Farley McGill Mowat was a Canadian writer, biologist and environmentalist.
Background
Farley Mowat was born 12 May 1921 in Belleville, Ontario. His father, Angus Mowat, participated in the Battle of Vimy Ridge and after the war he became a librarian and began writing. At the times of the Great Depression the family moved to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. In 1935 Farley and his relative Frank made their first trip to Arctic.
Education
In the 1930s Mowat studied zoology at the University of Toronto but never completed a degree.
After the war Farley Mowat graduated from the biology department of the University of Toronto.
Career
In the late 1940s Farley was hired to work for Frank Banfield in the investigation of barren-ground Caribou. This resulted in Banfield's publication entitled "The barren-ground Caribou".
Later, Farley started working in Canadian Wildlife Service. This organization sent him ( no later that 1959) to the Canadian tundra to study wolves. This expedition showed unexpected and surprising results for the time. He described it in his book "Never Cry Wolf".
Farley Mowat made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1981. One of the ships of the environmental organization "Sea Shepherd Conservation Society" was named after him.
Mowat worked for the famous american naturalist Francis Harper. They studied the barren-ground caribou in th Nueltin Lake. The result was a publication of the book "Caribou of Keewatin".
Religion
Farley Mowat was a spiritual man, who even went to Anglican church. He believed animals, and some humans, have extra-sensory perception (ESP), that Jesus was a “socialist revolutionary,” that there is a force in the universe that provides purpose and that “love is the glue that holds us together.”
“I am a very religious man,” Farley Mowat insisted. In another era, he thinks he would have been a preacher. Mowat admired Jesus as a ``prophet, an individual with great perceptivity, and a socialist revolutionary, of course."
Views
Quotations:
"Never let the facts get in the way of the truth"
“We have doomed the wolf not for what it is, but for what we deliberately and mistakenly perceive it to be –the mythologized epitome of a savage ruthless killer – which is, in reality, no more than a reflected image of ourself.”
― Never Cry Wolf
“And this is what happened, ands this is why the caribou and the wolf are one; for the caribou feeds the wolf, but it is the wolf that keeps the caribou strong.”