"Savage Girls and Wild Boys" by Michael Newton

Kids raised by wolves? It happens, says an English academic. But the mute and bizarre children in these outlandish histories don't grow up to be Tarzan.

By Laura Miller

Feb 12, 2003 | If you visit the Capitoline Museums in Rome, you'll find them pretty quiet except for the little cluster of people gathered around the statue of Rome's mythological founders, the twins Romulus and Remus. What attracts the visitors isn't patriotism or historical interest, though, but the hypnotic weirdness of the 2,500-year-old bronze sculpture: It depicts a standing she-wolf with two human infants sitting under her belly, nursing from her dangling teats.

Romulus and Remus are two of the most famous legendary examples of feral children, the subject of Michael Newton's new book, "Savage Girls and Wild Boys." There are plenty more of them, too, from Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli ("The Jungle Books") to Tarzan. This is one of humanity's favorite fables, a tale of cross-species benevolence touched by fate. In stories, the abandoned child raised by wolves or bears or apes tends to come from exceptional, if not downright noble, stock, and in the wilderness he acquires the honest, pure, courageous spirit so lacking in his decadently civilized brothers. When he rejoins his own kind, it's usually to run a nation or take some other position of authority where his virtues can be admired by all.

That's a far cry from the fate of most real-life feral children. Yes, they do exist -- at least Newton thinks so, and his judgment seems sound enough -- even if their stories are clouded by mystery and doubt. The author opens his book with a contemporary example: Ivan, a Russian 4-year-old who in 1996 fled his mother's home for the streets, where he took up with a pack of stray dogs, trading scavenged and begged food for the animals' protection, companionship and bodily warmth during the long winter nights. The police had a hell of a time capturing him, since the dogs turned out to be far more committed to his safety than his own flesh and blood had been.

Though Ivan snapped and snarled, he had the advantage of those first four years among human beings and managed to rejoin society after two years on the streets. Less lucky were Kamala and Amala, two girls found living with a pack of wolves near a village in southwest India in the 1920s. India, according to John Lockwood Kipling (Rudyard's father), "is probably the cradle of wolf-child stories," and the more substantiated cases undermine the Tarzan myth in many ways.

Thrilling yarns about specimens of robust manly perfection honed by the challenges of jungle life notwithstanding, the reality of feral childhood always seems to involve hideous infestations of intestinal worms. The wild children are often girls, less valued offspring abandoned by poor families to die of exposure. Once captured, they inspire more pity and revulsion than respect. Withdrawn and indifferent to other people, Kamala and Amala were typical of feral children in that "they had no sense of humor, no sadness or curiosity or connection to others."

Most important, feral children don't speak. Although the roots of Newton's interest in the subject lie in a boyhood fascination with Mowgli and Tarzan, his book winds up being about what happens to children raised without, or with very little, human contact, particularly without language. In addition to boys and girls purportedly nurtured by wild animals, he includes the famous case of Caspar Hauser, who turned up on the streets of Nuremberg in 1828 after (as he explained once he learned to talk) 16 years spent imprisoned in a dark, hole-like dungeon, fed and watered by a silent, faceless keeper. And then there is Genie, a 13-year-old California girl who in 1970 was discovered to have been kept tied up alone her entire life.

Newton's broad definition of feral children makes for an uneasy mix; as the author himself points out, we partly envy the child who runs free and happily consorts with the wild creatures that the rest of us fear, while we can only pity the person reared in grotesque deprivation. But both kinds of children have been the object of intense scientific scrutiny and theories about what it means to be human. And the sad and stubborn truth is that, as much as raised-by-wolves children fascinate us, they can't tell us much, even if they can be taught to speak. The kind of reflection and articulation that finds something meaningful in an extreme experience doesn't exist in those who are "lacking history or progression, animals living in a perpetual and unchanging present tense." Instead, Newton focuses most of his attention on the men who studied these children.

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