The actor, Ron Ely, who played Tarzan in the NBC TV series that I loved as a child, has just died, and it got me thinking again about ‘Feral Children’ again, about my 2019 novel, Nina X, and about the children who have been mythologised over millennia, as having been raised by apes and wolves, goats and wildcats.
The Feral Child is designated as a child removed from human contact, subject to early abandonment and severe neglect, who has been forced to fend for themselves, without clothing, or food, and to somehow scavenge for survival, in the wilderness possibly even being adopted by wild animals. It is a phenomenon we rarely hear about in our enlightened, high-tech age and when we do, we it seems impossible to us; we tell ourselves that these ‘poor things’ must be a throw back from our long banished species-past; such horrors cannot possibly happen ‘in our time’. They are mere myths, surely.
And the question that haunts the mention of their name today: feral children – are they real, and are they still among us?
The mythology around Feral Children has haunted the history of civilisation, with long distorted memories of archaic folklore and legend, with depictions of hybrid, half-human, half-beast demi-gods and monsters, such as Centaurs, Harpies, Mermaids and Fauns. And with old distant myths such as Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, mothered by a wolf.
In the 17th century along with these myths, ‘real cases’ of feral children began emerging, partly through the encroachment of colonial society onto areas of untamed nature, and partly due to improved communications, the printing press, the emergence of newspaper and the growing hunger for the exotic. There is solid evidence of many cases of real Feral Children that emerged in multiple countries at this time. We have reports of children raised by bears (Poland 1663); by sheep (Ireland 1672); by cattle (Germany 16th century), and the disturbing story of Marie-Angelique Memmie Le Blanc, the famous feral child of 18th century France who was named The Wild Girl of Champagne.
Between the ages of nine and nineteen, Marie-Angélique survived wild in the woods of Songy, before she was captured by villagers in September 1731. She became the subject of many studies and books; was an object of fascination for the aristocracy and scientists of the day and was taken into the care of the Queen of France (Spouse of Louis XV). Her tale inspired the thinkers of the French and Scottish enlightenment, who believed she embodied their ideal of the noble savage. It is claimed that she even learned to read and write – and if this was really the case she would have been unique among Feral Children. She earned a small income from an autobiography Histoire d'une Jeune Fille Sauvage which was, even in its time, disputed to have been ghost-written. Two hundred and forty years later, her tale of assent from animal to civilised citizen, became the fictionalised Feral boy-child, Victor, in Francois Truffaut’s 1970 film, The Wild Child.
As the world has become progressively industrialised and mapped, as the jungles and forests, have shrunk over the last two hundred years, there have become fewer and fewer places left from which a Feral Child could emerge. But yet, even in the 20th century there are reports of children raised by apes (Columbia, 1954, Uganda, 1982 and South Africa, 1987) Then children raised by goats (Peru, 1990) and ostriches (Sahara Desert, 2000).
In the now-mapped world it is alarming to find that there are other kinds of place from which Feral Children can emerge. The neglected children of poverty-ridden, abandoned modernity, come from environments as wild and hostile as any Jungle.
There are six known cases in the 20th century of children being raised by dogs, and five of them come from post-Soviet countries in the years after the collapse of the USSR; like the Romanian Dog Boy, found in 2002, or the Siberian Dog Boy found in 2004. More alarming still is the story of Oxana Malaya the eight-year old Ukranian girl (found in 1991), who had escaped from alcoholic parents and survived with mongrel farm dogs for six years and had almost no experience of human care or human language, who walked on all fours and barked like a dog.
‘Madina’, again from Russia (2013), lived with dogs from birth till age three. We are told, “Her alcoholic mother would sit at the table to eat while her daughter gnawed bones on the floor with the dogs.”
When we come across such shocking stories we consider them to be tragic tales of collapsed states and abusive and neglectful parents; we try not to take a prurient interest or to engage in the spectacle of suffering. But our attitude is very different from that which dominated during the Victorian Era, when tales of captured Feral Children inspired the public imagination, with the mixture of awe, fear and perverse curiosity. The peak of interest in Feral Children coincided with the era of Empire and colonial conquest. At this time Feral Children, when they were seized or rescued, were treated in with the same fascination given to circus ‘freaks’ (the bearded lady, Lizard Man) and they represented the Victorian era fear of animality and the un-colonised peoples.
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Given this background it was inevitable that Mowgli and the Jungle Book should emerge in 1894. Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli is a boy, raised by wolves in the Indian Jungle, on the fringes of the British Empire, and with the help of a bear named Baloo and a Benevolent Black Panther called Bagheera who call him Man-cub he is taught the very Darwinian, “Law of the Jungle”. The story of the Jungle book, Kipling claimed had come from many sources. “In fact,’ he said, “it is extremely possible that I have helped myself promiscuously but at present cannot remember from whose stories I have stolen.”
