A child, torn away from his mother for one reason or another and found himself in extreme conditions, is fed, as statistics show, not only by the most famous “adoptive parents” - wolves and bears, but, sometimes, leopards, antelopes, pigs and even birds.
And in all cases, without exception, children caught in the animal world learn the nature of new "dads" and "mothers", their habits and abilities.
He was running 50 miles per hour
Australia is predominantly a kangaroo country. Therefore, probably, "Mowgli" is found here most often in herds of marsupials. For example, one of the "marsupial children" in 1994 was caught by surprised hunters, finding him grazing with a family of 10 kangaroos 30 miles from the city of Diley Waters in Northern Australia.
“When we saw the boy in the headlights, we thought it was a kangaroo,” one of the hunters told reporters. - He looked, made sounds and jumped like a kangaroo. The animals obviously fed him, protected him, showed him how to survive on the prairie. When we tried to separate the boy from the herd, the kangaroos formed a circle around him and then began to attack us. In the end, we threw a rope over the child, pulled him into our jeep and left there as quickly as possible.
In the clinic where the kangaroo man was brought, he behaved like a trapped animal, ate only grass and leaves for several weeks, did not speak and did not understand what they were saying to him.
Several years ago, the Syrian media reported that an amazing boy was found while hunting gazelles in one of the remote northern regions of the country, who was running along with a herd of gazelles at speeds up to fifty miles per hour!
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The renowned anthropologist Jean-Claude Armen, who participated in the hunt, told about this: “The child moved in long leaps. I saw him approach the gazelles and lick their foreheads in gratitude."
Unfortunately, all attempts by the hunters to get to know the mysterious boy better ended in failure.
Another goat boy was caught in the highlands of Greece. He looked about nine years old. The hunters got the impression that the child had never had contact with people before.
“He tried to run away from us,” says Spyros Karras, and weighed no more than 35 kilograms, but was extremely strong and agile. When we finally managed with great difficulty, we were suddenly attacked by a huge goat-leader. He clearly considered this guy his own and fought for him with all his might. The goat broke the ribs of several of my friends and blew them. Therefore, to save our life, we had to shoot him."
According to Spyros, the boy screamed like crazy and tried to bite the hunter at that time, but he could not cope with the almost 100-kilogram Greek.
The child was sent to Athens and placed in an orphanage. The doctor of the institution Maria Alinas says that Billy, as the foundling was named, prefers to sleep under the bed and still walks on all fours. Over the years of his life with goats, the structure of his bones has changed so much that it is difficult for him to walk on two legs. The boy still prefers to eat grass, but is already beginning to like pizza.
“He bleats excitedly when he smells her,” says Maria. "Usually tries to run away, but not on the day the pizza is made."
In a herd of buffaloes
Another "Mowgli", raised by wild buffaloes, was found in a rainforest at the foot of Mount Nimba in the south of the Ivory Coast.
On that day, Forester John Nathan watched the herd of animals through binoculars. And suddenly his gaze was attracted to an unusual creature: it ran on all fours, then walked at a step, half-erect on two legs, like a monkey. But he did not have long hair, and his height was closer to that of a man.
As the forester approached the herd, the buffaloes began to leave. The strange creature also ran, while making sounds and screams that somehow resembled human ones.
The pursuit ended in failure that time. However, rumors about the buffalo man quickly spread around the area, and a real raid was organized behind the strange creature, which after two weeks of searching was crowned with success: the creature fell into skillfully placed nets.
“When we saw him at close range, we immediately realized that he was a man,” said the forester Mohamed Geylani after the hunt. “But we didn't know how to talk to him or how to touch him. Its long, pointed nails resembled the claws of a predator. He bared his teeth like a wild animal."
The local resident Segbe Sumahoro learned about the capture of the Mowgli. He turned to the foresters with a request to show him the caught creature. “Maybe this is my missing nephew,” he explained his request. "I need to see if he has scars on his right shoulder."
Of course, he was escorted to the place where the buffalo man was kept. The old man looked at him for a very long time and finally announced that it was indeed his nephew Mamadu. Then he told how 13 years ago his sister Mazebe went to wash clothes on the river. She put little Mamadu to sleep under a tree, and she went to the water. But when I returned to that tree after washing, I did not find my baby there.
Naturally, Mamadu himself could not say a word about what happened to him. He only bellowed and did not want to recognize his fellow tribesmen in people. When food was brought to him, the boy huddled in the corner of the room and trembled with fear.
True, gradually his contacts with people became mutual, Mamadu learned to eat with both hands and stopped hiding food. Today he occasionally even smiles at others.
The girl from … the barn
Unfortunately, today Mowgli children are increasingly found not in the forest or in the jungle, but next to us, in cities and villages. They come into view, as a rule, by pure chance and often only when irreversible changes in their physical development and psyche have already occurred.
So, the director of the Anshan Research Institute of Psychology in China told some time ago about the amazing fate of a girl named Xiang-Fen, who was sent by parents who were expecting the birth of their son, as soon as she no longer needed breast milk, to a “permanent residence” in a pigsty.
Little Xiang ate and slept in it for four years, pigs were the only living things with which she communicated.
