I finished reading this book a couple of days ago. It’s fantastic. Written in the mid-1900s, it’s the tale of a Canadian naturalist who is assigned to find out how much damage the wolves were really doing to the Arctic caribou herds in order to provide justification for the government’s campaign against wolves. While doing his study, he lived very near a family of wolves and as they became accustomed to him, he was able to observe their habits and behaviors from a fairly close proximity. There were a couple of times when his life was in their “hands” and they showed no ferocity, but let him leave in peace. It’s a wonderful read, especially if you have even the tiniest interest in wolves. I think the wolves are much less maligned then they were in decades past, but they are still poorly understood by the public. I wonder about our species, where any other “top predator” is so threatening to us. It’s obvious that we do not understand the ways of nature, and that the cultures that did learn to work with nature have repeatedly been dismissed as primitive or savage. I don’t know if we as a people (in the U.S. especially) will ever come to a collective understanding and appreciation of the natural world. I hope so, but I don’t really know if it will happen.
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