Feral Child

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Natural child, terrible child
Not your mother's or your father's child
You're our child, screamin' wild...
...do you remember when we were in Africa?

—The Doors, "Wild Child"

The extreme end of No Social Skills—a Feral Child has lived isolated from human contact from a very young age, and has little or no experience of human care, loving or social behavior, and—crucially—human language. These individuals are not just bad at social interaction; they are so limited that they are effectively wild animals who happen to have human form. And not the friendly talking kind, either.

Characters who are raised by fictional animals are usually much better off than these kids: If A Wild Child was literally raised by animals, it will be painfully obvious that those animals were no substitute for real parents, with the child showing markedly animalistic behavior, such as a tendency to bite anyone who crosses their gaze wrong or who intrudes into their personal space, or never having learned to walk upright. Sometimes this can be played for comedy, with less harmful behaviors like inappropriate sniffing or choosing to "mark" territory.

In Real Life, "feral children" are a blessedly rare phenomenon, and almost always the result of parental abandonment, neglect, and/or abuse. What exactly happened to them while they were out of contact with normal human culture? Is their odd behavior caused by lack of social contact, or did they have pre-existing developmental problems already? In real life feral kids are almost never rehabilitated.

Growing up in a jungle can lead to a character becoming the very different Nature Hero or Jungle Princess. Compare with Raised by Orcs. Not to be confused with the 2008 film of the same name, which is actually about a Bratty Teenage Daughter.

Examples of Feral Child include:

Advertising

  • Some Honeycomb Cereal commercials were centered around the character Bernard, the Bee Boy that was raised by Bees. Here's his site. It is quite amusing.
  • A recent series of car commercials explores a lion-man, raised in the Serengeti by lions before being discovered by zoologists and brought to North America. However, the damage has been done—he seems to be completely feral. Then he sees a car in the parking lot of the research center...
  • There was an ad for cheese that had three men staring at the last cube of cheese on a party tray. The first two had little versions of their mothers appear on their shoulders and demand that they be polite and leave the cheese for somebody else, with the second mother asking, "were you raised by wolves?" The third guy had a wolf appear and howl at him. He happily ate the cheese and walked off, prompting the mothers to call him an animal.

Anime and Manga

  • Keenan (Ikuto) from Digimon Savers is a type of this... Only he slightly knows how to act around humans because Digimon act sociable to each other. He still uses Tarzan-like language though (even though Digimon speak flawless English/Japanese)).
  • The feral girl Sapphire from Pokémon Special fights wild Pokemon with her bare hands, has refined senses of sight, smell, and hearing, is a bit socially awkward (though she does have regular human contact), and even has fangs and claws. When she was introduced she actually had clothing she made out of leaves.
    • In Pokémon Diamond and Pearl Adventure, Professor Rowan deliberately had Hareta raised by Pokemon, with just enough human contact to learn to speak and wear clothes. As a result, Hareta can do several feats that humans normally can't, such as chewing through trees.
  • Wrath from the 2003 anime version of Fullmetal Alchemist lived alone in the wilds of an island.
  • One of the plays Maya performs in Glass Mask is an extended deconstruction of this trope. In The Forgotten Wilderness Maya takes the part of a girl who was raised by wolves, then later captured and used as a side-show attraction until taken in by a professor who wanted to restore her to humanity. This series itself naturally approaches the trope from the far end. Although Maya has no real trouble learning to move on all fours, the challenge is getting to the point where she appears wild, as in someone who's never been exposed to human body language, never mind social conventions.
  • Kouya from The Twelve Kingdoms was raised by a youma after his parents abandoned him during a famine. Until he was taken in by Atsuyu, he couldn't really speak.
  • Age of Heroic Age is a subversion: he acts a lot like a wild child, having no comprehension of manners, personal hygiene, numbers, etc. and spends a great deal of his time goofing off in the garden or finger painting. However, as it turns out, he was raised by none other than the Golden Tribe themselves, is one of the few characters who fully grasps the situation of the war, and makes some astonishingly mature decisions (given his usual behavior) throughout the series.

