Analysis Of Never Cry Wolf By Farley Mowat

Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowat is a non-fiction story about naturalist Farley Mowat, on an expedition to find out why so many caribou were being killed. Mowat’s superiors believed that wolves were killing the caribou. He spent almost a year investigating the wolves’ way of life focusing on a small pack made up of two males and a female with her pups. Mowat camped near their den and observed their eating and hunting habits.He observed that wolves rarely ate caribou and when they did, it was the weak and sick ones. Also, with the help of Ootek, a local Eskimo he was able to understand how wolves communicate and hunt, and he saw that these wolves were not a tremendous threat to the caribou. This book gives the reader a view into the life of these …show more content…
Throughout his study he learned that the arctic wolves mostly lived by eating mice, squirrel, and even fish. When wolves hunted caribou they only killed the weak and sick. The wolves never attacked him even when they had so many opportunities to do so.“On three separate occasions in less than a week I had been completely at the mercy of these ‘savage killers’; but far from attempting to tear me limb from limb, they had displayed a retstrain verging on contempt...This much was obvious, yet I was still strangely reluctant to the myth go down the drain. Part of this reluctance was no doubt due to the thought that, by discarding the accepted concepts of wolf nature, I would be committing scientific treason;”(p76,77) This passages sums up how Mowat struggled to find the truth about wolves’ hostility. Mowat was in the middle of a scientist’s tug-of-war. On one side everything he had learned as a naturalist and on the other, the actions of the wolves that Mowat observed with his own …show more content…
“Of the hunts I subsequently watched, almost all followed the pattern of the first one I had seen.” (p200) Mowat followed the wolves as they hunted and he realized that Ootek was right - the wolves only preyed on the weak and sick. He also observed that the wolves did not waste any food and that they only killed what they needed. Mowat also saw the wolves’ method of training their pups. Adult wolves separated the caribou,chased a couple of fawns and then let the pups take over the chase and try to take them down. All that Mowat learned abled him to comprehend how wolves lived and worked together to survive. The reader can expand her knowledge of wolves because information presented comes together to make this book more