Topic > Essay on Feral Children - 1133

Feral children are children raised with minimal, if any, human contact. They may have been cared for by animals or somehow survived on their own in the wilderness. They are normally lost, stolen or abandoned in childhood and then, years later, discovered, captured and collected by humans. The known cases of feral children are of great scientific interest. They constitute a sort of zero degree of human development and teach us what we would have been without the support of human beings, suddenly show the fragility of our animalism and reveal the precarious root of our human life. In terms of language, wild children only know the mimicry and sounds made by the animals they lived with, especially those of the families who hosted them (Melson & Fine (2006). Their ability to learn a language upon their return to human the company is