Farley Mowat

At age five, Farley Mowat first became interested in his future career when he came across two catfish that were gasping in a stagnant pool near his grandmother’s house in Ontario. When they stubbornly refused to die, he took them home, housing them in his grandmother’s toilet until they were inadvertently flushed after she came across them by chance in the middle of the night. As an adult, Farley pursues a career as a naturalist and as a biologist, recognizing his own affinity for the lesser beasts of the kingdom of animals. He has several mentors – a Scotsman who studied pocket gophers and a mammalogist who studies the uterine scars of shrews. He could never understand why all of those in the study of biology preferred to study the animal after it was already dead. To him, the study of biology necessitated that they be...