Criticism
In a 1964 article published in the Canadian Field-Naturalist, Canadian Wildlife Federation official Frank Banfield compared Mowat's 1963 bestseller to Little Red Riding Hood, stating, "I hope that readers of "Never Cry Wolf" will realize that both stories have about the same factual content." L. David Mech, a wolf expert, stated that Mowat is no scientist and that in all his studies, he had never encountered a wolf pack which primarily subsisted on small prey as shown in Mowat's book.
Duncan Pryde, a Hudsons Bay Company trader who pioneered the linguistic study of Inuit languages, attacked Mowat's claim to have picked up the language quickly enough in two months to discuss detailed concepts such as shamanism, pointing out that the language is complex and required a year or more for Europeans to master the basics. Pryde said that when Mowat visited his post at Baker Lake in 1958 he only spoke a single word in the Inuit language.
Read more about this topic: Farley Mowat
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—Ben Hecht (1893–1964)
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“The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)