Raised in the Wild? Do Feral Children Really Exist?

We all know the backdrop of Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book:" The young boy Mogli is raised by wolves in the wild, but eventually is reunited with his human counterparts and taught the ways of man.

Amazing fact or urban legend? Do "feral children" exist? Can a child really be raised by wild animals? You'd be surprised by the number of documented cases that tend to support this premise: Small boys and girls raised by wolves, monkeys, bears and even gazelles - but who were not quite able to adjust back into modern society.

According to the website www.feralchildren.com there are nearly 70 documented cases of children being raised in the wild. Starting as early as 250A.D. with the 3 year old roman boy Aegisthus - who apparently was raised by goats, all the way up to 2004 with the seven-year-old Russian child Andrei Tolstyk - who was found living with a pack of dogs, and by all accounts was recognized as the leader of the pack.

A surprising number of feral children have been documented in India and researchers feel it's easy to see why. Mothers would typically set their children down while they tended to work in the fields, only to have infants snatched up by wandering wolves and leopards. More often than not, the infant offered an easy meal, but this was not always the case.

One of the most famous and well-documented cases of feral children involves the "wolf children" Kamala and Amala - as they came to be known - who were discovered by Reverend J.A.L Singh in 1920 in the jungles of Godamuri, India in 1920. The two young girls, estimated to be aged 3 and 7, were taken in by a she-wolf and her pack, and were discovered living in a cave in the wild. To his credit, the Reverend Singh - who captured the girls and took them back to his orphanage in Midnapore (now part of Orissa) India - maintained a running diary complete with photographs (now in the public domain) of his attempts to 'humanize" these two feral children, who may or may not have been from the same family.

From the pages of his diary, Singh writes about his first look at the children who were exiting the hollow of the cave close behind the mother-wolf and its cubs:

"…Close after the cubs came the "ghost" - a hideous-looking being - hand, foot, and body like a human being; but the head was a big ball of something covering the shoulders and the upper portion of the bust, leaving only a sharp contour of the face visible, and it was human. Close at its heels there came another awful creature exactly like the first, but smaller in size. Their eyes were bright and piercing, unlike human eyes. I at once came to the conclusion that these were human beings..."

Reverend Singh took charge of the two girls and brought them to his orphange. The older, Kamala was about eight, and the younger, Amala about three.

Writes Singh in his diary, "…they were extremely shy from the beginning. This shyness I counted for fright. After their rescue and subsequent capture, they were looking for the cubs and the wolves. It was noticeable that they wanted their company and association, but finding that they could not get them here, they refused to mix with the other children or with anybody…."

Slowly the children started to get accustomed to their surroundings. In September 1921, both girls became ill with diarrhea and dysentery. The younger child - now called Amala died - after a lingering illness that lasted several weeks.

Kamala - the older child - remained in Reverend Singh's orphanage for another 7 years.

"…Kamala was able to talk, writes Singh, "but she refused to go outside without being dressed, having complained with the sound "Fok" (possibly meaning "frock") and her vocabulary was thought to consist of about 30 words. These words were not common to English speech, but were sounds. When food was offered she used "Hoo" to indicate "yes", although other children use this word to mean "cold." "Ha" means "yes" in Bengali. She was able to name objects, but never used her words spontaneously. Two years later, she had learned more words, but apart from that there was no other mental change.

In 1929, Kamala came down with an unexplained illness and died, despite the efforts of area doctors to tend to her needs.

The question remains: does a wild animal have the maternal instincts to raise a small child? There are documented cases of lions "adopting" small calves and other animals to make up for the loss of a cub. Cannot the same be done with a small infant? Who knows for sure?

Researchers tend to be more taken with the efforts (or lack of) involved in trying to re-indoctrinate these feral children back into society. In most cases, the efforts have been for naught.

Perhaps the Reverend Singh had it right when he wrote in his diary, "….I often wonder if the right thing to do would have been to leave these children in the wild where I found them…."