Today I’ve been reading articles at Feral Children, a website that documents and explores accounts of isolated, confined, wolf and wild children. The site is a well put together work that provides much information on so-called feral children. Many of the stories are heartbreaking, because the children told about suffered much while in the wild and isolation, and also when they were “rescued”. At the same time there is something to be respected in the way they were able to survive such difficult lives and adapt to a world outside human society.
Feral children, also known as wild children or wolf children, are children who’ve grown up with minimal human contact, or even none at all. They may have been raised by animals (often wolves) or somehow survived on their own. In some cases, children are confined and denied normal social interaction with other people.
There are many accounts on this site that I recommend you read. The Lobo Girl of Devil’s River was an especially interesting story, though may be only a folk tale. She was apparantly orphaned in Texas when her mother died in child birth and her father died due to a lightning strike while he was riding for help. It appeared that wolves had killed her when the neighbours finally arrived at the home she was born in. Ten years later she was spotted by a boy as she attacked a herd of goats along with a pack of wolves. Under a year after that a Mexican woman saw the same girl and two wolves kill a freshly killed goat. The girl ran off initially on all fours and then went to two legs. The girl was hunted and the girl was captured in a wild struggle. She was locked in a ranch and began to howl like wolves do. Many wolves answered her calls and swarmed around the ranch, attacking the animals. In the confusion and gunfire that followed, the girl was able to loosen a board over a window and escape. When the girl would have been seventeen she was spotted by a group of surveyers caring for two wolf cubs. She ran off carrying the cubs and was not seen again.
Kamala and Amala, the Wolf Girls of Midnapore is another facinating story of animal-raised children, and is one of the best known of the twentieth century. The two girls, eight and eight-teen months respecitively (though one account stated they were five and three), were found in a wolves’ den in 1920. They had been taken in by wolves several years apart and were not believed to be biological siblings. Their matted hair and lupine walking manner had lead locals to believe that the two were hideous spirits, but their discovery showed them to be normal girls who had been in the care of wolves long enough to have developed their traits. The girls had little humanness apparant when discovered. They would only eat raw meat, growled, slept curled up togeher on the floor, tore off any clothes they were given, would only awaken once the moon had risen and howled to be let free, they could not straighten their legs because of their prolonged life among wolves, they showed no interest in human company, showed only the emotion of fear, they had aquired superior senses, and seemed unable to hear human voices. Amala died not long after their human guardian began to teach them social behaviour, but Kamala gradually was taught to walk, eat food, welcome human company, to be house trained, and gained a vocabulary of 40-50 words before her death in 1929 to typhoid.
The site does not only focus on animal-raised children. In fact, one of the more current stories is of a girl named Genie, who was freed from confinement in 1970. She suffered from acute social deprivation inflicted by her parents and was strapped to a chair in one room for 13 years. Even after she was freed she suffered abuse, but was able to learn to walk and speak to some extent due to the efforts of language and social experts.
Feral Children is a facinating look at human survival and the importance of caring for and teaching children in their early development. It certainly prompted me to think a lot about how important human society is to our development, and how little separates us from our more primitive past. I highly recommend learning more about this facinating field.
Feral children, also known as wild children or wolf children, are children who’ve grown up with minimal human contact, or even none at all. They may have been raised by animals (often wolves) or somehow survived on their own. In some cases, children are confined and denied normal social interaction with other people.
There are many accounts on this site that I recommend you read. The Lobo Girl of Devil’s River was an especially interesting story, though may be only a folk tale. She was apparantly orphaned in Texas when her mother died in child birth and her father died due to a lightning strike while he was riding for help. It appeared that wolves had killed her when the neighbours finally arrived at the home she was born in. Ten years later she was spotted by a boy as she attacked a herd of goats along with a pack of wolves. Under a year after that a Mexican woman saw the same girl and two wolves kill a freshly killed goat. The girl ran off initially on all fours and then went to two legs. The girl was hunted and the girl was captured in a wild struggle. She was locked in a ranch and began to howl like wolves do. Many wolves answered her calls and swarmed around the ranch, attacking the animals. In the confusion and gunfire that followed, the girl was able to loosen a board over a window and escape. When the girl would have been seventeen she was spotted by a group of surveyers caring for two wolf cubs. She ran off carrying the cubs and was not seen again.
Kamala and Amala, the Wolf Girls of Midnapore is another facinating story of animal-raised children, and is one of the best known of the twentieth century. The two girls, eight and eight-teen months respecitively (though one account stated they were five and three), were found in a wolves’ den in 1920. They had been taken in by wolves several years apart and were not believed to be biological siblings. Their matted hair and lupine walking manner had lead locals to believe that the two were hideous spirits, but their discovery showed them to be normal girls who had been in the care of wolves long enough to have developed their traits. The girls had little humanness apparant when discovered. They would only eat raw meat, growled, slept curled up togeher on the floor, tore off any clothes they were given, would only awaken once the moon had risen and howled to be let free, they could not straighten their legs because of their prolonged life among wolves, they showed no interest in human company, showed only the emotion of fear, they had aquired superior senses, and seemed unable to hear human voices. Amala died not long after their human guardian began to teach them social behaviour, but Kamala gradually was taught to walk, eat food, welcome human company, to be house trained, and gained a vocabulary of 40-50 words before her death in 1929 to typhoid.
The site does not only focus on animal-raised children. In fact, one of the more current stories is of a girl named Genie, who was freed from confinement in 1970. She suffered from acute social deprivation inflicted by her parents and was strapped to a chair in one room for 13 years. Even after she was freed she suffered abuse, but was able to learn to walk and speak to some extent due to the efforts of language and social experts.
Feral Children is a facinating look at human survival and the importance of caring for and teaching children in their early development. It certainly prompted me to think a lot about how important human society is to our development, and how little separates us from our more primitive past. I highly recommend learning more about this facinating field.