Lizards Book

This is a book I both love and hate. I love it because I love wolves and this is a well-written, entertaining story about wolves. 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."

Let's get one thing straight: Never Cry Wolf is fiction. Made up. Fabricated. And quite a lot of it is, at least in terms of factual accuracy, horseshit. Mowat knew a lot about life in the Arctic, but he didn't know much about wolves.

What he knew, he admired. This was in the early 1960's, when a lot of people were bent on systematically eradicating the wolf as a species. If I remember correctly from reading a long-ago interview with him, Mowat fully intended his book to be pro-wolf propaganda. 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. Its fundamental thesis was "wolves are okay," and that badly needed saying at the time.

Trouble is, now that big truth is largely accepted, we're still stuck with all the little lies. The pendulum has swung the other way. 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. Mowat helped convince two generations that wolves are sweet-natured beasts with strong family values and a natural place in the ecosystem. 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. As a wolf biologist said, despairing of educating the public, "We'll never get past Never Cry Wolf!"

Never Cry Wolf has served its day. It's a fine good story, with a strong emotional plotline as the narrator gets ever more involved with the wolves, and a nice line in laconic Canadian humour, but I'll never be able to stomach it while it's marketed as "An Incredible True Story."