Feral children

     From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Feral children are children who have lived isolated from human contact starting from a very young age. Their separation from society may be the result of being lost, abandoned, or even taken away by animals. Sometimes abandonment is apparently due to parents rejecting a child's severe intellectual impairment or physical disability. Some feral children experience child abuse or trauma before being abandoned.

There are reports of such children living with or being reared by wild animals. Legend and fiction also suggest that wolves, bears, or other normally hostile animals often adopt feral children as one of their own. Science, however, has found very few such cases to study.

Perhaps the best known legendary example is that of Remus and Romulus.

In mythology and literature (in legend and fiction), feral children often grow up with not only normal human intelligence, but also a healthy dose of survival instincts. Integrating them into human society is supposed to be relatively easy. In reality, however, feral children often seem mentally impaired, and in particular have almost insurmountable trouble learning a human language. They also lack any number of social skills. Some scholars claim that many of these differences should be explained by the hypothesis that abandoned children are on average much more impaired (at birth) than non-abandoned children. In any case, converting a feral child into a relatively normal member of any human society is usually unworkable.

Table of contents

1 Real-Life Cases 2 See also 3 External links

Real-Life Cases

• Hessian wolf-children (1341-1344)
• The Bamberg boy, who grew up among the cattle (at the close of the sixteenth century)
• Hans of Liege; the Irish boy brought up by sheep
• The three Lithuanian bear-boys (1657, 1669, 1694)
• The girl of Oranienburg (1717)
• The two Pyrensean boys (1719)
• Peter, the wild boy of Hameln (1724)
• The girl of Songi in Champagne (1731)
• The Hungarian bear-girl (1767)
• The wild man of Cronstadt (end of eighteenth century)
• Victor of Aveyron (1797), portrayed in the 1969 movie by Francois Truffaut The Wild Child (L'Enfant sauvage)
• Kaspar Hauser (early 19th Century), portrayed in the 1974 film by Werner Herzog The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Jeder fuer sich und Gott gegen alle)
• Genie (1970s)
• Oxana Malaya, Ukraine, (1990s) raised with the dogs until the age of 8

See also

• Language acquisition
• Feral children in mythology and fiction

External links

• FeralChildren.com, a rather comprehensive feral children website
• dmoz.org's list of sites about feral children