What does feral child mean?
The term feral child is used to describe a child who has lived in isolation from a tender age and has lacked human contact. Such kind of children experience little or nothing at all in terms of human behavior, care, and language.
What are some real examples of feral children?
Top 10 Real Life Feral Children You Won’t Believe Exist
- Madina, Russia, 2013. Madina did not exactly live with wolves. ...
- Lobo wolf girl, Mexico, 1845-1852. Photo: http://www.juliafullerton-batten.com/photos/10.jpg This girl is a mystery. ...
- Oxana Malaya, 1991, Ukraine. ...
- Prava, the Bird Boy. ...
- Shamdeo, India. ...
- Marina Chapman, 1959, Colombia. ...
- Genie, USA, 1970. ...
- The Leopard boy. ...
- Ivan Mishukov. ...
- Kamala and Amala. ...
What is the definition of feral children?
Mowgli was a fictional feral child in Rudyard Kipling 's The Jungle Book. A feral child (also called wild child) is a human child who has lived isolated from human contact from a very young age, and so has had little or no experience of human care, behavior, or human language.
Who are the feral children?
Feral children are children who have spent years isolated from human contact and are deprived of enculturation, the socialization necessary to function as members of society. They experience mental, physical, and social impairments as a result.
Overview
A feral child (also called wild child) is a young individual who has lived isolated from human contact from a very young age, with little or no experience of human care, social behavior, or language. The term is used to refer to children who have suffered severe abuse or trauma before being abandoned or running away. They are sometimes the subjects of folklore and legends, typically portray…
Description
Feral children lack the basic social skills that are normally learned in the process of enculturation. For example, they may be unable to learn to use a toilet, have trouble learning to walk upright after walking on fours all their lives, or display a complete lack of interest in the human activity around them. They often seem mentally impaired and have almost insurmountable trouble learning a human language. The impaired ability to learn a natural language after having been isolated for s…
History
Prior to the 1600s, feral and wild children stories were usually limited to myths and legends. In those tales, the depiction of feral children included hunting for food, running on all fours instead of two, and not knowing language. Philosophers and scientists were interested in the concept of such children, and began to question if these children were part of a different species from the human family.
Journalistic accounts of children raised by animals
• Marina Chapman claimed to have lived with weeper capuchin monkeys in the Colombian jungle from the age of five to about nine, following a botched kidnapping in about 1954. Unusual for feral children, she went on to marry, have children and live a largely normal life with no persisting problems.
• Robert Mayanja (1982) lost his parents in the Ugandan Civil War at the age of three, wh…
Alleged cases of feral children
The historian Herodotus wrote that Egyptian pharaoh Psammetichus I (Psamtik) sought to discover the origin of language, and prove Egypt was the oldest people on Earth by conducting an experiment with two children. Allegedly, he gave two newborn babies to a shepherd, with the instructions that no one should speak to them, but that the shepherd should feed and care for them while listening to determine their first words. The hypothesis was that the first word would …
Raised in confinement
• Isabelle (1938) was almost seven years old when she was discovered. She had spent the first years of her life isolated in a dark room with her mother, who was deaf and unable to speak, as her only contact. Only seven months later, she had learned a vocabulary of around 1,500 to 2,000 words. She is reported to have acquired normal linguistic abilities.
• Anna (1938) was six years old when she was found, having been kept in a dark room for most of her life. She was born in Marc…
Hoaxes
Following the 2008 disclosure by Belgian newspaper Le Soir that the bestselling book Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years and movie Survivre avec les loups ("Surviving with Wolves") was a media hoax, the French media debated the credulity with which numerous cases of feral children have been unquestioningly accepted. Although there are numerous books on these children, almost none of them have been based on archives; the authors instead have used dubious seco…
Legend, fiction, and popular culture
Myths, legends, and fiction have depicted feral children reared by wild animals such as wolves, apes, monkeys, and bears. Famous examples include Romulus and Remus, Ibn Tufail's Hayy, Ibn al-Nafis' Kamil, Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli, Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan, George of the Jungle and the legends of Atalanta and Enkidu.