Never Cry Wolf Documentary (Spencer Mottley)

     In the documentary "Never Cry Wolf", a biologist travels to Alaska with the intent to research wolves. 

    To gain valuable insight into their behavior and habits, he lives alongside the wolves to understand them 

on a scientific and non-scientific level. His main objective for studying wolves was to see if they were

decimating caribou populations, like what the scientists and outdoorsmen claimed they were doing at the

time (the nineteen sixties), when wolves were still being regularly persecuted, in large part due to this

belief. It turns out that during this study, the biologist noticed that the wolves were not feeding primarily

on caribou and other large game, like what the scientific knowledge at the time insisted, but they were

instead consuming mostly mice. Something the scientific community at the time said was impossible due

to the assumption that the wolves would not get enough calories from a diet heavily based on mice. In a

sense this biologist's finding could be compared to cave art because both serve as an awakening. In

addition to this, the biologist's findings provide the viewer with two important takeaways. The first being

that sometimes myth (in this case, more speculation) ends up being true, and science is proven to be

incorrect, and the second being that knowledge always comes from experience. After watching the film, I

was left with a question and an answer to that question. The question I had is, could personal

experiences (like studying wolves) be narratives that give ultimate perspective? In the same way, myths

are narratives that give ultimate perspective. My answer to this question would be yes. Experences are

narratives that give ultimate perspective, because experiences can explain how people come to

knowledge about things and why they hold many of the beliefs they hold. In other words, experiences act

as explanations (narratives) into how someone might know something, or why they think the way they do

about something. For example, studying wolves (an experence) gives an ultimate perspective into our

knowledge about wolves. 

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