Category: News and Views
Hi all,
Speaking of dogs (as someone did on another thread), it got me curious. Has anyone here read or seen in the past news stories about infants who were brought up by dogs? Apparently there has been a number of cases reported around the world where infants were put outside to fend for themselves and have literally ended up sleeping, playing and eating with packs of wild dogs. They even learnt how to communicate with the dogs.
I haven't seen any such stories when they've been on tV here but I was fascinated when I heard that it had been happening, so I ended up finding a few parts of documentaries on Youtube.
I was told that when such a story was featured on our 60 minutes, the girl (who was now a teenager) didn't want to be found and rehabilitated back to the human way of life.
And the reporter took this particular girl back to the pack of dogs, and they were so excited to see each other; they exchanged barks. When asked what the dogs said, the girl replied 'you will never know".
I just find these kinds of stories so fascinating. It really woke me up to the fact that all creatures great and small have their own unique language and we should never under estimate that.
wow... never heard of these, I'll have to check them out
Wow is right: bow wow!
I look on all this type of thing with a healthy sense of skepticism.
Maybe so, probably not.
Bob
/me barks hi to Rachel.
I'm with Bob on this one, totally.
I've heard of these before, I always wondered why it was always dogs and wolves, and
not Cows.
Then my buddy told me what it was like to be kidnapped and raised in a convent. Children
raised by cows just don't make the news like children raised by doggies do.
I believe I read about this in Psychology last year. But the article I read didn't say anything about the girl speaking to people, or that anyone tried to domesticate her. It sounds interesting, do you know how she learned to speak? From what I learned it's difficult to teach someone speech if he or she has been raised in a radically different environment. I'm thinking of Geanie, which I know is a different scenario but the same idea applies here.
Woe Leo, that's hilarious.
Bob
I've heard something similar about apes.
Hi Tough Sweetheart, No, I can't remember at what age these people were but I think in their early 20's. It probably would have taken longer but not impossible.
I remember my child development professor speaking about this a couple of times. I don't remember much about her specific examples (kinda makes me wonder how I got an A in there), but I remember one of them was this boy who grew up in the woods in French around the late 18th century. I found this on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_of_Aveyron
I'll look back through my notes and see if I can find anything from that lecture. This particular article doesn't say anything about him being raised by a specific animal, but I'm pretty sure I remember her giving an example of one raised by wolves.
There's a book on Bard about Victor from France.