Stories of children rescued from the wilderness have for centuries inspired awe, fascination and disbelief. PAUL SIEVEKING reviews a phenomenon that helps to define the frontier between human and animal.

Tales of children being adopted and nurtured by wolves, bears, monkeys, and other animals crop up with remarkable regularity. As the mediæval world gave way to the modern, the wodewose or wild man of the woods shifted from an archetype of chaos, insanity and heresy to one of natural harmony and enlightenment, culminating in Rousseau’s idea of the Noble Savage. But the wild man was both savage and sublime, an image of desire as well as punishment. Wild or feral children elicit both heart-rending pity for their abandonment and wonder for their survival against such terrible odds.

Ancient mythology has many stories of children nurtured by animals, but the first ‘true’ account of a feral child was recorded by the usually dependable Roman historian Procopius. A baby boy, abandoned by his mother during the chaos of the Gothic wars in about AD 250, was found and suckled by a she-goat. When the survivors returned to their homes, they found the boy living with his adopted mother and named him Aegisthus. Procopius states he saw the child himself.

Goats don’t figure much in subsequent feral accounts, although a child said to have been raised by goats for eight years was found in the Peruvian Andes in 19902.
Carl Linnæus, the great biological classifier, introduced a new species of man, Homo ferens, in 1758, characterising the creature as mutus, tetrapus and hirsutus (a mute quadruped covered with hair)3. The attribution of hairiness was probably influenced by the legend of the hirsute wodewose, but a number of feral children are thus described, as we shall see. Linnæus provided anecdotal case histories of varying reliability: Jean de Liège, a Lithuanian bear-boy, the Hesse wolf-boy, the Irish sheep-boy, the Bamberg calf-boy, the Kranenburg girl, the two Pyrenees boys, Wild Peter of Hanover, and the savage girl from Champagne. These primary cases are briefly described below.

Many academics regarded the whole phenomenon of feral children with scepticism; they pointed out that most of the children never learnt to speak, while those that did could recall very little of their wild existence. Similarly, the circumstances of their discovery were by their nature anecdotal, taking place far from habitation and often depending on the testimony of a solitary witness. Dismissing testimony as superstition and folklore became commonplace in 19th century science, to the detriment of folk wisdom and forteana.

Cont....

Robert Kerr, whose translation of Linnæus appeared in 1792, dismissed Homo ferens as imposture and exaggeration, while the 1811 survey of feral cases by JF Blumenbach, the father of physical anthropology, was characterised by Robert Zingg in 1940 as inadequate and unfair4. In 1830 the Swedish naturalist KA Rudolphi proclaimed that all the feral children were either fictional or congenital idiots, and this became the orthodox view, reinforced by Sir Edward Tylor, the father of social anthropology. According to Claude Levi Strauss in 1949.

It’s true that some feral children, such as Dina Sanichar of Sekandra (1867), the Lucknow child (1954) and the first Ugandan monkey-child (1982) were mentally or physically handicapped. Many others, however, were not; and neither were they intentionally abandoned, but had escaped from abusive parents or were lost by accident or in the chaos of war – and surviving without human help required considerable native intelligence.

Note Levi Strauss’s qualifying phrases “most of” and “almost all”; some of the case histories refuse to be explained away in this fashion, particularly those of Victor of Aveyron, Kaspar Hauser and the Midnapore wolf-girls Kamala and Amala, described in detail by persons of standing – respectively a doctor, a lawyer and a priest. As with all strange phenomena, it only requires one case to be demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt to allow the possibility that many of the others are also true.

The first modern published account of ‘historical’ as opposed to mythological feral children was a work by the medical writer Phillipus Camerius, published in Frankfurt in 16096. This described the Hesse wolf child of 1344 (of whom more below) and the Bamberg calf-child. The latter “had an extraordinary suppleness in his limbs and went on all fours with great agility. In this posture he would fight the largest dogs with his teeth, and attack them so intrepidly that he put them to flight. He was not, however, of a fierce nature.”

Sir Kenelm Digby, later one of the Royal Society’s founders, is the first to mention Jean de Liège in 1644, having interviewed those who had seen him a few years earlier7. As a five-year-old during the religious wars, Jean took to the woods with fellow villagers. When the fighting moved elsewhere, the villagers returned home, but the timorous Jean remained in hiding for 16 years. In the wild, his senses sharpened; he could scent “wholesome fruits or roots” at a great distance. When he was finally captured at the age of about 21, he was naked, “all overgrown with hair”, and incapable of speech. In human society, he learned to talk, but lost his acute sense of smell.

Cont...

Nicholaus Tulp, the Dutch doctor portrayed by Rembrandt in The Anatomy Lesson, described the Irish sheep-boy in 1672. “There was brought to Amsterdam... a youth of 16 years, who being lost perhaps by his parents and brought up from his cradle amongst the wild sheep of Ireland, had acquired a sort of ovine nature. He was rapid in body, nimble of foot, of fierce countenance, firm flesh, scorched skin, rigid limbs, with retreating and depressed forehead, but convex and knotty occiput, rude, rash, ignorant of fear, and destitute of all softness. In other respects sound, and in good health. Being without human voice he bleated like a sheep, and being averse to the food and drink we are accustomed to, he chewed grass only and hay, and that with the same choice as the most particular sheep...

