Feral Children, I am Wolf

Romuls and Remus: raised by wolves?


While researching for I Am Wolf I also looked into the world of feral children and the claims made about children raised by animals. Of course there are many examples in literature which tend to be very unrealistic portrayals, often seeing the child as a hero, for example Romulus and Remus the founders of Rome, Tarzan becoming an iconic hero of stage and screen and Mowgi in Jungle Book.


Click on picture below for a real story:

I Am Wolf is intended as a more realistic portayal as these children never really learn language or essentially to become human again. I read a lot of disturbing psychological papers for this story and really felt that what I was reading was about the plight of, to all intents and purposes, a captive animal. I suppose the way I show Volchitsa's decline in the story is akin to an animal in a zoo and I do use references to the behaviour of wolves, including the captive animal showing displacement behaviour to illustrate the parallels. The main essence of my story is that you become what you are by what you know and Volchitsa was raised and nurtured by wolve- these will always be her family.

And Amy the reporter in the story sent to tell Volchitsa's story asks the question: why do you want to make her human? She sees the connection Volchitsa has and the extract I included in a previous post about the last time she sees her, shows how she really feels about this poor child. Amy begins, through her research into wolves to undertsand the wild animal and herself becomes obsessed with this beautiful animal- that no one should cage.

There is a ton of information out there about feral children, and bear in mind that I used this as a way fo showing what is human and what is wolf and I suppose this is why I called the story I AM WOLF, which is what Volchitsa was. This story helps us to look at what is animal and what is human. And shouldn't we let animals be what they should be. Shouldn't all animals be free to realise what they are?

Here are some links of you're interested in further reading:

http://www.feralchildren.com/en/index.php This has heaps of information

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child Wikipedia- interesting!

http://brainsyoursmineours.blogspot.com/2009/03/feral-wild-children-raised-by-dogs.html