Comic Books

  • Karu-Sil, a member of the enemy Sinestro Corps in Green Lantern, qualifies for this trope, since she wound up with a pack of predators after her parents were killed in a minor tribal conflict. She assimilated to her new companions a little too well.
  • The French Graphic Novel Pyrénée is about a girl raised in the mountains by a bear.
  • Another French comic series, Sillage (Wake in English) begins with its heroine Nävis (Navee in English), the sole survivor from a wrecked spaceship, growing up wild with a big tiger-like companion on a jungle planet. The spinoff series Nävis (not yet translated into English) tells of her early childhood, when she was also being looked after by the ship's only surviving robot.
  • The Amphibian from Supreme Power. Her mother tried to drown the both of them after seeing her malformed baby, but the Amphibian took to life underwater pretty well, living there into her early 20s before ever being discovered. She's incapable of speech, but can communicate telepathically. She also responds to anything she preceives as threatening with violence. Oh, and, as you might've guessed, she doesn't wear any clothes.
  • Another aquatic example: the British comic character Fishboy is, as the name suggests, raised by fish and learns how to breathe underwater. Really.
  • The Black Condor is a human man who was raised by condors. Who taught him to fly (yes, without wings). And then he became a US Senator. I swear I'm not making this up.
  • Subverted by Teon AKA Primal from Generation Hope. He acts as if he's Hope's pet dog most of the time, rarely says anything but "fight", "flight", "eat", "mate", and "woof", and does horribly on intelligence tests, but then he aces them when she offers him a snack, and when his parents sue the X-Men for custody of him, he takes the stand and gives an eloquent speech convincing them to drop the suit. It turns out he had a normal human upbringing and was actually a computer geek before his mutation turned him into a being of pure instinct concerned primarily with survival and mating.

Film

  • François Truffaut's... The Wild Child.
  • The Feral Kid (credited as such) in Mad Max II.
  • The live action adaptation of The Flintstones: Bamm-Bamm Rubble was one of these, raised by wild mastadons.
  • The titular feral woman in The Woman, who gets kidnapped by a suburban family in an attempt to make her more "civilized".
  • In Nell Dr. Paley, who's never met Nell, erroneously thinks she is one of these, and Dr. Lovell is shown doing some research on them.

Literature

  • Hendrika the Baboon Woman from the Allan Quatermain novella Allan's Wife by H. Rider Haggard.
  • To a degree, Rickon Stark from A Song of Ice and Fire, as a consequence of losing his whole family, forming a mental bond with a borderline-feral Big Badass Wolf and having a amazon Wildling for a nanny.
  • Tarzan is the Trope Codifier and poster child of this.
  • As well as Mowgli from The Jungle Book.
  • Briefly mentioned in the Doctor Who Eighth Doctor Adventures novel The Crooked World. On a cartoon planet, Fitz accidentally causes a young woman who, being The Ingenue on a planet of characters fit for a children's cartoon, suffers from Virginity Makes You Stupid, to write to the Delivery Stork and ask for them to be brought a child. The stork, however, has trouble tracking him down, gets tired, and accidentally drops the baby in the jungle, but is reassured by the thought that the child will be raised by wolves.
  • The titular Firekeeper in the Firekeeper series, beginning with Through Wolf's Eyes. She's the only survivor of a group of colonists lead by the member of the royal family into some far distant wilderness, having been rescued and raised by large, easily man-like intelligence 'royal wolves'. Her conflict is how the king has lost all his other heirs and sent men east to search for survivors of the disastrous failure at colonization. They find her, with the proper hair color(red), the roughly proper age for it to have been possible for her to be his daughter, and her having his personal dagger (Which was a symbol of his rank/royalty), and take her away to 'civilization'. Ironically, however she isn't even related to the prince - she's the child of some lowly gardener.
  • The Thing from Gormenghast.
  • Big Alice Eyesore in The War Between the Pitiful Teachers and the Splendid Kids is raised by hyenas after her child psychologist parents forget/abandon (this troper doesn't remember which) her at a wild animal park and decide that the hyenas are better equipped to deal with Alice and her all-canine teeth. Her parents eventually return for her when she's about 11 or 13, but after learning that child psychology doesn't work on hyenas they abandon her for good at the horrible school where the story takes place. By the end of the book, Alice has been brought back from the dead (cryogenically frozen/coma?) and returned to her hyena family. She is the only kid who hasn't been forcibly aged or driven underground. She achieves a symbolic victory by climbing the highest tree in the park and declaring herself leader of her pack.
  • The title character in Roy Meyers' Dolphin Boy is raised by dolphins thanks to a whole string of ContrivedCoincidences. First of all he is born with the mutant ability to hold his breath for long periods of time and survive greater depths than normal humans, and then his parents are killed in an explosion that causes him to be blown into the water just as a pod of dolphins arrive...
    • Same idea, but pulled off much more realistically, in The Music of Dolphins by Karen Hesse.
  • Parodied in How to Be a Superhero, in which being raised by wild animals is given as one of the possible origins. The authors then present the story of a child raised by oysters, then reveal at the end that he drowned 20 years ago and the oysters never noticed.
  • The titular character from the short story Wolf Alice by Angela Carter. She is raised from infancy by wolves and captured by a hunter who kills her "mother", then given to a group of nuns who attempt to domesticate her. They eventually decide she cannot be integrated into society and instead send her to live with a mysterious werewolf/vampire called the Duke. Though she performs some basic human behaviour, she never learns to speak.
  • Ketrin, featuring a bisexual teenage feral child raised by lupinoids—who finds himself Taken for Granite and worshipped as a god by superstitious and very horny villagers.
  • One chapter in More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark titled "The Wolf Girl" tells of a Wild Child who was Raised by Wolves.
  • In the short novel The Pack, the mysterious new kid at the school was raised by wolves from a young age (note: not from birth. He had a human mother for several years prior to living with the wolves). He's learned to adapt well enough, but he can be extremely quirky and eccentric at times, and was a textbook example when he was first found.

