History Fix

Ep. 61 Feral Children: How Mysterious Wild Children Dot the Pages of Our History Books

• Shea LaFountaine • Episode 61

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This week I tell the stories of 9 feral children found surviving alone in the wilderness. Some even appear to have been cared for by wild animals - wolves, bears, dogs, and monkeys. Most walked on all fours, ate raw meat, and could only communicate in grunts, growls, and "wild cries." Some would never gain the ability to speak, burying their backstories in mystery to this day. Feral children have always fascinated us. Legends and myths are full of them - Romulus and Remus, Valentine and Orson, Amphion and Zethos, Moses, Oedipus, Mowgli. In examining these stories, an overarching theme emerges, one that forces us to re-examine what it means to be "civilized."

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When I was probably 14 years old, some close friends of mine found a litter of kittens in the woods. They had been feeding the mother who, though technically feral, was tame enough to stop in for a daily meal. Roxy, that’s what they named her, would come by to eat and then stalk back into the woods behind the empty lot next door. They began to think of her as their cat, their pet, and they became curious about where she kept disappearing to. She always seemed to head off in the same direction, popping through the trees towards the same destination. One day, they decided to follow her and what they discovered was nothing short of what childhood dreams are made of. Roxy had a litter of kittens hidden away, fuzzy, adorable kittens. We quickly picked one out, a gray one, and went to work convincing our parents that we simply must have her which they finally agreed to. But when the time arrived to actually retrieve our gray kitten, we were met with disappointment. She would not let us near her. She would not be touched, not without hissing and claws and a puffed up tail. Our kitten, it seemed, was too wild to be tamed. My friends continued to care for Roxy and, as the kittens grew, they came around to eat sometimes too. But they never were pets. They never were tame. When we found them, they were already feral. This was when I first learned that there was a time limit with these sorts of things, that if you didn’t tame them young enough, the wild would set like wet cement hardening. Past that point, they could never be tamed, not really. But did you know, the same can be said of humans? And you may be thinking, well that doesn’t really apply, humans are already tame, already civilized. Well, not always. In fact, history is riddled with stories of feral children found in wolf dens and bear caves, running around on all fours, and devouring raw meat, children with stories shrouded in mystery and yet impossible to ignore. Let’s fix that. 


Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. If you’re familiar with the story The Jungle Book, written by Rudyard Kipling in 1894 and brought to life by Disney animators in 1967, then you already know that feral children often find their way into stories and myths. In fact, the Jungle Book follows a long line of such legends dating back to ancient times. But where did these absurd ideas come from? A child living in the wild, raised by wild animals, it doesn’t seem possible. Why do we see this Mowgli character popping up over and over again? Is it possible there is truth behind it? Truth so equally fascinating and horrifying that we feel compelled to immortalize it in literature? Based on the historical accounts I’m going to share with you today, that seems to be the case. Today we’re talking about nine instances of feral children quote “rescued” from the wild. While some of their stories remain shrouded in mystery, or picked apart by skeptics, others are more convincing. But as always, I urge you to consider the credibility of each source and to take some of these claims with a grain of salt. Because for some, we just really don’t have a solid explanation. But that’s part of what makes these stories so interesting, the mystery. 


