Feral children

I want to try something new on this blog, so in this article, instead of a programming topic, I'll talk about something almost arbitrary that caught my attention earlier this year.

Do you remember those fictional stories of children like Mowgli and Tarzan, who were raised in the wild by animals? Well, I learnt that there's some truth to them. There have indeed been children who lived in the wild in the midst of animals, isolated from other humans. They are called feral children, and there have been numerous reports of them in human history. Some of these reports, understandably, are disputed, yet some are authentic. I'm going to narrate two interesting examples of the latter from recent history.

The first is of a 19th century Indian boy, who is said to be the inspiration for the character Mowgli in the (original) Jungle Book. His story is preserved in several writings from around that time, the most comprehensive being, as I found, a short biography titled Sanichar: The Wolf-Boy of India. The biography was published in 1902 by someone named George C Ferris and is based on an account shared by a missionary who oversaw the orphanage in which the boy later lived. Let me now proceed with his story.

A group of hunters were chasing a wolf in a forest in India when they observed a strange human-like creature follow the wolf into hiding in a cave. After debating within themselves regarding the creature and then consulting with local authorities, they decided to return to the forest to capture the creature to determine what it was. When they succeeded at that, they discovered that the creature was indeed a human—a boy, in fact, presumably not older than eight years. Following the advice of the local authorities, they handed the boy over to a missionary orphanage in 1867.^[1]

The missionaries of the orphanage named the wild boy "Sanichar", meaning "Saturday", as he had arrived at the orphanage on that day. They sought to teach him how to function in human society, so that he could grow up to make a living for himself. But that proved very difficult, as his time in the wild, however long, had left its mark on him. He was tough, hard of hearing and able to utter only unintelligible sounds. He walked on four limbs—his forearms and knees, in particular. He sniffed his food before consuming it, ate raw meat and chewed on bones like a canine. The first time they covered him with clothes, he pulled them off and tore them up forcefully. Further, he was restless and couldn't be left unsupervised.

Over time, he grew docile and learnt to walk on his feet, eat cooked food, wear clothes and stay still before a camera. However, he never learnt to speak, and he remained impaired. For this reason, the missionaries allowed him to spend the rest of his life at the orphanage. He died in 1895, shortly after the death of a fellow orphan friend.

I didn't find anything definitive on how he ended up living in a wolf den in the wild. One legend during his time was that he may have been snatched by wolves as an infant—for that was a common occurrence in India—but then a broody wolf in the pack nursed him as a cub, thus preventing the others from eating him. The idea of a wolf nursing a human infant sounds like fantasy. However, I will state here that there are attested cases of one animal looking after the infant of another species. An example that comes to mind is a young female leopard briefly protecting a baby baboon, as filmed in the National Geographic documentary, Eye of the Leopard. Another example is The Dodo's video of a hen raising peacocks. Further, it is well known that cuckoos lay their eggs in the nests of other bird species, so that their chicks get raised by the other species. In any case, I suppose the truth about Sanichar's origin remains a mystery, since the boy never learnt to articulate his story.

The second feral story I'll narrate is of a 20th-century Spanish boy named Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja. I found a lot more information about him than with Sanichar. For example, he is the subject of a PhD thesis and movie and the guest of several filmed interviews. All of this isn't surprising, since Marcos's case is even more recent, and, unlike Sanichar, he learnt to speak. In fact, judging by his Wikipedia page, he is still alive as of this writing.

His story begins in a village in the mountains of a post-civil-war Spain, where he lived as a child with his father and stepmother. The family was poor to the point that when he was about the age of seven his father gave him away to a goat owner, either by selling him or hiring him out. The goat owner in turn handed him over to an old goatherd who lived in a cave in the mountains of Sierra Morena. The goatherd used to tend to the owner's goats, and Marcos was to be his apprentice.

The old man hardly spoke to Marcos, but the boy learnt a few tips from him on surviving in the wilderness. For example, he observed from the man how to graze and milk the goats and how to hunt and roast rabbits. However, he didn't accompany the man for long, as one night, the man left the cave never to return. Thus began Marcos's life in isolation.

The boy spent the next decade or so in the mountains, having no contact with other humans, except for the goat owner's men who rarely visited to take some goat kids. Even then, they barely exchanged words with each other. During this time, he bonded with various animals, including a wolf pack, a fox and a snake. He learnt to mimic the sounds of different animals, and his cave became a refuge for some of them.

His isolation ended abruptly in 1965 when the Spanish Civil Guard (who were sort of like the police) discovered and captured him. By this time, he was a radically different person. He had lost most of his vocabulary and could barely communicate with his captors. He had thick calluses beneath his feet and struggled to walk upright on flat ground, after having walked barefoot for such a long time in the mountains. His hair was reaching his knees, and he wore a deer-skin jacket. His capture was a traumatic experience, and he attempted, albeit unsuccessfully, to escape back to the wild. You can imagine the fear he must have felt as strange armed men in uniform abducted him from his decade-long home.

