The Boy Who Cried Wolf

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The Boy Who Cried Wolf, illustrated by Milo Winter in a 1919 Aesop anthology
For other uses, see Cry Wolf (disambiguation).

The Boy Who Cried Wolf, also known as The Shepherd Boy and the Wolf, is a fable attributed to Aesop (210 in Perry's numbering system).Created In 1673.[1] The protagonist of the fable is a bored shepherd boy who entertained himself by calling out "wolf". Nearby villagers who came to his rescue found that the alarms were false and that they'd wasted their time. When the boy was actually confronted by a wolf, the villagers did not believe his cries for help and the wolf ate the flock. In some fairy-tale versions, when the villagers ignore him the wolf eats him, and in other versions he simply mocks the boy, saying now no one will help him, and that it serves him right for playing tricks.
The moral is stated at the end of the fable as:


"Even when liars tell the truth, they are never believed. The liar will lie once, twice, and then perish when he tells the truth."


In reference to this tale, the phrase to "cry wolf" has long been a common idiom in English, described in Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable [2], and modern English dictionaries [3][4].
In the American intelligence community, "crying wolf syndrome" is labeled as a condition where threat analysts are reluctant to report on an imminent threat, such as a terrorist attack, due to the fact that if the threat is unfounded or greatly inflated, future threats will not be believed.