Before we delve into the stories of these real life feral children, let’s take a quick look at some of the myths and legends that have prevailed throughout history. One of the most well known is probably that of Romulus and Remus, the proposed founders of Rome. According to the Roman myth, Romulus and Remus were twin boys born to a woman named Rhea Silvia. Rhea’s father had once been a king but he had been overthrown by his evil brother Amulius. Worried that Rhea would bear sons who would try to claim the throne, Amulius forced her to become a vestal virgin. So vestal virgins were women in ancient Rome who took an oath of chastity, sort of like a nun, right? They were priestesses of the Roman goddess Vesta and tasked with maintaining the sacred fire that was kept burning on the altar of Vesta. So Rhea’s evil uncle makes her become a vestal virgin so she can never marry or bear children. But the gods see right through this mess and so they act to right this great injustice that has been done, this stolen throne. Rhea is impregnated by the god Mars who, if you’re more familiar with the Greek names like I am, is Ares, the god of war. She gives birth to twin sons but Amulius still ain’t having it. He demands that the babies be abandoned near the River Tiber where they will, Amulius assumes, die of exposure. And so they are. They are abandoned in the wilderness. But Amulius’ plans are thwarted once again when a wolf discovers the babies and nurses them, feeds them, as if they were her own wolf cubs. And they continue to be cared for by this mother wolf until they are found by a shepherd and his wife who raise them to adulthood. Despite being literally raised by wolves, they grow into mostly functional adults. This is where the story gets a little unrealistic by the way, not the raised by wolves part, the still being normal afterwards part. But anyway, their true identities come out, they overthrow Amulius and put their grandfather, the rightful king, back on the throne. Then they set out to found a city of their own which they name Rome, after Romulus I guess? Poor Remus. He really got the shaft on that one. 


According to Michael Newton in the book “Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children” quote “restorations and substitutions are at the very heart of the Romulus and Remus story: brothers take the rightful place of others, foster parents bring up other people's children, the god Mars stands in for a human suitor. Yet the crucial substitution occurs when the she-wolf saves the lost children. In that moment, when the infants' lips close upon the she-wolf's teats, a transgressive mercy removes the harmful influence of a murderous culture. The moment is a second birth: where death is expected, succor is given, and the children are miraculously born into the order of nature. Nature's mercy admonishes humanity's unnatural cruelty: only a miracle of kindness can restore the imbalance created by human iniquity. From this experience, the city may begin over again, refounded in the building of Rome,” end quote. 


Newton recounts numerous medieval stories involving children being raised or cared for by animals, stories involving “swan children” or children being nursed by goats, apes, lions, wolves, ravens, and even rats. Sometimes they are stolen by wild animals and sometimes it’s portrayed more as a rescue, where the animal saves the child from what Newton calls quote “the outrages of human cruelty.” And we’ll see this in our real life stories here soon. The medieval story of Valentine and Orson, which I wasn’t familiar with, clearly left a lasting impact on people. In this story, another set of twin boys, Valentine and Orson, become lost in the forest. Valentine ends up getting rescued and returned to civilization. Orson remains in the woods where he is taken in by a bear who cares for him alongside her bear cubs. So Orson goes wild and he transforms into a character who will recur throughout medieval and even into renaissance literature: a character most similar to what we call the boogie man. Newton says quote “Such wild men haunted the forests of medieval and renaissance romance: irrational, carnivorous, dangerous, untamed. They lived and died in the wild woods, far from the sound of church bells; hairy as demons, or sometimes leafy; always solitary; moving alone through the wilderness; sometimes snatching children or, more often, women from the beleaguered villages; marauding, angry, violent; though, if tamed, useful and loyal servants to the wandering knights given up to adventure in the trackless forests. They were invariably incapable of speech.” end quote. So Orson is the original boogie man used, even to this day, to frighten children into behaving, which is questionable parenting but whatever. But despite being wild and scary he does actually meet back up with his brother Valentine later and they recognize each other and are reunited. Newton theorizes quote “perhaps stories such as this are fables that suggest the need for a reconciliation between civilization and the wild,” end quote. And we will see that civilization vs. wild battle play out over and over again in these stories of feral children. And what I find really interesting about that is that, in a lot of these cases, it’s the civilization that ends up looking wild and cruel and harsh and the quote “wild” that is actually nurturing and caring and accepting. An interesting contradiction is revealed. I think you’ll see it. 