Kipling, in fact, appears to have ‘stolen’ most from the case of Dina Sanichar – the “Indian Wolfboy” discovered in 1872 by a group of hunters in the jungle of Uttar Pradesh.
As reports go, the six-year-old child appeared from within a pack of Wolves, ambling on all fours. When the hunters smoked the animals out of their hiding place in a cave, they killed the wolves and captured the boy. On being taken to ‘civilisation’ and named (Sanichar means Saturday), the child was diagnosed as “an imbicile” by clinicians and studied extensively.
Sanichar’s story is more typical of all real Feral Child stories. He was “unable to acquire the English language, speaking instead in grunts and animal noise”. The child psychologist Wayne Dennis, writing half a century later in the American Journal of Psychology, claimed that “Feral man is untidy,” and would “eat things that civilized man considers disgusting.” In Sanichar’s case this was a repulsion to all meat that was not raw. Feral children, Dennis explained, had “little or no attachment to human beings.” A tragic trait that comes up again and again in the Scientific History Feral Children. This is usually to do with abandonment or abuse by by parents. In the story of Mowgli, it is from the romanticised death of the child’s mother, but Sanichar’s real life was no Jungle Book, but a story of isolation & neglect. After twenty years of attempted rehabilitation the Wolf-Boy Sanichar could not adapt to modern life and he died at the age of twenty-six.
These motif’s re-appear in the story of Tarzan, created by Edgar Rice Burroughs in 1914, albeit in heroic and positivistic mode.
Tarzan too was abandoned after the death of his parents and raised by a special species of Great Ape unknown to man – the Mangani. Tarzan shares many features with Mowgli, and indeed, Rudyard Kipling fell just short of accusing Burroughs of plagiarism. However there is evidence that Burroughs also took the Tarzan story from a news report, that of the life of the 14th Earl of Streatham, William Charles Mildin, who spent his childhood and young adulthood living in the wilds of Africa between 1868 and 1883.
According to Llewellan Jones, Lord Mildin left 1,500 pages of memoirs, which begin: “I was only 11 when, in a boyish fit of anger and pique, I ran away from home and obtained a berth as cabin boy aboard the four-masted sailing vessel, Antilla, bound for African ports-of-call and the Cape of Good Hope…” The ship was wrecked off the coast of Equatorial Africa and Mildin claimed to have been befriended by “a group of benevolent apes who offered him food and shelter.” The boy took pride of place within the ape family by fashioning weapons and creating fire and lived with them until late adolescence.
Whether based on Mildin or not, Burrough’s Tarzan caught the imagination of fin de siecle audiences and he became one of the most successful author ever, going on to write eighty books, and even founding a town – Tarzana – which still exists as a suburb of Los Angeles.
Looking back, however, we can see that Tarzan is a contradictory character made up of the conflicting ideas of the time. On the one hand the original Tarzan is himself a colonialist and racist, and views blacks as inferior – for example, Tarzan first introduces himself to Jane as “Tarzan, the killer of beasts and many black men.”
And on the other hand, Tarzan is the embodiment of Enlightenment values, the living proof of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s “Noble Savage”. Tarzan despises the hypocrisy of civilisation and feels chained by culture; he longs to return to the primordial jungle, because only there can he be true to man’s inner nature. To paraphrase Rousseau, Tarzan was born free, and finds society to be everywhere, in chains. Tarzan is also, miraculously unaffected by the loss of his parents and the trauma caused by scraping a living together among fierce, hungry, dangerous animals. He is a romantic dream of primal nobility; he believes in and fights for justice and rallies against the greed and blindness of technological man. What Tarzan is not, however is an accurate study of the profound psychological damage occurs with real Feral Children.
Far from living with animals being a liberating experience, there is considerable scientific evidence that humans cannot develop healthy adult brains if they are forced to live in the adrenal state of fearful high alert known as ‘Flight or Fight’. Excessive adrenaline and cortisol in the system, floods the brain and shuts-off the parts of the brain associated with learning, language, creativity and most of all empathy. These parts of the hippocampus simply do not develop if the child lives in this constant state of fear.
Michael Newton’s excellent study Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A history of Feral Children, demonstrates over six case studies, how mentally and emotionally damaged Feral Children actually are, “They had no sense of humour,” he claimed, “no sadness or curiosity or connection to others…they never laughed or cried.”
The real-life story of Genie is a shocking example of how wrong we get it when we romanticise feral children.
In Russ Rymer’s book: Genie: A Scientific Tragedy, the undercover NYT journalist covers the real events of the attempted rehabilitation of the American girl, discovered in 1970, who spent almost her entire childhood locked in a suburban bedroom in L.A, abused and isolated from the outside world. “Genie” spent all of her days tied naked to a potty chair only able to move her hands and feet. When she made noise, her father would beat her. Her father, mother, and older brother, all suffering from addiction issues and mental illness, rarely spoke to her. The authorities quickly discovered that the child had spent most of her life in this appalling confinement and had never learned how to talk, walk or eat correctly. At age thirteen Genie was still wearing diapers when a social worker discovered her.
