Hunters and farmers feared the wolf - a beast large yet low to the ground, silent, quick, carnivorous, and nearby. The difference seems obvious though, the lion was killed for fun, these other animals were killed for food.įear is another excellent motivator in the killing of animals human, spider, wolf, and otherwise. So far no one has threatened to burn my house down. I killed a couple fish the other day, small mouth bass. For the one day of Thanksgiving last year 45 million turkeys gobbled their last gobble. On the same day this alleged psychopathic monster murdered Cecil in Zimbabwe something like 115 million cows were killed by corporate employees in the United States. His home and office were picketed, people cried on television. People screamed, through their keyboards mostly, that this man was an evil monster, a psychopathic criminal, that he deserved an identical death. He had been named Cecil (the lion, not the dentist). Mowat, of course, assumed the wolves were to blame.Ī dentist from Minnesota recently shot, skinned, and beheaded a popular Zimbabwean lion. The cabin itself was surrounded by caribou bones, revealing that indeed the caribou had been being killed at alarming rates. By luck he happened upon a local trapper named Mike, with a nearby cabin which became Mowat’s base. Mowat was flown on planes of dubious airworthiness to a remote region of northeast Canada and dropped off with enough gear, beer, and ammunition to get him through the summer. Ostensibly his charge was to examine and record the relationship between the wolf and the caribou, but it seemed clear to Mowat that the government assumed he would simply confirm what they had been told by the hunters and so be justified in carrying out an official lupine massacre. Having declined to specialize in any particular biological area Mowat was singularly qualified for random government work, and so was recruited for the quest, which ultimately led to his book Never Cry Wolf. It had become necessary to decimate the wolf population, said the hunters, and so Ottawa decided to investigate.įarley Mowat was a recent graduate in the field of biology. The hunters relied on the herds of caribou for food, not only for themselves but also for the dogs that made their lives possible, and over the last few years the migrating herds seemed to have shed thousands of members. These beasts weren’t even hunting for food, they were killing them for fun. It was reported by hunters and farmers that wolves were slaughtering livestock by the thousands, eating hundreds of people per year, and were solely responsible for the severe declination of the hunters’ prized kill, the caribou.
At the end of the 1940s a massive wolf problem had developed in northern Canada.
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