Let’s start with the Wolf Boys of Hesse. This information is coming from records recorded by monks in Hesse, Germany that were later published in multiple history books throughout the 1500s. The monks reported that, in the year 1341, a young boy who was anywhere from 7 to 12 years old was captured by soldiers in the forest. He had reportedly been living with a pack of wolves in the forest. He  walked around on all fours growling at people. He couldn’t stand up straight and he couldn’t speak. He was also reported to be very physically agile and could jump long distances. The monks knew about this because the soldiers brought the boy to live with them at their monastery which sort of doubled as an orphanage. The monks took care of orphaned children. So they took in this boy and attempted to feed him and tame him and raise him as a functioning member of Christian society. But the boy was terrified and mostly hid under benches and tried to run away. He refused to eat human food and eventually became malnourished and died soon after. The monks never figured out how the boy ended up in the forest. Three years later, they report another wild boy being found in the same region of the forest. They take him in and this time, having learned from their past mistakes, they allow him to eat raw meat and, according to reports, he lived to be 80 years old. But that’s it. Like, did he ever learn to talk? Did they find out why he was in the forest? Was there some connection to the other boy, the first boy? I have so many questions. But that’s it. That’s the report. 


Our next feral child, John of Liege, was reported by Sir Kinelm Digby in 1644. Digby was an English courtier, diplomat, philosopher, and astrologer. But honestly he was a bit of an enigma. The University of Cambridge says of him quote “Digby was a man of many parts: he was a privateer (or state-sponsored pirate), compiler of recipes, assimilator of foreign tongues (“a great student of the Arabic language”), collector of objects (antiquities of every kind), thinker and doer. In his extensive writing, and experiments in kitchens and laboratories, he embraced philosophy and alchemy, science and magic, food and flavors,” end quote. So he’s a pirate and a foodie, cool. Digby wrote about a boy named John who fled into the woods in Liege, Belgium when his home was attacked by soldiers during a religious war. The danger passes, his family and the rest of the villagers return home but John stays in the woods, apparently too afraid to come out. He hears his family calling his name but he’s still just terrified. He doesn’t know if he can trust what he’s hearing so he stays hidden. According to Digby, he survived on his own in the forest for 16 years eating roots and berries. He returned to society around age 20 and was caught trying to steal food from a farm. Digby describes him as quote “naked and all overgrown with hair” and reports that he had quote “quite forgotten the use of all language,” but that he had acquired a dog-like sense of smell. He was taken in by a woman who took care of him and helped him remember how to speak and his heightened sense of smell eventually faded away. But like, where’s his family? It’s been 16 years. Are they still there? Is this a different place than where he came from? Did he wander away to a new village? Did they ever try to find his family? These are the burning questions that Digby failed to answer. And honestly I have to question the accuracy of Digby’s account. According to that University of Cambridge article quote “On his death aged 62 in 1665, Digby left behind a library of several thousand books, countless letters and journals, and a fictionalized account of his adventures in elaborately flowery style. On the Greek island of Milos, scribbling furiously and barely eating for a week, he wrote Loose Fantasies, recasting himself as a romance hero in the shape of Theagenes, a character lifted from classical literature,” end quote. So was this a loose fantasy or was this a true story? I’m not sure. 


In 1725, King George I was king of England. When he heard that a young boy was found living alone in the woods in northern Germany, he decided he wanted this child as his sort of pet. The boy, who the king would come to name Peter, was probably around 12 years old. He walked on all fours, ate with his hands, and couldn’t speak. He hated wearing clothing but was forced into a green suit every day. He refused to sleep in a bed and, instead, curled up in the corner of the room on the floor. Peter was paraded about at court to entertain royal guests who basically just pointed and laughed at him. But eventually, King George became tired of his unruly behavior and sent him off to live at a farm. The king paid the farmer to care for Peter. According to Shannon Quinn in a History Collection article quote “The farmer was kind to Peter, and he made him a collar to wear around his neck, like a dog. This was not to be cruel or treat him like a slave. It was simply because they knew Peter had a tendency to wander off, and they did not want him to be lost. The collar was inscribed with a message that said, “Peter the Wild Man of Hanover. Whoever will bring him to Mr Fenn at Berkhamsted shall be paid for their trouble.” When he died, he was given a headstone, and people still leave him flowers to this day,” end quote. But Peter never learned to speak and so the reason behind why he was found alone in the forest is still a mystery. At the time it was presumed that he had been raised by wild animals. His behavior surely suggested it, walking around on all fours, sleeping on the floor, eating with his hands. But later theories suggest that Peter actually may have had Pitt-Hopkins Syndrome, a developmental disability which could explain Peter’s unusual behavior and inability to talk. Those with Pitt Hopkins Syndrome have similar distinctive facial features, kind of like how people with Down Syndrome have a particular look. King George had a portrait made of Peter (which is on my instagram and my website) and he has these facial features similar to what someone with Pitt Hopkins syndrome looks like. So the latest theory is that he had a developmental disability and was either abandoned by his family in the forest because they were unable to care for him (in much the same way King George sent him off to a farm when he tired of him) or, possibly, he wandered into the forest and they just didn’t bother to look for him or couldn’t find him. There was no assistance in those days for families caring for a special needs child, no services, no help, and it was not uncommon for a child exhibiting challenging behaviors like that to be abandoned in the woods, sadly. So I don’t know how feral Peter actually was. I don’t know how long he was in the woods. This may be a case of someone with a disability being mistaken as a feral child. But I don’t know, I mean he was found in the woods. If he was in there for a while he may have been a disabled feral child. 