The girl was accidentally discovered by a botany teacher from the regional center, when he was collecting plants for herbarium. In the foothills near the village, he saw several pigs, and among them a naked girl of about five years old, unimaginably dirty, who ran away from him on all fours, grunting and squealing.
The teacher reported what he saw to the party organs, and Xiang ended up in the Anshan Research Institute. Seeing a pig feeding piglets in a laboratory enclosure, the girl on all fours (she could not walk vertically) rushed to the pig, pushed the pig away and began to greedily suck milk, grunting with pleasure.
It took almost ten years before she learned to walk and spoke the first word. And today, as one of the Chinese newspapers recently reported, Xiang has a "tentatively human appearance."
In the fall of 2003, in one of the houses of the village of Goritsy, Ivanovo region, they found 3-year-old Anton, who behaved like a real cat: meowing, scratching, hissing, moving on all fours, rubbing his back against people's legs. Throughout the boy's short life, only a cat communicated with him, with which the child was locked by a 28-year-old parent - so as not to distract from drinking.
In the village of Zhulanovo, Solikamsk district of the Perm region, in July 2012, they found a girl who was brought up among cows in a barn. By the age of five, she cannot speak, but only hums.
Farmer parents did not send the child to kindergarten, but kept him with the animals. In winter, the girl did not go out, and she had nothing to wear - she practically has no clothes.
In the rehabilitation center, they found out that she does not know how to use cutlery, she prefers liquid food from food, mainly milk, which she drinks right over the edge of the pan. Now they are trying to teach the child the necessary human skills.
Three years earlier, in Volgograd, a seven-year-old baby was discovered who spoke only bird-like! The boy lived with his 31-year-old mother in a two-room apartment, which was completely filled with bird cages and stained with droppings.
The woman kept poultry for sale and fed the wild, as well as her child, with whom for some reason she did not communicate at all. Therefore, the boy was simply forced to learn the language of birds.
The representatives of the authorities, who removed the boy from the family, said that when they tried to talk to the baby, he only tweeted in response. At the same time, he waved his arms, imitating the flapping of bird wings.
In the nest of mountain eagles
However incredible it may seem to someone, children raised by birds are not so few. So, on one of the islands of Fiji, doctors today are trying to restore the human form to a man who grew up among chickens.
When his parents died, the grandfather locked the boy in the chicken coop and simply forgot about the existence of his grandson. Among chickens, the child spent several years, during which he almost did not communicate with people, adopting all their habits and habits from birds.
When, at last, the "chicken Mowgli" managed to escape from the poultry house, kind people took him to the hospital. But the doctors did not think of anything better than to transfer the allegedly possessed child to the staff of the mental hospital, in which he spent more than 20 years.
And only in 2004, doctors decided to pay closer attention to the unusual patient. The chicken man is now being handled by workers from several charities. As one of them, Elizabeth Clayton, says, a man imitates the behavior of chickens all the time - life among them left a deep imprint on his soul.
When the specialists just started working with him, he constantly tried to climb higher, imagining himself on the perch of a chicken coop, ate - as if he pecked, clucked and did not know how to walk - instead, he was jumping on his haunches, his arms out to the sides, like wings.
Despite this, the scientists managed to achieve significant results: in the end, the man learned to walk tolerably on his feet and articulate his native language.
Incidentally, this is not the first time that a person is raised by chickens. Several years ago, the media reported that a girl named Isabel had spent over 10 years in a chicken coop in Portugal.
Isabelle's mother suffered from mental illness and soon after giving birth locked the child in a chicken coop, where she fed her own daughter the same that she gave to birds. The neighbors knew very well that something was wrong in the family, but they did absolutely nothing, and only when the girl was 10 years old, the woman who lived in the same village took her and took her to the hospital.
The fiendish doctors refused to accept the strange patient, and the kind woman decided to keep the child with her. But she could not retrain the girl raised among chickens and turned to the media for help.
In the end, the girl was placed in an orphanage for disabled children.
An even more incredible birding story took place in the state of Colorado in the western United States. Here climbers in the Rocky Mountains noticed a little girl about ten years old on a steep slope.
“At first I thought it was a hallucination. Well, where could a child come from in the mountains? - recalled rock climber Jim Behman. “But my partner said he saw her too. The girl also noticed us and began to climb surprisingly quickly up on all fours, like a spider."
Back in the city, the climbers told the authorities about the child. A team of volunteers went to the mountains to find the girl. She was found sleeping on top of a cliff in a large nest of twigs and full of small animal bones.
When rescuers tried to take her out of the nest, three huge eagles swooped down and attacked people. To drive off the birds, they had to shoot flares into the air. The girl also fiercely fought off people: she screamed angrily and scratched herself with long nails. With great difficulty, they still managed to wrap her in a blanket, lower her downstairs and take her to Colorado Springs.
Here the child was placed in a children's medical center. Currently, the girl is still afraid of people, she sleeps only on the upper bookshelf, throws herself at mice, deftly catches them and eats them alive. Scientists believe that the girl was once carried away from someone's house by an eagle to feed her chicks. But, having got into the nest, for some reason she survived and then was raised by birds.
“Eagles have a very strong maternal feeling,” says ornithologist Feizheld. - There are cases when, instead of eating, they adopted little kids brought to the nest. But for the eagles to raise a human baby - such cases have not been known to science to this day …"