CauCau, Newest of the Abandoned Children
Copyright ©2003 by Douglas K Candland, Editor, Review of General Psychology. All Rights Reserved.
On a chilly winter evening, a Tuesday in August 1948, the train arriving in Santiago, Chile, discharged a 12 year -old boy with his escort, who was carrying orders from the police in Los Riscos to take the boy to the Hospital San Vicente, where the attending physician would read the following:
At the asylum, he was baptized into the Roman Catholic faith and renamed Vicente. Cau Cau, as he had come to be called, as these were the boy's first words understood by his captors, was said to be one of three children of reportedly alcoholic and abusive parents, Sara and Antolin. It was also reported that he had been living without human companionship in a forest. His background was of interest as his upbringing mirrors that of other so-called 'feral' children, these perhaps reared by animals, most often reported to be wolves. The word 'feral' has been used in different ways — meaning wild and uncivilized, or reared without civilization, or, at times, reared by the civility of animals. It was thought that Cau Cau's physical and mental status, along with his development to come, might contribute something informative about the tangled skeins of nature and nurture to which human beings attribute their behavior.
The question of the relationship between nature and nature always underlays and motivates investigations of feral children. It was thought in 1800 that the rearing of the 'feral child', Victor of Aveyron, by the young Dr. Itard, would reveal whether human nature and thought is innate, or must be acquired through contact with other human beings and their culture. In the 1920s, the discovery of two girls in northeastern India who were thought to have been raised by wolves was expected to reveal, upon their civilizing, humankind's innate belief in God. Genie, the girl who spent her childhood in Los Angeles tied to a chair in an attic, was expected to reveal how language develops; perhaps whether we human beings are born with neural networks of grammatical syntax.
There are instructive differences between Cau Cau and Victor, the Indian wolf girls, Amala and Kamala, Genie — and the 450 or so other such reported cases of feral upbringing. For one, Cau Cau is alive, now in his 60s. For another, we are able to locate some historical records dating from 1948 and to examine the testimony of living persons regarding how Cau Cau's life has been spent — and altered — by his 'feral upbringing'.
Cau Cau's life story resembles that of another 'feral child' I met, the so-called Monkey Boy of Uganda, John. I spent a week with John and some members of his family and a film crew preparing a documentary for the BBC. According to John's testimony, corroborated by fellow villagers in the town of Bombo, Uganda, he was a child of physically abusive parents. One night, they argued and the house caught fire. John ran to the nearby woods for an unspecified period of time. According to him, 'monkeys' (probably vervets) helped him out by allowing him to accompany their groups and to eat the residue of foodstuffs they tossed away. As vervets scatter food and tolerate strangers, at least in the periphery of their groups, John's memory of monkeys may well be accurate, although whether he was consigned to forest-dwelling and, if so, for how long, remains uncertain.
The woman who found John told me that she had thought there was a leopard in the forest but saw it one day in a tree and recognized it was not. She sent her husband and other men to capture the creature. They did so, and when the being was brought to a shed attached to her house, she and others claim the creature was hirsute. "He had hair all over him," she told me, "except for his buttocks." I found this testimony intriguing, as it is so often reported by witnesses to discovered feral children, even though the claim seems unlikely.
