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.
~ Savage man, left by Nature to bare instinct alone ... will then begin with purely animal functions.... His desires do not exceed his physical needs; the only goods he knows in the Universe are food, a female, and rest.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur les origines et fondements de l'inégalité parmi les homes (1755)
~ Left by nature to instinct alone, this child performs only purely animal functions ... his desires do not exceed his physical needs. The only goods he knows in the universe are food, rest, and independence.
Pierre-Joseph Bonnaterre, Notice Historique sur le sauvage de l'Aveyron (1800)
I don't very often stay up late at night, but here recently my fiancee has been working late hours and not getting home until well past 8 pm. The other evening after we finished our dinner I turned the TV on to pass the time as we waited for our meal to settle before going to bed. This is when I saw the episode on the Discovery channel which shocked me. Titled Wild Child it was a look into feral children of the past and present. I was shocked to learn about these childen. I've seen a couple movies which touched on the subject of finding a child in the woods raised by wolves (I'm sorry, I can't even think of the title of the movie right now). It never occurred to me that it was based on a true story. I was prompted to look further into these feral children.
There are three different types of feral children. Children raised by animals, confined children, and isolated children. All very tragic cases of children being abandoned or abused by isolation and solitary confinement. It breaks my heart. My first instinct is to be very angry since the research I have done within this subject shows children as recently as this year being abandoned or confined and yes, even raised by animals.
One such recent case is of Traian Calderer, the Romanian Dog Boy found in 2002 in Brasov, Romania by a sheperd who spotted the boy when his car broke down. He called the police and the boy was captured. Although aged seven when he was found, Traian Caldarar was only the size of a three-year-old, could not speak, and was naked and living in a cardboard box covered with a polythene sheet. He suffered from severe rickets, had infected injuries and his circulation was poor, possibly because of frostbite. Doctors believe it would have been impossible for Traian to survive on his own and speculated that he received assistance from the many stray dogs in the Transylvanian countryside. He was found near the body of a dog that he had apparently been eating.
Brasov, Romania is not a stranger to feral children: that's where the Wolf-boy of Kronstadt comes from.
This is an extract from Wolf Children and Feral Man By Singh and Zingg c1780:
Here you have information about the wild boy who was found a few years ago in the Siebenburgen-Wallachischen border [Romania] and was brought to Kronstadt [now Brasov], where in 1784 he is still alive. How the poor boy was saved from the forests... I cannot tell. However one must preserve the facts, as they are, in the sad gallery of pictures of this kind.
This unfortunate youth was of the male sex and was of medium size. He had an extremely wild glance. His eyes lay deep in his head, and rolled around in a wild fashion. His forehead was strangely bent inwards, and his hair of ash-gray color grew out short and rough. He had heavy brown eyebrows, which projected out far over his eyes, and a small flat-pressed nose. His neck appeared puffy, and at the windpipe he appeared goitrous. His mouth stood somewhat out when he held it half open as he generally did since he breathed through his mouth. His tongue was almost motionless, and his cheeks appeared more hollow than full, and, like his face, were covered with a dirty yellowish skin. On the first glance at this face, from which a wildness and a sort of animal-being shone forth, one felt that it belonged to no rational creature... The other parts of the wild boy's body, especially the back an the chest were very hairy; the muscles on his arms and legs were stronger and more visible than on ordinary people. The hands were marked with callouses (which supposedly were caused by different uses), and the skin of the hands was dirty yellow and thick throughout, as his face was. On the finger he had very long nails; and on the elbows and knees, he had knobby hardenings. The toes were longer than ordinary. He walked erect, but a little heavily. It seemed as if he would throw himself from one foot to the other. He carried his head and chest forward... He walked bare-footed and did not like shoes on his feet. He was completely lacking in speech, even in the slightest articulations of sounds. The sounds which he uttered were ununderstandable murmuring, which he would give when his guard drove him ahead of him. This murmuring was increased to a howling when he saw woods or even a tree.
The most famous feral child is Victor, The Wild Boy of Aveyron made famous through François Truffaut's fascinating 1969 film L' Enfant Sauvage; Translated - The Wild Child. Victor is considered by many to be the first documented case of autism. He was first sighted wandering in the woods near Saint Sernin sur Rance, in southern France, at the end of the 18th century. He was captured but subsequently escaped, and wasn't retaken until January 1800 when he emerged from the woods. Aged about 12, he couldn't speak and bore a number of scars, suggesting he'd been in the wild for some time. Victor's discovery coincided with the age of Enlightenment, when debate raged about what exactly separated humans from animals, and he was thus ideal experimental fodder for the scientists.
This was the most facinating reading on feral children I found, or so I thought..
