feral children

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netrox

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I am often intrigued how children can be raised by wolves or primates and how some of them still want to keep their lives that way.

Is it wrong to take them out of their group?

FeralChildren.com | Feral children: isolated, confined, wild and wolf children

Sometimes I just think they're better off just living with their pack and letting them die with them. They lack social skills that humans are taught and they exhibit more serious mental problems when they were forced to intergrate with us. So, why should we force them to intergrate with us if they were fine the whole time with their pack?

I am talking about feral children raised by animals, not by confinement.
 
Hi, I dreampt of this last night so thought I should come back to this lonely thread and respond. I don't know that I have any of the answers you ask for, I suppose like many things in life, each case must be looked at individually.

The children who get locked up and caged in their homes is sickening, but this is not what you were hoping to chat about.

The children/people who grow up with animals, wolves in particular.....tough. It seems like a natural human thought that they should be integrated back into our society as human. But, are their lives really better off then? To take a child from all that they have known, the family of their pack, all the skills they have learned for survival, ways of communicating, none of it fits into our human world....I have more questions than answers but I thankyou for posting such a contraversial and interesting topic. I don't mind not having any answers, the beauty of this is in the questioning and looking at my own belief system.
 
Probably I will get a flame for this post...

I just disagree about children should to be raised by animals for a whole of their lives. They are humans, not creatures. Feral children should get some help and to be raised by humans in a right way.
 
No flaming from me, it is a difficult subject and there will be many opinions.
 
Netrox, u brought up a good point. If feral children are happy living among animals because that is the only way to know, then it becomes a sticky situation whether to remove them and try to assimiliate them into society or just leave them be. I honestly am not sure what I think about it. I just know that who is anyone to judge whether they are happy being left alone or not.
 
It is a tough question. The fact is, there is not a single feral child who has ever been completely and successfully integrated back into human society. They have always suffered numerous problems from the effort.
 
jillio said:
It is a tough question. The fact is, there is not a single feral child who has ever been completely and successfully integrated back into human society. They have always suffered numerous problems from the effort.
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I was going to make another post asking if there were any cases in which feral children have been successfully assimilated into human society. If there are no known cases, then I would think just leave them where they are.
 
shel90 said:
I was going to make another post asking if there were any cases in which feral children have been successfully assimilated into human society. If there are no known cases, then I would think just leave them where they are.
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The ones I know of have all ended up living an institutional life.
 
Moon-Child, thanks. :) Well, I hope I don't get a flame. :P
I just visited some links on FeralChildren.com | Feral children: isolated, confined, wild and wolf children. Now, I think I understand why they dislike/distrust humans at all (I am not said all of them are) cos of bad experiences of abusive/abandoned/etc, vile memories, seeing the cruelty of human race, and go on. They preferred to live with animal families or to be loner or whatever it is...

=/ Mmm... They really reminded me of the "anti-humanity people" on some websites, online journals, and forums... and etc etc...

Before I don't know about feral children (until now), I remembered I read some comments on somewhere else at forums some years ago. They said they wished they are an animal, so they could live in forest with animal families since they hated humans. Yeah, they had some issues... It was because of how wreck and cruel humans can be and etc etc. Also, it reminds me of a dog-lover wife, from Wife Swap show, who hated people. She refused to social with humans except her own family; a husband and a son.

As I am a fantasy writer and artist myself, I enjoy reading various fantasy, myths, science fictions, fictional histories, and so on. Until I was like fifteen, I noticed some bitter comments toward humans by "anti-humanity people". Their writings said they really wanted to be somebody else like an elf, a mermaid, vampire, werewolf, or others. They think those races are much better than humans. They did complain how much suck humans were, and they were stupid, and etc etc. Ironically, they failed to realize all fantasy characters are either a good or an evil like our race. More ironic, all fantasy characters do have human physical appearance, therefore they are a human, in my opinion.

Sighs. At nineteen of my age, I found a link is about anyone who interested to support human extention movement for many reasons. To me, I think it's so depressing to see humans don't like another humans... I guess humans are nothing more important than a huge rock hits the earth.

Now, this feral children have a sort of somewhat similar situations... I don't know what to say. =/ Only I can say I personally disagree about feral children should stay with animal families.

Mmm...
 
Wow!

I really do not know what to think of this.

This is something I will have to think about and learn more about before I can really say.

I will definitely keep tabs on this thread.
 
I don't know if the feral children should stay with the animal families for the simple reason is that feral children are humans, not animals even if they are mammals. They can become brothers or sisters in spirit to the animal families but not actually living with them. The feral children should try to get along with human people and living with human families as part of the normal family life. It is kind of like brainwashing from how they were grown up with animal families. I think feral children are abandoned or being throw away from their parents or other family members that they don't want to take care of children. It is sad if the feral children chose to live with the animal families instead of human families. :(
 
Bebonang said:
I don't know if the feral children should stay with the animal families for the simple reason is that feral children are humans, not animals even if they are mammals. They can become brothers or sisters in spirit to the animal families but not actually living with them. The feral children should try to get along with human people and living with human families as part of the normal family life. It is kind of like brainwashing from how they were grown up with animal families. I think feral children are abandoned or being throw away from their parents or other family members that they don't want to take care of children. It is sad if the feral children chose to live with the animal families instead of human families. :(
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I dont think they "choose" to live with animals. They had no choice when they were abandonded at a very young age and without language stimilation, their cognitive processing becomes extremely retarded (full of deficits that cannot be overcomed).
 
shel90 said:
I dont think they "choose" to live with animals. They had no choice when they were abandonded at a very young age and without language stimilation, their cognitive processing becomes extremely retarded (full of deficits that cannot be overcomed).
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Age do play a role on how their minds are wired.
 