Genie’s rehabilitation team included graduate student Susan Curtiss and psychologist James Kent at UCLA. They described her as “a girl who weighed just fifty-nine pounds and moved with a strange “bunny walk.”” She often spat and was unable to straighten her arms and legs. Silent, incontinent - she urinated and defecated when she was stressed - and unable to chew, she initially seemed only able to recognize her own name and the word “sorry.” After assessing Genie's emotional and cognitive abilities, Kent described her as “the most profoundly damaged child I've ever seen … Genie's life is a wasteland.”
Scientists in the different fields of neuroscience, peditarics and linguistics petitioned to study her - seeing her a a unique opportunity to study brain and speech development. She placed into full time ‘care’.
Feral Children contradict the Rousseauian belief in ‘the noble savage’ and expose it as a fallacy. According to Linguist Eric Lenneberg, the critical period for language acquisition lasts until around age 12. After the onset of puberty, he argues, the organization of the brain becomes set and no longer able to learn and utilize language. Noam Chomsky also proposed that acquiring language could not be fully explained by teaching alone. Instead, children are born with a language acquisition device (LAD), an innate ability to understand the principles of language. Once exposed to language, the LAD allows children to learn the language at a remarkable pace. However, Psycho linguists and Cognitive scientists now agree, with their “Critical Period Hypothesis”, that if a child is not exposed to socialisation and language before a certain age the ability to learn language simply withers. Not only that, but the capacity for human exchange and the development ‘mirror neurons’ that we use to reflect emotions to each other, also ceases.
Genie at age thirteen, had missed the window for language acquisition, but more sadly for human empathy.
The subject of many scientific studies which have now come under ethical scrutiny, Genie’s sad story was fictionalised in the feature film Mockingbird Don’t Sing, in 2001, but has spawned little in the way of fiction, perhaps because her life is so unremittingly tragic. In 2008, an undercover reporter for ABC published a report that Genie lives, in a small private facility for mentally underdeveloped adults. In 2016, The Guardian stated that she lived in a state nursing home in the state of California, and could only communicate using rudimentary sign language. Today, she may still be there, but her whereabouts have not been proven; if she is still alive, she would be 66 or 67 years old.
Like her German 19th century counterpart, “The Holy Fool” Kaspar Hauser (1812-1833), the dungeon the Genie was raised in, could never be escaped from.
Perhaps the only true story of Feral Children that has a remotely happy ending is that of Poto and Cabengo - the feral twins Grace and Virginia, born in 1970, who survived extreme parental neglect and isolation in rural San Diego, and who, as compensation, inhabited their own intimate, imaginary world of two, constructing their own invented language understood only by each other (Poto and Cabengo were their made-up names for each other).
At first it was assumed that the twins were mentally impaired, and their impoverished parents used this as an excuse to abandon them to the care of their silent, deaf, German grandmother who rarely spoke a word. Suffering years of neglect, starved of affection and of spoken engagement; left to feed themselves and fend for themselves in silence, with no contact with other children, no classes, no exposure to media or to the outside world, the twins failed to learn how to communicate in any known language. After they were discovered at age eight, it was assumed by linguists that their quickly-spoken, staccato ‘gibberish’ was a sign that they were, as their parents assumed, developmentally damaged. That was until two speech therapists in San Diego, discovered that Poto and Cabengo had invented a rich, eccentric and vast personal language – or Idioglossia.
Neurologically, the contact they’d had with each other, permitted the growth of a unique language and a profound empathy, well before the cut-off time for acquiring language in the development of the brain. Unlike nearly all Feral Children, the twins were not neurologically damaged, and unlike the film, Nel, in which Nel is alone after the death of her twin sister, and has no-one left to understand their Idioglossia, the Poto and Cabengo went onto school, both learned English ‘at speed’ and are still alive.
The true story was turned into a book by Alejandra Vanessa, it also inspired an award-winning play by Mark Handley and the Oscar winning film Nell, starring and produced by Jodie Foster.
When we think about Feral Children, and think they belong in the wild places of the past, we could perhaps remind ourselves that even in our highly technologized modern world, there are still wildernesses between people. Wildernesses of neglect, that unwanted children can fall into. Feral children emerge from failed states, broken societies, from fragmented communities, from parents who are addicts, and from collapsed family structures.
The Feral Children are still among us, and their existence is not to be romanticised, rather we might perhaps take their lives as a warning and as a reminder, that even in our planned, managerial care societies, there are dark corners where the people we have banished and neglected, who we fear as we fear wild animals, survive in spite of us, somehow.
Donald Trump is of course an example of a feral child.