The wild animal story

Ralph H. Lutts

Bringing together some of the most celebrated wild animal stories, Ralph H. Lutts places them firmly in the context of heated controversies about animal intelligence and purposeful behavior. Widely regarded as entertaining and educational, the early stories - by Charles G. D. Roberts, Ernest Thompson Seton, John Muir, Jack London, and others - had an avid readership among adults and children. But some naturalists and at least one hunter - Theodore Roosevelt - discredited these writers as "nature fakers," accusing them of falsely portraying animal behavior. Renewed interest in the wild animal story accompanied the environmental movement, and since the 1960s' novels and stories by writers like Rachel Carson and Farley Mowat, commercial films and documentaries have become the main source of public information about nature and animal behavior.