And now on to a feral girl, Marie-Angelique Memmie Le Blanc. This is one of the most well documented cases of a feral child because it was recorded, independently by so many different people, so many different first hand accounts of people who had met Memmie Le Blanc. And honestly this story is wild. This is one of those that really should be a movie. In 1731, people in the French village of Songy spotted a wild looking girl emerge from the forest with a wooden club. She was scantily clad wearing a torn dress and animal skins with no shoes. Reports of her age vary anywhere from 10 to 18 years old. Villagers were unsuccessful in their attempts to catch her and backed off after she killed a guard dog with a single blow from her club. They switched up their strategy at this point and tried to lure her out of the woods instead with a pitcher of water but, scared, she climbed up into a tree. So they sent a woman holding a small child to the tree, thinking she wouldn’t be intimidated by them. Umm, yeah I’m not volunteering for this. But the woman and child go to the tree carrying food and they try to coax her down which eventually works. She climbs back down the tree to get the food the woman is offering and that’s when two men grab her. 


She is taken to the kitchen at the chateau of the Viscount d’Epinoy where she immediately grabs a dead chicken that’s being prepared for the Viscount’s dinner and tears at the raw meat with her teeth. The Viscount d’Epinoy arrives, he is tickled, he’s like “give her a rabbit. Let’s see what she does with a rabbit.” And, when they do, she instantly skins it and starts eating it raw. They start asking her questions but she doesn’t seem to understand them. Her skin looked dark, they thought she was black, but after washing her several times they discovered that her skin was actually much lighter. It had just been covered in dirt and what seemed to be black paint. They examined her hands. They were small, little girl hands except that the fingers and thumbs were larger than they should have been which explained why she was so adept at climbing trees. According to reports, she wore a necklace, some pendants, and a pouch attached to an animal skin garment reaching down to her knees. Inside the pouch were a club and a small knife inscribed with unfamiliar characters that no one could understand. And I hate when there’s this kind of documentation happening but like, where’s the necklace, where’s the knife with the strange characters on it. I need to see these things. I need someone to examine these mysterious characters now and figure out what language it is or whatever. They are written about by the Viscount and a woman named Madame Hequet who would later care for the girl and also a Scottish Lawyer who met her named James Burnett but where are they? I don’t know. 


