| This is an essay, and as such it has the freedom of using some literary flourish, including rhetorical questions. The question was the motivation for visiting that farm, and the author does recount his interactions with the wolves there. They just weren't terribly exciting. A complete account of what the scientific literature or other second-hand sources have to say on the question wouldn't fit with the personal style of the article. That's why we only get the bottom line in the last graph: Then he said what all wolf specialists say: That even though wolf pups look like dogs, they are not, that keeping a wolf or a wolf-dog hybrid as a pet is a terrible idea. Regarding your quest for higher info/word ratios, I'll start by saying that the term information is somewhat ill-defined. In an article such as this, it may appear at first that the information content is low. See this example: The humans were still groggy from a night with little sleep. Pups at that age wake up every few hours to whine and paw any warm body within reach. The first sentence adds nothing to your understanding of wolves that isn't also included in the second. As a wildlife enthusiast scanning the article for "wolf facts", you wouldn't highlight the first sentence, and you'll probably regard it as useless human-interest fluff. But what that's missing is that this article isn't (just) about wolves. It's about human/wolf relations as well, and specifically about the group of people working with wolves. And regarding those, we learn, for example, that these university researchers don't hesitate to get their hands dirty, and are willing to spend sleepless night for their research. Journalism such as it's practiced at the New York Times isn't intended to prepare you for a face-to-snout with a wild wolf. They aim broad rather than deep. And all the extra information in this essay touches on any number of topics that are much more likely to be relevant to real-world decisions (including votes), such as the morality of zoos, research funding, or genetics. |
Actually, what I said was maybe it should have stayed more focused, or, maybe I'm reading the wrong publications.
I didn't say I wanted to read scholarly articles, either.
I think there is maybe a little bit of a void in journalism here? I find sometimes bloggers fill this space with the ability to chime in efficiently.