Farley Mowat (1921-2014) was a noted Canadian author and environmentalist. The Mowat family lived in Saskatoon in the 1930s, and young Farley's first experience as an author was writing a weekly bird column in the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix. Mowatt served in the Canadian army in Europe during World War II, and shortly after returning to Canada, was employed by the Dominion Wildlife Service. The DWS sent him to an area on the border of Manitoba and Nunavut in 1948-49 as part of an investigation into the dwindling caribou herds in subarctic Canada. It was assumed that wolves were to blame, but Mowat concluded that while both wolves and local Inuit utilized the caribou as a food source, the wolves diet consisted of mainly of rodents and other smaller mammals. He suggested that human hunters from civilization were more likely reponsible. He wrote Never Cry Wolf based on his experiences and observations. It was published as a work of non fiction in 1963, and a movie adaptation was released in 1983. The book did much to change perceptions and appreciation of the wolf and likely averted a killing which could have put the species in peril. Later critics claimed that Never Cry Wolf was mostly a creation of the author's imagination, and should be classified as a work of fiction. Mowat emphatically denied this, although late in his life in an interview with the Toronto Star in 2012 allowed that it coud be called subjective non fiction, conceding that, in his writing, "I never let facts get in the way of a good story."
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