The girl is baptized and given the name Marie-Angelique Memmie Le Blanc and over the next 10 years of living in France, she starts to learn French and she starts to be able to speak and actually tell her story. According to Memmie, she was kidnapped from her own country, which she couldn’t remember the name of, when she was around 7 years old. She was put on a ship and taken to a quote “warm country.” Once there her skin was painted black so that she would look like she was of African descent and then she was sold into slavery. According to a History.com article, quote “Many of Memmie’s contemporaries believed she was originally Inuit, but recent research suggests she was most likely a Meskwaki Indian born in what is now Wisconsin,” end quote. So this clears a lot of mysteries up. Now we’re thinking she was actually a Native American, kidnapped in Wisconsin and shipped to probably a Caribbean Island, right that “warm country” she talked about. There she was disguised as an African and sold into slavery. Once in the Caribbean, she was put on another ship by her new enslaver but the ship eventually wrecked. While everyone else clamored into lifeboats, Memmie and an enslaved black girl around her same age were left to fend for themselves. According to Memmie’s account, she and the black girl swam away from the ship but the black girl couldn’t swim well so she held onto Memmie’s heel to keep from drowning. When they reached the shore, they traveled across the land for a long time, moving only at night and sleeping in the tops of trees during the day. They couldn’t speak to each other because neither knew the other’s language so they communicated with body language and quote “wild cries.” Eventually the two girls got in a physical altercation following an argument and parted ways. Soon after that Memmie was captured in Songy. 


Memmie lived out the remainder of her days in a French convent and I’m like, take this poor girl back to Wisconsin. But, you know, they didn’t know she was from Wisconsin then. They thought she was from Norway or possibly the West Indies. And, you know, that History.com article says recent research suggests Wisconsin but I couldn’t find anything about this research. How did they figure that out? Did they have this knife with the mysterious characters? Did they trace the language to indigenous people living in what is now Wisconsin. I wish I knew. Show me the knife. I can’t let it go.  


In 1800, also in France, this time in Aveyron, France a boy around 12 years old was found naked in the forest. When doctors examined him they found a scar on his neck that looked like a knife wound that had healed and they assumed that someone had taken him to the woods, slit his throat, and left him there to die. But he miraculously survived and had clearly been living in the forest ever since. He couldn’t speak and he was terrified of humans. But, I mean, the last human he saw tried to murder him, so I can’t really blame him for that. A doctor at a deaf school named Jean Itard took the boy in and gave him the name Victor. He began trying to tame Victor, teaching him to wear clothing and eat at a table with silverware. He even got him to identify a few written words and he could understand some spoken language but was never able to speak. Quinn reports quote “He would often get frustrated by Victor’s wild nature and beat him, especially when the young boy began to go through puberty. He had no sense of what was or was not a socially acceptable way to deal with sexual urges, and it became nearly impossible to bring him out in public,” end quote. Dr. Itard eventually wrote a book about his experiences taming and, it seems, abusing Victor. And this one is giving me Peter vibes. I feel like Victor was more than just a feral child. I feel like he was also possibly disabled. Like he had some kind of developmental delay that affected his speech and behavior. And maybe that’s why someone tried to kill him and leave him in the woods to begin with, this abandonment of someone who was seen as unfit or as a burden to those tasked with their care. Super sad but it definitely happened more than we probably know. 


And now on to one of, probably the most famous feral children, Dina Sanichar. Dina is believed to be the inspiration for Mowgli in the Jungle Book. That’s unconfirmed but their stories are quite similar and the timing of it checks out. In 1867, some hunters in the forest of Uttar Pradesh in India tracked some wolves to a cave where they were surprised to find a small human boy around 5 or 6 years old walking on all fours with the wolves. When they tried to get the boy, the wolves fiercely protected him as if he were one of their own cubs. And this next bit makes me really sad but eventually they set a fire near the opening of the cave to smoke the wolves out. When the wolves ran out, the hunters shot them and then captured the boy hoping to return him to civilization. He was brought to an orphanage and given the name Dina Sanichar. Sanichar means Saturday which is the day he was found. Like many of the others we’ve discussed, Dina walked on all fours, he preferred to eat raw meat, and he couldn’t speak. But then, more feral children were brought to the orphanage. Yeah, at least three others. Two more boys and a girl were all found separately in the same jungle. They all walked on all fours, they all ate raw meat, none of them could talk, and this is crazy to me! They were called “wolf children” and this is like a thing in India, like a common thing, finding children raised by wolves. I found an India Today article titled “During the last century, nearly 50 cases of wolf children reported in India” and it listed all these different kids that were found in the jungle, just too many for me to include in this episode. But what in the world is happening in India? This is, I’ve just scratched the surface here. This is an iceberg. I can’t with it right now. Filing it away for another time. So Dina showed no desire to interact socially with other humans but he did seem to bond with the other feral children that were brought to the orphanage. He was eventually able to stand on two feet, get dressed on his own, and eat off a plate but that’s pretty much it. He never could speak, never could tell his story, shed some light on this mysterious wolf child situation and he died of tuberculosis around age 34. 


