authority and the Canadian Wildlife Service as a fallible institution devoid of factual analysis....

....Letters to the Wildlife Service applauding the virtues of Never Cry Wolf often employed humanitarian motifs. These themes reflected traditional concern for animal welfare, yet also testified to an emerging animal rights discourse exemplified by organizations such as Cleveland Amory's Friends for Animals (1967) and the International Fund for Animal Welfare (1969). Respondents to the CWS perceived predator control as needless, brutalizing, and inhumane....Readers singled out sportsmen...as particularly immoral....

By contrast, letter-writers commonly paid homage to the moral society of the wolf. As David Sheppard, a seventh-grader from Edmonton, exclaimed: "The wolf kills only the sick weak animals and even then he takes a chance." [Mary Sue] Haliburton, meanwhile, lauded wild canids as "loyal," "intelligent," "fun-loving," and "good parents."....

....Significantly, however, respondents couched their newfound appreciation for the wolf by ascribing the species human qualities. Readers followed Mowat's lead in constructing lupine society as an anthropo- morphic world of "married" wolves, "old maids," and "bachelors." Nature was understood in terms of human society and its value systems. According to environmental historian Lisa Mighetto, this process suggested an inability to accept the wolf on its own terms....This proclivity for anthropomorphizing animals was not confined to Mowat and his readers. rom Aesop to Disney, many commenators cast their animals in sapient garb and judged them according to cultural precepts. A few dissenters -- notably Henry David Thoreau, Grey Owl, and John Muir -- proclaimed a nascent biocentrism, but it was not until the 1970s, with the rise of deep ecology and Earthfirst!, that the environmental movement received an organizing biocentric rationale....

Readers of Never Cry Wolf fostered an abiding anthropomorphic attachment to the virtuous community of appealing, doglike animals. However, that view did not stop them from proclaiming a distinctly misanthropic agenda. Communiques celebrating the "humanity" of the wolf pack regularly displayed unease about the moral fibre of sapient society. Accustomed notions of civilized and uncivilized society were reversed in the environmental vernacular, the wolf's traditional position as most hated predator now assumed by Homo sapiens. Raymond Bock stated that "the wolf competed with the worst predator ever to roam this planet, namely man." David Sheppard...assert[ed] that "wolves are not the vicious killers that some authors pictured them as. We are! Yes, us. The highly sophisticated and superior race known as Man. Slaughterer of the caribou, mass murderer of the seal, terror of canines. Man. Preacher of peace, user of violence."

....Although Mowat's tale might easily be taken as a single-issue campaign for the preservation of the tundra wolf, his readers made connections with other environmental campaigns. The destruction of wolves, the hunting of seals, and the chemical pollution of the planet were read as symptomatic of modern industrial society's relentless pursuit of profit over ecological sustainability. Raymond Bock prefigured his comments...with a call for "population control rather than predator control," an allusion to Paul Ehrlich's forecast of overpopulation doomsday in The Population Bomb....

Respondents displayed an accomplished awareness of key ecological texts and tenets. Along with a copy of Never Cry Wolf, Mrs. F. Vacher of Salinas, California, sent Canadian officials a version of the "Leopold Report" (1964), the famous US government-sponsored study chaired by A. Starker Leopold (Aldo's son) that stressed the importance of large predators in ecological systems and inaugurated a policy of natural regulation in US national parks....Readers characterized Canis lupus as a vital ecological agent, playing a necessary and productive role in nature.

Enlivened letter-writers manifested an impassioned distrust of governmental and scientific authority. This estrangement from traditional sources of knowledge and power related a key characteristic of the modern environmental movement. To many activists, bureaucratic and technological expertise bespoke socio-environmental despoliation rather than progress. Institutions were berated for the ineffective environment stewardship, while the sanitized language of science was deconstructed to relfect a more malfeasant agenda. Respondents read wolf control as annihilation....

Never Cry Wolf and Literary Environmentalism in the 1960s

....Never Cry Wolf...sits within a North American nature writing tradition that encompasses works by literary greats such as Henry David Thoreau, John Muir...and Ernest Thompson Seton. Communion with nature, geographical and personal exploration, and a mystical sense of the environment as a moral and beneficent realm denote elemental themes in this naturalist vernacular....

At the same time, Never Cry Wolf participated in the birth of a new environmental revolution. Mowat's text represented part of an emerging discourse on animal rights and human wrongs that characterized the Canadian environmental movement in the 1960s. The storytelling naturalist incorporated his personal foray to the North into a truly modern, activist discourse on human relations with nature. This timely blend of traditional naturalism and modern ecological awareness explains the significance of Never Cry Wolf in Canadian environmental history. Mowat drew on traditional animal stories and contemporary fears about human-crafted biocide to fashion an effective protests discourse on wolves. The book is best interpreted as a bridge between two realms -- historic North American nature writing and modern environmental literature.

In terms of its science, Never Cry Wolf conveyed traditional naturalist pursuits of describing individual animals and landscapes. Rather than comprehend nature using professional, bureaucratic methods, Mowat adopted an amateur enthusiast approach that embraced sentimentalism as well as biological process. This refusal to separate biological knowledge from a romantic perception of the natural world recalled the works of Seton and Roberts in the early twentieth century and set Never Cry Wolf apart from contemporary environmental treatises stressing the dangers of nuclear power, human overpopulation, or industrial pollution in grave and functional prose....

