21st Century Children Raised by Wild Animals

3 stories of kids raised by wild animals

At least 1 of the children may still be out there; because he escaped within 24 hours after he was discovered…

Source: Dateline Zero

In September of this year, a news story emerged of a youngster being found after living in the woods in Germany. The kid spoke English, and authorities at first had no idea how the lad came to live in the woods in Germany. This gained some interest on blogs and discussion boards of stories of children being raised by wild animals. Was the boy raised by wolves or bears?

Well, turns out he was raised by his father. The two moved from one place to the next for five years, always living in tents and small huts all over Europe. German police said that the boy was 17, and in good health. Police spokeswoman Miriam Tauchmann told MSNBC that the kids is “not like a wild man or anything like that. Physically and mentally, everything is OK with him.”

The teenager’s father had died. The teen buried his father in a shallow grave, and wandered with his tent and backpack until he found Berlin.

While this story ended up not involving a small child raised by wild animals, there have been other such tales. Some turned out to be utter or crap, or horrid cases of exploitation — such as a pair of girls touted by a missionary in India as “raised by wolves,” who were eventually revealed to be part of a scam exploiting two mentally and physically disabled children.

But there are a few stories of children raised by wild animals that appear to be true. Here are three such tales.

Just as a heads-up: the stories aren’t at all like the romantic, sweet, sentimental tales offered up by Disney movies or children’s books.

Romania’s Traian Caldarar

Found in 2002 eating the carcass of a dog, Traian Caldarar lived in the forests of Transylvania from ages four to seven. Traian grew up in an abusive household, with his mother abandoning him shortly after his fourth birthday in order to flee her husband. Traian disappeared from the house soon after, and lived in a cardboard box in the Romanian forests, where at least one wild dog in the area cared for him over the next three years.

Traian’s mother identified her son during a television broadcast announcing his discovery in the wild. In the months following his re-entry into society, Traian quickly lost many of his animal-like traits, including his unusual manner of moving around. He soon learned several social niceties, including the idea of sharing, suggesting that Traian will continue to make leaps toward rejoining human society.

21st Century Children Raised by Wild AnimalsA Russian Boy Raised as Bird

This is one of the stranger stories. In a bizarre social experiment, a Russian mother turned her home into an aviary. Her apartment was filled with birdcages, and her young boy, found in 2008 at the age of seven, communicated only with the various birds, chirping and flapping his arms like wings to obtain his mother’s attention. The Russian newspaper Pravda stated in their initial report:

A boy lived with his mother in a 2-room apartment full of cages with feed and droppings. She had her own domestic birds and fed wild ones. The woman neither beat him nor left him without food. She just never talked to him.

After his removal from the house, he only chirped when spoken to. The mother relinquished care of the child to the government, where he was initially committed to an asylum, but later moved to a Russian rehabilitation center.

Read the rest of this post at Dateline Zero…