Now we’re going to get into some much more recent examples, like very modern accounts. The first is Marcos Pantoja and this is coming from a BBC History Magazine article by Richard Sugg. Marcos was born into extreme poverty in Andalusia, in Spain. He reports that in 1946, when he was 6 years old, his parents sold him to a local landowner. Cause this was actually a thing. You could sell your kids if you were too poor to care for them. So they sold him to a local landowner who put him to work with a goatherd in the Sierra Morena mountains. But one day this goatherd guy disappeared leaving this 6 year old boy, Marcos Pantoja in the mountains all by himself. He observed the birds and animals eating berries and roots and then started to eat those same berries and roots himself. And then at some point, to get out of a storm, he crawled into a cave where he found some wolf cubs. The mother wolf returned with meat. At first she growled at Marcos but then she shared the meat with him, he ate alongside her cubs. And Marcos would live this way for the next 11 years before police found him in 1965. In a 2018 interview with journalist Matthew Bremner, Marcos described those 11 years as the happiest of his life. He claimed to have befriended wolves, foxes, and snakes and said he could talk to them in a sort of hybrid human-animal language. By the time he was found in 1965, he could no longer speak Spanish but he could still understand it. He lived in a convent in Madrid for a time and then was just sort of let out into the world. Sugg reports in his article quote “He later recalled that the main things he then learned were embarrassment, fear and distrust, as he was humiliated, cheated and robbed by supposed companions… it is clear that the years either side of his wild time were comparatively miserable ones,” end quote


Around the same time Marcos was left to fend for himself in the Sierra Moreno Mountains in Spain, a 4 year old girl named Marina was abducted from her garden in a remote South American village. She was driven through the rainforests of Colombia and eventually abandoned there. Her captors had gotten spooked by something and just abandoned their plan, dumping her off in the middle of the jungle alone. According to Marina, she lived with capuchin monkeys for several years. She began to walk on all fours, stopped even thinking in human words and found that she had learned a sort of basic monkey language that she could use to communicate. She recalled making friends with younger monkeys and carrying them on her back. She recalled a day she got really sick after accidentally eating a poisonous plant. An older monkey whom she called “Grandpa” carried her to a pool of water. At first she thought he was trying to drown her but then he quote “looked me straight in the eyes. As I looked back at him… his expression was completely calm. It wasn’t angry, or agitated, or hostile… Perhaps he was trying to tell me something,” end quote. Marina, finally figuring out what the monkey was trying to tell her, drank from the pool and immediately vomited up the poisonous plant. Eventually she was recaptured by humans but unfortunately not by good ones. She spent some time being trafficked by a brothel owner and abused by a mafia family in Cucuta. Marina is now married with two children and living in the UK. She wrote a book about her experiences in 2012 called “The Girl With No Name: The True Story of a Girl Who Lived with Monkeys.” Although a lot of people have cast doubt on how true her story really is. Anthropologist Barbara J King scrutinized the story and raised some questions about the behavior of capuchin monkeys that Marina described. Also, I just want to point out that a full grown capuchin monkey is only like 10 pounds so I’m really not sure how this “grandpa” fellow carried her to a pool of water. Maybe he dragged her? Monkey’s are pretty strong right? I don’t know. 