Live-Action TV

Music

Newspaper Comics

  • In a few Garfield strips, Jon Arbuckle dates a woman who was raised by wolves. Although she usually seems to have assimilated well into human society, she does occasionally exhibit such behaviors as trying to gnaw off her own leg because her shoe is pinching her foot.
    • Garfield played with this trope at least one more time. The titular tabby climbed a tree and met a cat that had been raised by squirrels.
  • There is a GahanWilson cartoon about a boy abandoned by summer people and raised by squirrels.

Oral Tradition, Folklore, Myth and Legend

  • Older Than Dirt: Enkidu in The Epic of Gilgamesh lived in the wilderness without human contact. But he was already adult by the time Gilgamesh meets him. Enkidu is turned into something like a civilized man with sex and beer. Those Mesopotamians had their priorities straight.
  • In Classical Mythology, Atalanta was abandoned and nursed by a bear before hunters discovered her.
  • The American tall tale of Pecos Bill.
  • There's a tale (of unknown veracity) of an Egyptian Pharaoh who supposedly ordered two children to be raised without anyone speaking to them in order to see what language they would start speaking. Yeesh. Supposedly, they said the word "becos", which meant "bread" in another local language (Phrygian), but which sounded very similar to the sounds made by sheep nearby, which the infants could hear through the window.
  • Romulus and Remus were famously raised by a wolf. This did not impede their future career as the founders of Rome.

Tabletop Games

  • Leman Russ, primarch of the Space Wolves in Warhammer 40,000, was literally raised by wolves...wolves the size of horses.
    • The primarch of the Night Lords, Konrad Curze a.k.a. Night Haunter, wasn't raised by anything. He was not the most stable primarch, though, and grew up into a terrifying hybrid of his namesake and Batman.
    • Dark Angel primarch Lion El'Jonson spent the first ten years of his life alone in a jungle before being discovered by humans. He turned out as well-adjusted as the setting allows, if a bit taciturn and secretive. He never spoke of his experiences in the wild.
      • Though it was suggested in Gav Thorpe's Angel of Darkness that he grew paranoid from the experience.
  • Second edition Dungeons & Dragons had this in one of the splat-books as an option for some players.

Theatre

  • In RATZ, a reimagining of the Pied Piper fairytale, the town's problem is not actual rats but a whole gang of feral children, who communicate in their own language and hiss when startled. They also steal other children.