“He had lived on rough mountains and in desert places... delighting in caves and pathless and inaccessible dens.” Huntsmen had finally netted him. “His appearance was more that of a wild beast than a man; and though kept in restraint, and compelled to live among men, most unwillingly, and only after a long time did he put off his wild character. His throat was large and broad, his tongue as it were fastened to his palate.”

Another sheep-boy was captured near Trikkala in Greece in 1891. He had been living with his woolly family for four years.

The Kranenburg girl was discovered in the woods outside Zwolle in the Dutch province of Overyssel in 1717. She had been kidnapped at 16 months from her home in Kranenburg, and was found dressed in sacking and living on a diet of leaves and grass. There was no evidence that animals had befriended her. After her capture, she learnt spinning and sign language, but never mastered speech.

The primary (and uncorroborated) source on the Pyrenees feral boys is Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Human Inequality in 1754. All he says is that they were discovered in 1719, “running up and down the mountainside like quadrupeds.”

The first really famous feral child was Wild Peter, “a naked, brownish, black-haired creature” was captured near Helpensen in Hanover on 27 July 1724, when he was about 12. He climbed trees with ease, lived off plants and seemed incapable of speech. He refused bread, preferring to strip the bark from green twigs and suck on the sap; but he eventually learnt to eat fruit and vegetables. He was presented at court in Hanover to George I, and taken to England, where he was studied by leading men of letters. He spent 68 years in society, but never learnt to say anything except “Peter” and “King George".

Cont....

The wild girl of Champagne had probably learned to speak before her abandonment, for she is a rare example of a wild child learning to talk coherently – although she could remember little of her feral existence, which she thought had lasted two years. When coaxed from a tree in Songi near Chalons in the French district of Champagne in 1731, she was aged about 10, barefoot, and dressed in rags and skins with a gourd leaf on her head. In a pouch she carried a cudgel and a knife inscribed with indecipherable characters. She shrieked and squeaked, and was so dirty (or possibly painted) that she was mistaken for a black child. Her diet consisted of birds, frogs and fish, leaves, branches and roots. Given a rabbit, she immediately skinned and devoured it.

“Her fingers and in particular her thumbs, were extraordinarily large,” according to a contemporary witness, the famous scientist Charles Marie de la Condamine. She is said to have used her thumbs to dig out roots and swing from tree to tree like a monkey. She was a very fast runner and had phenomenally sharp eyesight. When the Queen of Poland, the mother of the French queen, passed through Champagne in 1737 to take possession of the Duchy of Lorraine, she heard about the girl and took her hunting, where she outran and killed rabbits.12 She was given the name Marie-Angélique Memmie Le Blanc, and later eked out an existence in Paris by making artificial flowers and hawking her memoirs (written by Madame Hecquet). She died, like most of the feral children, in obscurity.

The two most famous feral cases of the 19th century are Victor of Aveyron, made famous by Francois Truffaut’s wonderful L’Enfant Sauvage, and Kaspar Hauser, the subject of Werner Herzog’s haunting film of the same name. A great deal has been written about both of these, most recently by Michael Newton in Savage Girls and Wild Boys, so I will concentrate on lesser-known cases. There are about 80 examples of feral children, and many will only be referred to in passing.
Victor, Kaspar and Kamala represent the three main types of feral child: in isolation, in confinement, and among animals. Children locked up for years often develop autistic symptoms, leading the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim in 1959 to lump all three types under the heading of infantile autism. “While there are no feral children,” he wrote, “there are some very rare examples of feral mothers, of human beings who become feral to one of their children.”14 This denial of genuine feral cases is closely related to the orthodox anthropological position and requires an unwarranted dismissal of remarkably consistent evidence and testimony.

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Love For Tigers -

This site is all about tigers! There is a lot of good information here, as well as some really good links to other resources! There are petitions you can "sign", suggestions for ways that you can become involved in helping to save tigers, important news articles, and a whole lot more!

Good day to you.

River Dolphins of No Return

Best Places to See Wild Beasts

It' fantastic, just play and hear it; Yeti strikes back

It was nice. I enjoyed to hear the music. Thanks Diju!!

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Wild Things:

Lupine
Lupine comes in several varieties and colors. These were photographed in Yellowstone.




Source is; http://www.wildthingsphoto.com/gallery/flwr9.htm

Gramma Grass (Attached file)
Patterns and shapes in nature are easy to find when they involve plant life.

Wild thing; Pushkar of India.

There is a lot of magic in Pushkar, as well as several conflicting identities. It is a very (VERY) old and important Hindu pilgrimage site, built around the shores of a sacred lake (here seen from a nearby hill). It has also reinvented itself as a center for foreign tourists, and is filled with little cafes, hotels, handicraft shops, camel rides, and insistent touts. There's a large camel fair on the Kartik full moon (October/November) which brings hundreds of thousands of buyers, sellers, and curious onlookers. In the other times it is quieter, and if one can get out of town, it is positively peaceful.

More pictures of Pushkar;

Tyo thauma chahi pakkai janchhu jindagima ek patak. Seems to me, Pushkar is a amazing place.
Thank you for the nice picture Diju.