And finally there’s Ivan Mishukov, a four year old boy who ran away from home in Russia in 1996 and lived on the streets where he began begging for food. And, I guess people were giving him food and not actually being concerned at all that a four year old was begging on the streets without an adult. Like, why is no one looking for this kid? This is 1996. He starts sharing the food with some of Russia's many stray street dogs. He shares the food with a particular pack of these street dogs and they start to trust him so much so that he is eventually seen as the pack leader. So, just to recap, 1996 a runaway 4 year old becomes the leader of a pack of stray street dogs. What is happening in Russia? The dogs protected the boy and kept him warm through the winters for two years. But eventually the police started to catch on. Maybe someone finally decided to report this four year old beggar running around with dogs. The police figure it out but they can’t seem to actually capture Ivan. They try and fail three times. Each time, the dogs aggressively defend Ivan, distracting police long enough for him to slip away. Then they set a trap, baiting the dogs with food inside a restaurant kitchen and capturing Ivan while his protectors are distracted. Ivan can still speak and understand perfectly fine. It’s only been two years. So he’s able to explain all of this to police. He’s like, “yeah, I’ve just been out here on the streets running around with dogs for two years, where were you guys?” He goes to live in a children’s shelter. It turned out he had been living with his alcoholic grandfather who would just disappear for days on end, leaving Ivan alone. So one day he just up and left, choosing the street over that. So after the police get him, Ivan goes to this shelter, he goes into foster care, he goes to school, he turns into a pretty normal guy despite it all. According to a Daily Mail article, he doesn’t like to talk about that dark time in his past although he did share with reporter Will Stewart that the dogs' names were Jesse, Goga, Masha and Seva. He also said quote “I understand that if it wasn't for those (dogs) I wouldn't have survived in the street,” end quote. Sort of a modern, urban wolf boy. I’m very sad to report that all four dogs were killed after Ivan was captured. And I debated even including that. I thought about sparing you the heartbreak, but I think it’s important in understanding the overarching theme that starts to develop when you dig into these stories. 


How much of these stories is true, how much is misremembered, how much is fictitious, I don’t know. But I do know that feral children have popped up throughout history far more often I realized. It’s happening way too often for there not to be some degree of truth to it all. Too many different accounts. I mean, you can call Ivan up right now and he’ll tell you. He’s like 30 and he lives in Moscow. Some of them were able to remember and communicate their lives before they lived in the wild, to explain how it all went down, and some of them weren't. We will never know how Dina Sanichar ended up in that cave with wolves. But I think we can safely say that all of these people faced a lot of trauma and hardship very early in life. Some of them were forced into the wild by violent, traumatic events. John of Liege who ran away from a war, Memmie le Blanc who was kidnapped and sold into slavery, Marcos Pantoja who was sold into manual labor and eventually abandoned, Marina Chapman who was kidnapped by traffickers and abandoned, and Ivan Mishukov who was neglected by his guardian and opted for dogs over humans. Some of them, it seems, were abandoned due to disabilities that made them too difficult to care for. Peter the wild boy of Hanover whose portrait bears the look of someone with Pitt Hopkins syndrome, Victor of Aveyron with a scar suggesting someone had tried to slit his throat. These boys never gained the ability to speak suggesting maybe they never could to begin with. The wild boy of Hesse and Dina Sanichar both died young and without ever being able to speak to shed light on their stories but what I find most interesting about these two is that other children were found too, shortly after them and they were just as feral, just as wild. Where are these kids coming from? Where are all of these Indian wolf children coming from? Were people abandoning children in the jungle for whatever reason, disability, too poor to care for them, were they born out of wedlock and it was perceived as culturally or religiously shameful? How are these kids ending up in the jungle? And these ones don’t seem to ever be able to regain speech. That India Today article I mentioned talks about a bunch more of them - Pascal, Ramu, Parushram, Kamala and Amala. They are never able to speak. Kamala gets the farthest, learning around 45 words, but she stops developing once she reaches the intellect of like a 2 or 3 year old. 


