One thing the article didn’t mention was a documentary that was aired on the Life network a few months ago. I believe it was called “Wild Child” and cited cases of feral children. One story was of a girl in Russia who is now in her early 20’s I believe - she was homeless from an early age, abandoned by her parents, and managed to fend for herself living in an abandoned building with a pack of wild dogs. She told of how the dogs would bring and share food with her. By the time she was discovered by care workers, her behaviour was much like others cited in the column - walking on all fours, growling, howling, shaking herself off if wet in a doglike fashion. She has enough vocabulary skills now to converse and they interviewed her in this documentary. Did anyone else see it?
Whoops. Link to column.
I just wanted to say that this line from the article:
…has never failed to crack me up.
I think I’ve seen the program, and I think you are thinking of Oxana Malaya. (She’s from Ukraine, not Russia, incidentally - I remembered her as being from Russia, too.) Wikipedia has a short article on her story, and there’s much more out there if you want to Google.
Unfortunately I wouldn’t be surprised if there had been more children in similar circumstances in the xUSSR - the social and economic chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union turned a lot of bad family stories into horrid family stories. We just know about Oxana because she survived, she was eventually rescued, and her story was publicized.