Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowat is a book that takes a young scientist and places him in the wild, where he has to develop a new conception of and relationship to the environment. In the course of this book, the young man learns a lesson about the real nature of the wild and about the way animals that belong in a given environment fit into the larger scheme of things. He also learns that people are often intruders who make false assumptions and who introduce a damaging and dangerous external influence into the environment so that efforts human beings might make to protect the environment could have the opposite effect.
Never Cry Wolf is the story of one isolated man, a scientist, facing a world he did not understand until he found himself in it. The central character is sent to the Arctic wild by the Canadian government to prove that wolves were decimating the herds of caribou in that region. This central character is Mowat himself, for he was assigned to this task. He finds that the wolves are not the "evil" predators he has been led to believe but that they have personalities and character of their own.
Mowat is sent to the wild by a government that believes killing the wolf is necessary to protect other species, but Mowat finds this a questionable premise once he has encountered the wolf packs and experienced the life of the wild. Mowat also finds that the rationale has been promoted by sport killers, hunters who may have their own agenda and whose view has been accepted because governments, which are far from the wild, see hunters as more knowledgeable: "Governments listen. Most, if not all, provincial and state departments of fish and game are little more than Trojan horses of the sport-killer lobby" (Mowat vii).
Mowat takes a polemical position as he analyzes what he discovers and what he feels as he experiences life in the wild and becomes closer to the Eskimo tribes of the area. He also makes a strong arg...