Never Cry Wolf : Amazing True Story of Life Among Arctic Wolves Paperback – September 13, 2001

The book arrived in excellent condition and was a fun and entertaining book filled with first-hand experiences with wolves. Very enlightening. Wolves aren't the savages I thought.

A fascinating read with great humor. I wish I had read this years ago.

Am always thrilled to read books about nature and wildlife, especially when done through the eyes of someone like Farley. As I read I knew over time he would realize how much of the information regarding wolves was false and grossly untrue. His writing is factual while being delightfully entertaining. You will learn about the amazing wolf and how they live as a family, educate their young as well as only taking what they need - highly recommend

Never Cry Wolf is a good, funny book that's actually quite endearing. It's also one of those unique novels that changed the way people think in a positive way.Yes, it's pretty clear it's a novel.I didn't know anything about the controversy surrounding the book until I finished reading it but I knew right away that aspects of the book didn't ring true.The notion that the government would simply drop an inexperienced greenhorn in the territory 300 miles north of Churchill, Manitoba to engage in research all by himself sounded improbable.The author's fortuitous discovery of friendly Eskimo's seemed a little too convenient.However, once you accept that this isn't really a true story,you're in for a lot of fun.The scene where the author is cooking for Eskimo visitors who quite understandably think he is insane is priceless.The wolves are charming and that was deliberate and important. Mowat can accused of self aggrandizement and has been accused of plagiarism(I don't know if that's true).This book was for the wolves and it served them well.

Up there with To Kill a Mockingbird and the James Herriot trilogy as one for all time and to be enjoyed frequently.

A delightful story of the author's life in the Arctic investigating wolf predation of caribou - during the course of which he came to all the wrong conclusions from the point of view of his government agency employers. Wolves are not the ravenous savage beasts that are responsible for devastating caribou herds, but devoted family animals which can communicate complicated messages over great distances, and which live to a large extent off mice and other small mammals. Where they do kill caribou, they are careful to select the most vulnerable animals (the very young, the very old or the sick ones), for good reasons - they aren't fast enough to catch a healthy full-grown specimen (mechanized human hunters carrying rifles with telescopic sights do not have this problem...).Farley Mowat is a trained biologist with a great sense of humor, and with a keen sense of how ridiculous he must have looked competing with wolves to mark territory around his tent, or pursuing them clad in a pair of binoculars and not much else because he didn't have time to dress. But the underlying message was serious then and is even more relevant now, since so much habitat has been lost or fragmented: decisions on wildlife management need to be based on good science, not on prejudice or commercial considerations alone.

I watched the movie some time in the 90s. I loved it. I was unaware that the author of the book has nearly cult status in Canada. An amazon friend (or more than 1?) told me that I ought to read Farley Mowat ... so here I am, choosing his one book that means something to me immediately. I find that the book must have been among the front-running myth busters on wolves. Myth busting is always entertaining. I don't know enough about the subject matter to judge the full extent of truth in the matter, but as I like Mowat's attitude and writing, I give him the benefit of doubt (though I was a little disconcerted by the following line in his foreword of 1993: Never allow facts to interfere with the truth! That is of course a nicely absurd sentence and therefore fun, but is also a little precarious.)What is this? It is several things: first of all a non-fiction account of a research expedition into the wild and cold. (Or is it an inaccurate account of a biased partisan trip to damage the natural interests of the hunting industry?) It is also a shrill satire about hunters, their lobby, bureaucrats, and `scientists'. All this is funny and it is nice to see how Mowat stretches his humor to himself. (Example: he was sunbathing naked in the wilderness, when a small group of wolves passes nearby; he has no time to collect his clothes and runs after them naked, for his scientific observations; he meets a group of local people (then still called Eskimos) and after the encounter a man says to him that the woman in the group might have liked him better with his trousers on.)The book was published in the 60s but based on events in the 40s. A young zoologist is sent to the wilderness to prove that wolves are bad and require eradication. They are competing with the large game industry, who does not like competition. The ruling theory about wolves is that they are voraciously bloodthirsty and kill for the fun. Our hero is expected to measure the problem and propose solutions.He writes in his 1993 foreword that he sees himself as one of the fathers of the theory that the wolf has been demonized unfairly, that he is not remotely the danger to Homo sapiens and other species that mythology claimed him to be. The demonization of the wolf, says Mowat, was started when man became sedentary. Wolf became the embodiment of evil to civilized man.Mowat's idyllic stories about good family life and neighborhood, plus his descriptions of wolves hunting deer reads as if it makes sense. His main theory is that wolves don't diminish deer herds, but keep them healthy. Convincing.This is all old history and probably the real world has moved on to doing irreparable damage by now. Or not?