10 حالات حديثة للأطفال فيرال 10 Modern Cases of Feral Children

A feral child is a human child who has lived away from human contact
from a very young age, and has little or no experience of human care,
loving or social behavior, and, crucially, of human language. Feral
children are confined by humans (often parents), brought up by animals,
or live in the wild in isolation. There have been over one hundred
reported cases of feral children, and this is a selection of ten of
them.10Shamdeo



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In May 1972, a boy aged about four was discovered in the forest of
Musafirkhana, about 20 miles from Sultanpur. The boy was playing with
wolf cubs. He had very dark skin, long hooked fingernails, matted hair
and calluses on his palms, elbows and knees. He shared several
characteristics with Kamala and Amala: sharpened teeth, craving for
blood, earth-eating, chicken-hunting, love of darkness and friendship
with dogs and jackals. He was named Shamdeo and taken to the village of
Narayanpur. Although weaned off raw meat, he never talked, but learnt
some sign language. In 1978 he was admitted to Mother Theresa’s Home for
the Destitute and Dying in Lucknow, where he was re-named Pascal and
was visited by Bruce Chatwin in 1978. He died in February 1985.
9The Wild Girl of Champagne



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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. 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.8John Ssebunya



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One day in 1991, a Ugandan villager called Milly Sebba went further
than usual in search of firewood and came upon a little boy with a pack
of monkeys. She summoned help and the boy was cornered up a tree. He was
brought back to Milly’s village. His knees were almost white from
walking on them. His nails were very long and curled round and he wasn’t
house-trained. A villager identified the boy as John Sesebunya, last
seen in 1988 at the age of two or three when his father murdered his
mother and disappeared. For the next three years or so, he lived wild.
He vaguely remembers monkeys coming up to him, after a few days, and
offering him roots and nuts, sweet potatoes and kasava. The five
monkeys, two of them young, were wary at first, but befriended him
within about two weeks and taught him, he says, to travel with them, to
search for food and to climb trees. He is now about 21 years old, and in
October 1999 went to Britain as part of the 20-strong Pearl of Africa
Children’s Choir.7The Syrian Gazelle Boy



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Jean-Claude Auger, an anthropologist from the Basque country, was
traveling alone across the Spanish Sahara (Rio de Oro) in 1960 when he
met some Nemadi nomads, who told him about a wild child a day’s journey
away. The next day, he followed the nomads’ directions. On the horizon
he saw a naked child “galloping in gigantic bounds among a long
cavalcade of white gazelles”. The boy walked on all fours, but
occasionally assumed an upright gait, suggesting to Auger that he was
abandoned or lost at about seven or eight months, having already learnt
to stand. He habitually twitched his muscles, scalp, nose and ears, much
like the rest of the herd, in response to the slightest noise. He would
eat desert roots with his teeth, pucking his nostrils like the
gazelles. He appeared to be herbivorous apart from the occasional agama
lizard or worm when plant life was lacking. His teeth edges were level
like those of a herbivorous animal. In 1966 an unsuccessful attempt was
made to catch the boy in a net suspended from a helicopter; unlike most
of the feral children of whom we have records, the gazelle boy was never
removed from his wild companions.6Oxana Malaya



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Oxana Malaya (Оксана Малая) (born November 1983) was found as an
8-year-old feral child in Ukraine in 1991, having lived most of her life
in the company of dogs. She picked up a number of dog-like habits and
found it difficult to master language. Oxana’s alcoholic parents were
unable to care for her. They lived in an impoverished area where there
were wild dogs roaming the streets. She lived in a dog kennel behind her
house where she was cared for by dogs and learned their behaviours and
mannerisms. She growled, barked and crouched like a wild dog, sniffed at
her food before she ate it, and was found to have acquired extremely
acute senses of hearing, smell, and sight.




5Prava, the Bird Boy



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The most recent case of Mowgli Syndrome was that of a seven-year-old
boy who was rescued by Russian healthcare workers after being discovered
living in a two-bedroom apartment with his mother and an abundance of
feathered friends. It would appear the small apartment doubled as an
aviary with cages filled with dozens of birds. In an interview, one of
his rescuers, Social Worker Galina Volskaya, said that his mother
treated him like another pet. While he was never physically harmed by
his mother, she simply never spoke to him. It was the birds who
communicated with the boy

“He just chirps and when realising that he is not
understood, starts to wave hands in the way birds winnow wings.” Quote
from Social Worker, Galina Volskaya.

4The Leopard Boy



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A leopard-child was reported by EC Stuart Baker in the Journal of the
Bombay Natural History Society (July 1920). The boy was stolen from
his parents by a leopardess in the North Cachar Hills near Assam in
about 1912, and three years later recovered and identified. “At the time
the child ran on all fours almost as fast as an adult man could run,
whilst in dodging in and out of bushes and other obstacles he was much
cleverer and quicker. His knees had hard callosities on them and his
toes were retained upright almost at right angles to his instep. The
palms of his hands and pads of his toes and thumbs were also covered
with very tough horny skin. When first caught, he bit and fought with
everyone and any wretched village fowl which came within his reach was
seized, torn to pieces and eaten with extraordinary rapidity.”3Kamala and Amala



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The most famous wolf-children are the two girls captured in October
1920 from a huge abandoned ant-hill squatted by wolves near Godamuri in
the vicinity of Midnapore, west of Calcutta, by villagers under the
direction of the Rev JAL Singh, an Anglican missionary. The mother wolf
was shot. The girls were named Kamala and Amala, and were thought to be
aged about eight and two. According to Singh, the girls had misshapen
jaws, elongated canines, and eyes that shone in the dark with the
peculiar blue glare of cats and dogs. Amala died the following year, but
Kamala survived until 1929, by which time she had given up eating
carrion, had learned to walk upright and spoke about 50 words.2The Bear Girl



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In 1937 George Maranz described a visit to a Turkish lunatic asylum
in Bursa, Turkey, where he met a girl who had allegedly lived with bears
for many years. Hunters in a mountainous forest near Adana had shot a
she-bear and then been attacked by a powerful little “wood spirit”.
Finally overcome, this turned out to be a human child, though utterly
bear-like in her voice, habits and physique. She refused all cooked food
and slept on a mattress in a dark corner of her room. Investigations
showed that a two-year-old child had disappeared from a nearby village
14 years earlier, and it was presumed that a bear had adopted her.1Wild Peter



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The first really famous feral child was Wild Peter, “a naked,
brownish, black-haired creature” captured near Helpensen in Hanover in
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”, although his hearing and sense of
smell were said to be “particularly acute”.
You can read more about feral
children here.