Peace Crane by Hilary Taylor

Peace Crane by Hilary Taylor
Picture by Justin Wyatt
To read Hilary's story buy this special book...

This magical story has a touch of the supernatural. When an injured crane is found and nursed, something happens, something magical and inspiring...

Gentle Footprints launched- AS SEEN ON TV

Gentle Footprints was officially launched Fri June 4th at the Hay Festival with guest speaker Virginia McKenna and some of the authors


Buy from Bridge House Publishing by clicking on the link BUY:

BUY





Virginia McKenna at Hay Launch

Virginia McKenna at Hay Launch

Animal Anthology To Raise Funds for Born Free

Bridge House Publishing announce new book coming Spring 2010. For more about Bridge House please see their website.
This book is the annual charity book for Born Free...if you want to get involved with promoting and selling this book- email me!

www.bridgehousepublishing.co.uk


Visit the Born Free Website to find out more about their valuable work...

Visit the Born Free Website to find out more about their valuable work...
KEEP WILDLIFE IN THE WILD

Thursday, 28 January 2010

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

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