Maybe you'll remember the case in the state of California of a "wild child" found in 1970: a girl of 13 who had been isolated in a small room and had not been spoken to by her parents since infancy. "Genie," as she was later dubbed to protect her privacy by the psycholinguists who tested her, could not stand erect. At the time, she was unable to speak: she could only whimper. The case came to light when Genie's 50-year-old mother ran away from her 70-year-old husband after a violent quarrel and took the child along. The mother was partially blind and applied for public assistance. The social worker in the welfare office took one look at Genie and called her supervisor, who called the police. Genie was sent to the Los Angeles Children's Hospital for tests. Charges of willful abuse were filed against both her parents, according to the Los Angeles Times. On the day he was due to appear in court, however, Genie's father shot himself to death. He left a note in which he wrote. "The world will never understand."
Genie is living proof of human resilience. It is surprising that she survived at all. Her father apparently hated children and tried to strangle Genie's mother while she was pregnant with her first child. According to the book A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-Day "Wild Child" by Susan Curtiss, when an earlier baby girl was born, he put the child in the garage because he couldn't stand her crying: the baby died of pneumonia at two-and-a half months. A second child, a boy, died two days after birth, allegedly from choking on his own mucus. A third child was rescued and cared for by his grandmother when he was three years old and is still alive. Genie, the fourth child, was denied such help, however, because shortly after she was born, her grandmother was hit by a truck and killed.
From the age of 20 months, when her family moved into her grandmother's house, until she was 13 and a half, Genie lived in nearly total isolation. Curtiss' book and newspaper reports describe Genie's life at the time: naked and restrained by a harness that her father had fashioned, she was left to sit on her potty seat day after day. She could move only her hands and feet. She had nothing to do. At night, when she was not forgotten, she was put into a sort of straitjacket and caged in a crib that had wire-mesh sides and an overhead cover. She was often hungry.
If she made any noise, her father beat her. "He never spoke to her," wrote Curtiss. "He made barking sounds and he growled at her.... Her mother was terrified of him - and besides, she was too blind to take much care of Genie. The task fell largely on Genie's brother, who, following his father's instructions, did not speak to Genie either. He fed her hurriedly and in silence, mostly milk and baby foods. There was little for Genie to listen to. Her mother and brother spoke in low voices for fear of her father.
Genie's story is just one of six stories of feral children found in the United States.
The physical changes of these children's human bodies is remarkable. Many physical changes that feral children genuinely do undergo are brought about by walking on all fours. Their muscles develop differently, they acquire callouses on the palms of their hands and their knees, and their ankles and other leg joints become accustomed to being bent most of the time. Feral children are usually both strong and very dextrous physically. They can run (on all fours), climb and jump very nimbly and with great rapidity. Their senses become more acute as well. We know, from the keen sense of hearing that blind people develop, that human senses can become much more acute than is normal. Feral children brought up by animals develop a particularly good sense of smell, keen hearing, and excellent sight especially at night. However, they are quite impervious to heat, cold and rain. Bizarrely, several children are reported as having an offensive odour that wouldn't leave them despite washing, and weeks or months on a normal diet. While these types of changes may seem good for the children, otherwise they might not have survived if they had not physically developed to adapt to their surroundings, there are some disturbing drawbacks. Feral children, and otherwise abused or neglected children, can suffer from psychosocial dwarfism growth retardation in which overactive stress hormones depress the child's growth hormone function.
And then there is the impact of abuse and neglect on the neurological development of these feral children. Studies of childhood abuse and neglect have important lessons for considerations of nature and nurture. While each child has unique genetic potentials, both human and animal studies point to important needs that every child has, and severe long-term consequences for brain function if those needs are not met. The effects of the childhood environment, favorable or unfavorable, interact with all the processes of neurodevelopment. Evidence from abuse studies which show that so great is the impact of the absence of normal human interaction and social stimulation suffered by feral, isolated and confined children, that brain development, both of caring behaviour and cognitive capacities, is damaged in a lasting fashion.
Undoubtedly, the lack of normal developmental stimuli has a devastating impact on the development of the human brain. Feral children would not be classified as human using any of the traditional criteria. However, generally speaking, we now accept as human someone who is clearly genetically human, regardless of their intelligence, abilities or skills.
Part of being a human is being brought up by humans. If you're not brought up by humans, are you completely human?
Of course, throughout history there will have been many other cases of feral children, whose story has simply never reached us. And there will have been many more, who never lived long enough to be discovered. I will write more about these Feral Children. There are many more cases which I am facinated with. One in particular is the story of a Nymph (can you guess why I am attracted to this story?), found to be a hoax, but nonetheless interesting. I plan to introduce several stories, both of the real life feral children and hoaxes which prove to be just as facinating. For now I leave you with a poem about Victor of Avetron:
Notes from Society of the Observers of Man
He took readily to clothes,
to upright carriage. Harder to teach
the balance of quill, the groove
along his pointing finger.
The slash across his throat
seems all he wants of language.
Man in a state of nature
neither smiles nor weeps
and feels not heat nor any shame
in nakedness. Nor without voice does time pass
though of course that is conjecture.
In forty years he learned to write
two words, lait and O Dieu, milk and
O God, the former being a kind of cry
for anything he wanted: as white contains all colours,
the loop of that L, an infinite longing.
Poem written By: Erin Noteboom *the child in the photo above is Genie