And I think this speaks volumes about how crucial those first few years of life are. I don’t think people realize how much development is taking place in those early months and years. If you miss that window, you can’t really make it up later. If you’ve been with me for a while, you know my first teaching job was at a psychiatric residential treatment facility for children. So this was a place where children were sent to live and receive treatment and an education when they were too violent or mentally disturbed to be cared for by their guardians or to attend a regular school. And I remember when a new kid came to live at the center. He was older than all the other kids. It was only for kids ages 5 to 12 and this kid was 12 and he was a big kid. He was a big 12 year old. And I remember his father bringing him in and this guy was just so normal. He seemed like such a good dad. He seemed devastated that they were having to resort to this. And I remember him saying that it was just too much. He was too violent. He was hurting their other children. They could handle it when he was little but now he was big, and strong and they couldn’t protect the other children. I remember the dad saying that he would wear an eagle glove on his arm like what people who train hawks wear so the talons don’t get them. He would wear this because otherwise the boy would just tear him up when he tried to restrain him. And I was like well what in the world? This seems like such a good family? What is up with this kid? And I learned that the family had adopted him when he was around 18 months old. That he had been raised in a loving home since that age, 18 months. But it didn’t matter. Whatever damage had been done to this kid in the first 18 months of his life stuck. And, from what I saw, I’m not convinced that rehabilitation was possible. So, those first few years matter. They severely impact what type of person you will be. Which is why it's so incredibly infuriating to me that the United States does not have mandatory paid maternity leave and is way behind other countries when it comes to affordable access to childcare and preschool. Public school for the most part starts at age 5 in the United States. And yet, those first 5 years are by far the most critical and impressionable years. It makes absolutely no sense. And we wonder why our jails are so full, why our mental health is in shambles. Mmm, don’t even get me started. 


Another theme we see throughout these stories is children being cared for by animals, by another species. This is typically wolves although with Ivan it’s street dogs and for Marina it was monkeys. So this obviously begs the question, you know, is this possible? Would a wild animal actually take in a human child and care for it as if it is its own offspring? With Ivan’s dogs I’m like, yeah I believe that. They were domesticated dogs. I can see them treating a human that way, especially if the human is feeding them. That checks out. But wolves? How does the wolf come to see the child as offspring and not prey? And yet many of these accounts report the wolves guarding the children along with the wolf cubs. Richard Sugg notes in his article for BBC History Magazine quote “There are many well-documented cases from Britain of one animal or bird fostering another. In the early 20th century, retriever dogs nursed both tiger and polar bear cubs at London Zoo. In the case of very young children who grew up with wolves, their complete dependency implies that the infant humans must indeed have been raised by the wild animals, and it would probably have been easier for a mother wolf to feed them with her own milk than with anything else,” end quote. 


And so here we see this weird flip flop, this contradiction, where the wild animals appear civilized, taking in a suffering child nursing it back to health, and the humans are the cruel and savage ones. The humans are the ones responsible for abandoning, neglecting, abusing the child both before and after their time in the wild. Many of the children who regained the ability to speak reported realizing for the first time feelings of shame and embarrassment. Even when they had been reclaimed by civilization, they did not feel as though they were truly accepted by it. Not in the way that the wild had taken them in and provided for them. I think this contradiction, this inversion where the civilized is wild and the wild is civilized is why we are so intrigued by stories of feral children. It’s why these stories are so pervasive throughout ancient myths and literature. Michael Newton lists many in his book “the wild education of Cyrus; the riverside abandonment of Moses; the infancy of Semiramis, founder of Babylon, fostered by birds; the story of Oedipus, lamed and left in the wilderness of Kithairon; the childhood of the twins, Amphion and Zethos, forsaken on a mountainside; the exposure of Paris on the slopes of Mount Ida, where for five days he was suckled by a bear; the story of Tyro, and Neleus and Pelias; the infant Aleas fed by a doe,” it goes on and on. And when we find a real life child, abandoned in the wild by our own kind, and seemingly cared for, taken in by wild animals, it forces us to examine ourselves, our humanity in a completely different light. Newton sums it all up nicely saying quote “Through the stories, factual and fictional, of the feral children, there emerges, perhaps, another narrative: the fragmented and haunting story of our continuing relationship with the savage image of ourselves.


Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix. I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow this podcast on whatever app you’re using to listen, and go ahead and tell a friend or two about it, that’ll make it much easier to get your next fix.  


Information used in this episode was sourced from BBC History Magazine, The Guardian, history.com, India Today, History Collection, the University of Cambridge, History Uncovered, and the Daily Mail. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.