His reintegration into society was also a challenge. He was placed in the custody of different charitable families at different periods until he ended up at a convent in Madrid. With the help of the families and the nuns at the convent, he gradually relearned language and picked up societal customs. It appears though that he never had a formal education or became literate. He was sadly often taken advantage of because of his naivety. On one occassion, an acquaintance invited him to the city of Majorca with the promise of greener pastures, only to rob him of his suitcase on arrival.

It was in Majorca, while working in the hospitality industry in 1975, that he met Gabriel Janer Manila, who interviewed him and later published a PhD thesis on the challenges of educating feral children, with Marcos as a case study—this being the same thesis I mentioned earlier. The thesis was published in ... well I'm inclined to say Spanish, but I think I read somewhere that it's Catalan instead. In any case, part of it has been translated to English by someone named Deborah Bonner in a book titled Marcos: Wild Child of Sierra Morena. It is this translation that I read, and it is the source of much of what I've presented here.

The book includes a transcription of Marcos's own oral account of his life, so I thought I'd conclude Marcos's story by sharing a few amusing quotes from there. Here we go:

One night, after a while, he [the old goatherd] said to me, he says: "When I close the [goat pen] door, go to the cave and wait for me, I'm going to get a rabbit." And I never saw him again. [...] I was afraid, because I could hear the sounds of so many animals; so the next day I got up and looked around everywhere, looked and looked but I couldn't find him. Then, seeing he wasn't coming, I took one of those cork bowls and went over to the pen to a goat that had very big udders and I wanted to do what he used to do, but I couldn't do it. I pulled and pulled and the goat kicked me and threw me flat on my back. [...] Then I saw a [goat] kid suckling [...] and I crept up really slowly and started to suckle at the other tit. But the male, the billygoat of the whole herd, saw me suckling at the goat, butted me with his horns and sent me rolling down the hill. I cried. I couldn't suckle.

And one day I lifted a rock, a big rock like this, big. I found a mouse's nest where the mouse was having babies, I didn't know that mice had babies, I thought they laid eggs. [...] I didn't know how to count, but now since I know how to count I know there were nine little mice. [...] I took my fingers and told each finger: This is a mouse, this is a mouse, this is a mouse, and said there's one mouse short for it to add up to two hands, and I would go to see them and knew if any mice were missing. I didn't know the name, that they were mice, just animals like the others. Maybe they weren't even mice, but I've seen mice since then and they were almost the same, but those were prettier, a different coat, more reddish.

In front of the Civil Guard barracks there were children, boys and girls who laughed when they saw my long hair: "The man from the Sierra! The man from the Sierra!" And the women. One woman who was there says to her little boy: "Look, if you don’t eat today the man from the Sierra will take you away." And I stared at them and was more afraid than the boy.

They [the Civil Guard] took me to a barber's. [...] when I sat in the chair the guards went over to the door and of all things the barber picked up a razor and started to sharpen it, so what did I think? That it was to cut my throat with, and I get up like this, climb up on to the chair and start to scream and throw myself at him, and the barber shouted: "He's going to kill me, he's going to kill me!" And the guards came. [...] They called a boy in from the street and asked him if he wanted his hair cut, and they cut it so I'd see what they were doing and like that they managed to cut my hair very short, like this, like my finger.

I [...] asked who lived there and they said it was the house of God [...] The first time I saw the priest in the church I thought he was God and asked him: "If you're God and I've been told you know everything, then you must also know where my father is." Then the priest started laughing.

I go to work, but I don't earn what I should be earning because I don't know how to put a price on things. Maybe I'll go to a hotel and they'll say: "How much do you want to earn?", and whatever they say is okay with me. But maybe someone who works less than me makes much more, and you've been working for two months and you buy a few clothes and it's all gone.

I'd like to work for myself, in a place that belonged to me. I'd like to have, for example, a mechanic's garage, because what I've liked the most, I love cars; to be able to get in a car and ride up and down; I don't drive but I'm sure I'd drive it like the best. But the only thing I want is to be able to get a good girl, to be able to make a bit of a home. If someone said to me: "Do you want fourteen million?" I'd say: "You can have your fourteen million."

This brings me to the end of this article.

I remember being speechless when I first learnt about these two cases of feral children, as I never would have imagined such wild tales to be real. These stories remind me of the fact that the world is a big place full of wonders. They also remind me to be grateful for certain blessings that I easily take for granted, like the blessing of a decent childhood and of speech. Alhamdulillah!

Thanks to my sister Taofeeqat for reviewing drafts of this.