Stories of Children Raised by Wolves

A tall tale of a little boy raised by a family of apes in the jungle.

There are quite a few of these stories and not all from ancient legends, but some from modern news reports as well.

Well, might some of these be true?

Can a human child truly be raised by an animal family and adopt their mannerisms?

Or is it possible that a very different phenomenon might be behind these reports?

We're going to look at feral children right now on Skeptoid.

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Feral Children.

Today we're going to open a book by Rudyard Kipling or Edgar Rice Burrows and read about that strange mythical beast we've heard about in tall tales.

Children raised by animals in the jungle. Perhaps lost or abandoned, these children are said to have learned all the ways of their animal families and lived with them in comfort.

And once returned to society, they seem unable or unwilling to learn to be human.

Since Romulus and Remus raised by wolves in Roman mythology, to nonfiction accounts of children being discovered even today having lived with monkeys,

Feral Children have always captured our imagination.

I'm going to start this episode with a bit of a spoiler because in the case of this subject matter, knowledge of what's actually going on gives a crucial context to the case studies we're going to talk about.

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