Depends on state of the child while living with the animals. If the child seems well cared for (not malnourished) and poses no threat to others or themselves then let them.

But if the child is seriously ill malnourished and is extremely aggressive, then the child should be brought to socialize with us.
 
Dixie said:
Depends on state of the child while living with the animals. If the child seems well cared for (not malnourished) and poses no threat to others or themselves then let them.

But if the child is seriously ill malnourished and is extremely aggressive, then the child should be brought to socialize with us.
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The problem is...the ones that are seriously ill and extremely aggressive. Ends up living a life in a mental institution.
 
Babyblue said:
The problem is...the ones that are seriously ill and extremely aggressive. Ends up living a life in a mental institution.
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Yes, but place them in a synthesized environment that is similar to the one they were living in, but with a better diet, shelter, and of course access to human interaction on their terms, not ours. If they are put in a position to associate other people with positive things such as food, affection, shelter, etc, then they will eventually begin to interact with us, and who knows they may decide that living a human life is better than non-human life.

The problem is that we take these feral children from their 'safe' environment in a hostile manner which scares them and then like dogs taken off the street and thrown in a shelter literally shut down internally and lash out at caregivers because they feel threatened. They cower in the corner afraid to approach another human. It's their way of trying to 'survive' in their new environment because up to this point they have associated human with bad things and pain.

These feral children don't think about the past or what's going to happen next - they live in the moment and that's the greatest benefit really. Children are incredibly resilient which is why a lot of these feral children who were thrown out of their homes were able to adjust so well to life in the wild. They left a bad situation, found comfort in the jungle, and wish to remain their because the jungle despite its perils becomes their haven from abuse by their parents.

We can take the severely ill and malnourished in, and keep them, but we need to ensure that their adjustment is as painless as possible. If they lived in the jungles, then give them an enclosed space that is set up like a mini-jungle provided with shelter and regular food daily. A person can go in and just sit in a non-threatening way and let the child come to associate humans with good things and as they develop, you can teach the child that not all humans are bad, there are good humans and bad humans just like their jungle life there are good animals and bad animals.

If they seek companionship with an animal then give them companionship with a domesticated dog, or goat or whatever animal it is they lived or associated with the most. Being around an animal pack is their idea of family. When you remove them from the pack, you remove them from their comfort zone and their family and their structure and you place them in a strange environment with a strange pack, a strange language, and its sometimes just too much of an adjustment for them to handle.

But I've also noticed that many of these feral children who were captured and institutionalized died young. Much younger than they should have if they had been given a proper diet and medical care.
 
Funny how I found this thread in an external search through google.

I will say, in the context of feral children, that there is a reason why feral children don't integrate successfully into modern society. My feeling is because maybe they don't want to? By the time they are found, their worldview is set, cemented into place by the innate feeling of primalness, I don't know the word, but the sense that, "What I experience is the right way to be; this is how I am, this is what I see. If I like something to do, that's what I will do. If there is something I don't want to do, I'm not going to do it, period."

The thing you need to understand is that attempts to integrate such children into modern civilization involves breaking the freeness of the person's spirit enough to get them to focus and begin to shed their own beliefs, or lack thereof. It is just like bronco breaking, only in a mental sense.

These attempts fail, and these children die young because they are no longer happy. They may be no longer happy because they have to do things they may not want to do, especially a structured lifestyle where you have to do certain things at certain times. They don't see the point of it. I believe that because that's was what happened to me, as I was not found to be deaf until I was seven and a half. I had friends, but I couldn't communicate with them. I was just like I would have been 20,000 years ago, playing with kids wordlessly. I didn't know what Sesame Street was, I didn't know what Scooby Do or Lidsville was about. I didn't learn any of the things that kids were being taught through TV or peer interaction. But I fought teachers because I didn't want to be sitting at a desk all day. I didn't want to be told to do something. Because it was a little late, it took several years for me to calm down enough to the point that I could understand if I didn't keep up, I was going to get held back in school. In a way, I HATED it because I couldn't get to be me all the time.

Perhaps we need to consider the possibility that it is civilized people who are "wild, or nuts," and what we see in feral children or adults frighten us because that is who we are naturally. This living as "modern, civilized humans" in the past thousand years represents only a tiny fraction of our time span on Earth. As they say in financial circles, as fast as it goes up, must it come down. Our civilization is not sustainable in the long run. Our civilized manner based on the discovery of oil and technology is not normal, and will be but a temporary stage in our history of humankind.
 
Children become feral due to extreme lack of human contact since they were very young. I am not sure feral is the right word for you.
 
DeafCaroline said:
Children become feral due to extreme lack of human contact since they were very young. I am not sure feral is the right word for you.
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It's not, but I do have some of the characteristics of it within. It's perhaps a lighter shade of what would have happened had I gone longer without language.
 
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well, I think the wild child syndrome must have been common for kids before they were diagnosed as deaf. My mother told me I really scared her at times with my violent banging of head against walls and floors and apparently i was uncontrollable most of the time.

Because you were diagnosed much later, the wild child in you stayed and you know what? It's ok. It's ok to accept that about yourself and to live with this for the rest of your life. It would be far more difficult if you weren't able to acknowledge or accept this about yourself. As for feeling different from others, all solotaires feel that way. Very much so.
 
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