....The story of the greenhorn biologist and the lupine protagonists in Never Cry Wolf conveyed a highly personal narrative about a specific place. It operated on a local level. By the end...readers knew every character, both human and nonhuman, intimately. This sense of nature as familiar, even familial, harked back to the nature writing traditions of Muir, Grey Owl, and Seton. Seton's personal interaction with a real Mexican wolf formed the basis for his lupine story, "Lobo: The King of Currumpaw." is tale cast the "king wolf" as a unique and rugged character, a noble personality with feelings and goals. Such emphasis on the individual animal, of seeing ecological interactions in microcosm, did not naturally lend itself to the global, all-encompassing doctrines of modern environmentalism, to talk of acid rain and nuclear fallout. And yet, as Mowat's work demonstrates, stories of human-nature interactions in one place could inform a greater ecological cause. Mowat readily linked the fate of the Wolf House Bay pack with wider destructive impulses and events, such as the decimation of Native peoples and the ruination of sensitive ecosystems. Readers analogized the persecution of the wolf with that of the seal and the whale....The fate of an individual animal -- the tundra wolf -- grew to embody the unequal relationship between humans and other species.

Measuring Environmental Impact

....Mowat's book...depicted a program of wolf culling that had all but ended by the time of its publication in 1961. Predator control had wound down after 1959, and it family came to an end in the late 1960s. Never Cry Wolf could claim little role in altering CWS policy in the Northwest Territories, with change instead determined by the dissemination of ecological science and the recovery of caribou populations. The book did, however, inaugurate a discourse within the professional wildlife community over how best to present the dynamics of wolf ecology to an interested public....

Issues of predator management clearly moved into the public arena courtesy of Never Cry Wolf. Mowat employed his literary skills to synthesize natural resource issues that had largely remained the preserve of the scientific community. The tragic fate of the individual animals at Wolf House Bay, coupled with the book's wider critique of industrial scientific modernity resonated among an environmentally motivated Canadian public. It also won many converts to the lupine cause in the United States....The book emerged as a prominent consciousness raiser for canine preservation. Never Cry Wolf ensured that predator-killing prgrams in North America could no longer escape public scrutiny.

Perhaps the greatest testament to the significance of Never Cry Wolf lay in its prolonged shelf life. Irate missives to the Wildlife Service through the 1960s and 1970s attested to the book's continuing saliency. In literary and celluloid guise, the lupine tale was employed in campaigns to prevent government wolf control programs in British Columbia in the late 1980s and in the Yukon in the early 1990s. Three decades on, the book retained its power as a tool for rousing sympathy for wild lupines....

Questions remained, nonetheless, over the efficacy of Mowat's portrayal....In the 1980s and 1990s resource managers complained that the complex task of wildlife management had been rendered more difficult because of Never Cry Wolf. Biologists today still face a small cadre of advocates who willingly regurgitate that wolves dine exclusively on small rodents....

....In the 1990s the "Friends of Farley" roused to defend the "northern national icon" from renewed attack, asserting the importance of sentiment over science as a method of apprehending environmental realities. Portraying Mowat as the common man of Canadian environmentalism, the affable and accessible wildlife guide, one commentator asserted: "There is more truth in one of his outrageous exaggerations than in a shelf-load of pretentious twaddle." A critical article in International Wolf in 1996 spurred outrage on the letters page for the "low hit against Never Cry Wolf...A book that is, after 34 years, still a bestseller and available in more than 20 languages, and that has created sympathy for wolves like nothing else." Akin to the charismatic canines that Mowat idealized, the Canadian writer continued to inspire pervent attacks and equally enlivened defences. The truths of wolf conservation remained contested territory.

The Writer as Environmental Commentator

Ecological science has often been lauded as integral to the rehabilitation of the wolf in post-1945 North America. According to biologist John Theberge: "The rapidly growing concern in defence of the wolf stems to a large degree from the results of wolf research...Books, articles, radio programs, television documentaries, and commercial recordings have put into public hands many new biological facts." However, the currency of Never Cry Wolf as a text of lupine advocacy also suggests a need to consider the role of the storyteller in propagating environmental awareness....Following on from his wolf story, Mowat successfully publicized the fate of marine mammals using a similar blend of biological knowledge, personal storytelling, and anthropo- morphism. A Whale for the Killing (1972) recounted the senseless murder of a gin whale by sports hunters, while Sea of Slaughter (1984) decried the killing of seals in the Canadian north. These ethically focused, affectionate portrayals of animals fostered empathy between the reader and the faunal subject. The popularity of such narratives in North America was perhaps unsurprising, given the predominance of moralistic and humanistic attitudes towards animals. Citizens responded well to the blending of wilderness and domesticity, rendering the animal at once an independent spirit and an appealing pet. Tales stressing intuition and sentiment over rationality and analysis gained widespread appeal with those disaffected with progress or seeking spiritual reconnection with nature....

The wolf, meanwhile, remained a popular character in North American nature literature. Several titles narrated the return of the wolf to Yellowstone National Park in 1995, while lupine protagonists patrolled works on the modern West by Nicholas Evans and Cormac McCarthy. As a conservationist agenda and as a literary character, the wolf has been transformed from the skulking killer of the Boy Who Crief Wolf to an exemplary symbol of wild, ecologically healthy North America. Never Cry Wolf played a role in that greater story. At this juncture, however, it appears appropriate to offer a cautionary epilogue. Although the wolf of literature has been redefined, humans, as the crafters of the story, invariably construct their animals. In common with the gloomy fairy tales of medieval Europe, the bright fable of Never Cry Wolf conveyed imaginary beasts. A potent dilemma thus remains: If writers create the wolf in order to save it, what happens when the animals roaming the material landscape fail to satisfy human expectations?

INCLUDES

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