Video Games

  • Guy of Final Fantasy II. He speak beaver.
  • Gau of Final Fantasy VI was abandoned by his father at a very young age and had to survive alone on the Veldt. He speaks broken English, and usually moves around on all fours, but otherwise is never shown to have any trouble fitting in with the rest of the party.
    • Unfortunately, Gau's wild nature only really comes up in three places: his dialogue ("Gau! Gau!"), his in-battle specialty (Rage, which allows him to copy monsters' skills and abilities), and an optional cutscene where his father is finally found and the party does their best to clean up his manners and appearance. Gau's father doesn't recognize Gau, but does compliment him (he must have cleaned up nicely) and say that his "father must be proud". A Crowning Moment of Heartwarming ensues outside.
  • Baba from F-Zero, according to his backstory.

Web Comics

  • Gatamache from Amazoness!, who can't understand even basic verbal instructions.
  • The eponymous Dawn of Time is at least a partial example, having apparently been raised by a Neanderthal man.

Web Original

Western Animation

  • Donnie from The Wild Thornberrys.
  • Aqualad of Teen Titans was orphaned and basically fended for himself until he was about 12. Only through the intervention and guidance of a god-like figure kept him from going completely feral. He was also an Ichtyphobe: not a good thing to be when you spend your entire childhood in the ocean.
  • "Cub" from Little Bear is essentially a bear version of this, acting more like a wild animal then the other Funny Animal bears.

Real Life

  • Victor of Aveyron, France. Some people think he may have been autistic, though.
  • Amala and Kamala are possibly the most famous account, despite being ultimately revealed as a con.
  • Genie the Wild Child
  • Oxana Malaya Potentially qualifies for Woobie status as well.
    • Particularly when you realize that, according to this website, she met her father, the cause of her abandonment and upbringing with the dogs. To quote the article, "Several weeks ago, another distinctly canine trait showed itself. For the first time since her ordeal, she met her father, and she forgave him completely."
  • Danielle Crockett, whose mother is still insisting she loved and took care of the girl despite confining her to one room for the first seven years of her life, never teaching her even the most basic English.
  • There is a story that Frederick the Great wanted to find out if he could raise soldiers from birth, without motherly care. So he took some infants from their families and gave them to caretakers who were instructed not to cuddle or talk to them. All the babies died.
    • There's an experiment with baby monkeys where the monkeys were offered two "mothers": one which offered food, and one which was made of warmed terrycloth and offered comforting arms. Every single baby monkey consistently chose the mother's arms over the food—even if it meant they had to go hungry. I would easily believe those babies died, even if their basic physical needs were met.
  • There are many examples of allegedly "feral" children recovered from the wild in real life. However, it is virtually impossible to definitively say how long they have actually been living in the woods. Children raised in isolation demonstrate a lack of socialization that looks like autism or Asperger's syndrome—but there is also the suggestion some of these children may have had developmental problems before being abandoned.
    • The term "environmental autism" has been proposed for what happens to these children, particularly in Danielle Crockett's case. I don't think it's accepted medically though, partially due to the once-common practice of throwing out/abandoning family members who might be showing signs of mental illness.
  • The 18th century medical literature discussed several such feral children, most of whom never learned to speak, wear clothes or adapt to society and ended up in mental asylums. There are a few such "wolf children" in existence even today, ranging in age from a man in his 40s to a teenage girl. Most of them were orphaned children in Eastern European states which were part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics prior to its collapse in the 1990s. Some claim to have actually been raised by wild dogs or wolves in the woods. The good news is, the modern-day wolf children have learned language and adapted to life among people, even though the girl still refers to herself as a wolf not a human.
  • In 27 May 2009 , A 5-year-old Russian girl found in a filthy apartment imitating the cats and dogs. Officials said the girl had feral characteristics and barked like a dog, lapped food off a plate and seemed to have been "raised" by the animals. Following This news
  • There has been cases of parents locking their autistic children away from the world because they're embarassed by their lack of social skills. Because you know, being locked up for the entirety of your childhood is totally good for your social skills.
    • They probably wouldn't acquire social skills even if they weren't, and there is no danger of overload-induced anxiety that way.
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