Are there any documented cases of feral children raised by animals?”
A feral child (feral, wild, or undomesticated) is a human child who has lived isolated from human contact from a very young age, and has no (or little) experience of human care, loving or social behavior, and, crucially, of human language.[1] Some feral children have been confined by people (usually their own parents); in some cases this child abandonment was due to the parents’ rejection of a child’s severe intellectual or physical impairment. Feral children may have experienced severe child abuse or trauma before being abandoned or running away. Others are alleged to have been brought up by animals; some are said to have lived in the wild on their own. Just over one hundred incidents have been reported in English.[2] When completely brought up by animals, the feral child exhibits behaviors (within physical limits) almost entirely like those of the particular care-animal, such as its fear of or indifference to humans. The term Mowgli Syndrome has been applied. These cases have been in
Are there any real, documented, tried-and-true cases of children raised by animals? You apparently haven’t done much driving in northern New Jersey: They’re everywhere. But seriously, as Douglas K. Candland, author of Feral Children & Clever Animals and professor of psychology and animal behavior at Bucknell University, puts it, “This is a story that is important to the human mind, a narrative that humans, regardless of culture, tend to get interested in and ask about. A lot depends on what you mean by ‘raised by.’ There are about 450 cases with some documentation involving various animals — I’d say most often monkeys. The documentation is sparse. We have several people living who are thought to have had significant interaction with animals when they were infants.” Andrew Ward, the founder of FeralChildren.com, says, “Truly raised over a number of years? Probably not. The more I read and the more I investigate any individual case, t
