Children raised by wolves, monkeys and other animals

These are children who have supposedly been raised by animals: there are monkey boys, wolf girls, gazelle boys and even an ostrich boy. Click on the child's name to read more about that child. The information available varies greatly from child to child. Where the name is in bold, there is a considerable amount of information here.

Authenticity

Are any of these stories true? The evidence for many is virtually non-existent. Some, such as The Lobo Girl of Devil's River are quite possibly merely folk tales. In The Mother Wolf, the final chapter of his PhD thesis, Paul Williams questions whether any child has really been raised by animals. However, in May 2005, a nursing dog did retrieve an abandoned human baby and carry it to its litter of puppies.

In The Wolf Children: Fact or Fantasy?, Charles MacLean sets out to discover whether the best-known case of wolf children, that of Kamala and Amala, is true or a complete hoax.

Animal characteristics

Many children who've lived with animals tend to behave like their foster parents: they walk on all fours, make the same noises as the dogs, wolves or other hosts, and can bite and be aggressive. This provides confirmation that they certainly did spend their formative years in the company of animals. Oxana Malaya can be seen in the Optomen TV production, running around on all fours and barking like a dog.

Animal parents?

Certainly, it's true that some animals wouldn't make good parents. It's difficult to imagine a crocodile doing anything other than eat a human baby. But from an evolutionary perspective, babies are designed to be extremely cute, or they wouldn't be nurtured even by their own parents. (For more on cuteness and the "innate releasing mechanism", see Natures and Cultures of Cuteness by Gary Genosko.) Cases of cross-species nurturing among animals are common; so, perhaps, we shouldn't automatically dismiss tales of a monkey boy, wolf boy, wolf girl, or dog boy.

One modern example of an animal caring for a human baby is the Kenyan dog who, on finding an the abandoned human baby Angel in a forest, picked her up and carried her home to her own litter of puppies. There are many other documented cases of children throughout history being cared for by animals for a few hours or days.

Wolf children

There are a large number of wolf children in the list, in particular from India. One explanation is that women with young children or babies would leave their infants at the edge of a field while working, and wolves would emerge from the forest and steal them.

Specifically, it's believed that a she-wolf whose cubs have been killed (and this is the specific theory put forward in the sources for Kamala and Amala) might be attracted to human babies, her maternal instincts all-powerful.