A broad definition of a nature faker was someone who ascribed human thoughts and emotions to animals, or exaggerated physical abilities to animals which they did not possess. Novels about animals (The Call of the Wild, White Fang, Black Beauty), were becoming extremely popular around 1900. In this genre animals were portrayed as not just having human emotions and human goals, but achieving extreme human ideals. This was nothing new (think Aesop’s Fables), but soon journalists began writing papers and essays describing their experiences with animals in the wild, where they assigned human motives to the animals they claimed they watched. 

This made other authors, like John Burroughs, very frustrated. John Burroughs, a strict naturalist, didn’t think that these novelists - and more especially these journalists - had a right to “take liberties with facts”. He called these essayists the “yellow journalists of the woods”. The anti-fakers were angry because they believed these nature fakers weren’t just making mistakes, they were purposely inventing facts to pass off as truths.

Around 1905 President Roosevelt, whose love of hunting and the outdoors was notorious, began to weigh in on the debate. He became fast friends with Burroughs and began to write his own articles to discredit the “nature fakers”. He described one story, purported by it’s author to be true, where a wolf leads two children through the woods and back to their home “in a spirit of thoughtful kindness” as preposterous, and scoffed at another story where a hunted fox left a bribe for the hunters. 

Jack London and other popular authors of the time like Richard Harding Davis, Rudyard Kipling, Mrs. Humphrey Ward and Rex Beach came under fire for being “Canada fakers”. Arthur Stringer, a Canadian novelist, accused these authors of sentimentalizing and sensationalizing the Canadian wilderness and touting fiction as fact. He took issue with their descriptions of the Native Americans, the RCMP and the state of the law (most authors described Canada as being one huge wild west where witnessing vengeance shootings and vigilante justice were humdrum daily experiences for the average Canadian), the Hudson’s Bay company employees (depicted as wearing head to toe furs), the weather (“Jack London in his resolve to give us goose-flesh while dwelling on the awfulness of the Northern Cold - it must always be spelled with a capital C”, most authors depicted Canada was a barren frozen wasteland, while in real life these same locations were extremely lush or filled with wheat and barley fields as far as the eye could see), the geography (Mrs. Humphrey Ward had one scene where a character stood at Lake Superior and could see the St Lawrence river, although it’s roughly 895 km away), and, of course, the animals, especially sled dogs. Stringer said that these novelists would spend a couple weeks or possibly a month vacationing in Canada and came back believing they were experts on the country.