History of the Wild Child

Living barefoot in the woods and hiding himself in the trees, 18-year-old fugitive Colton Harris-Moore, a.k.a. the "Barefoot Burglar," is making life miserable for the inhabitants of the islands north of Seattle, allegedly burglarizing homes, jacking boats, even stealing small airplanes and crash-landing them.

The teen has managed to elude police in Washington state for the past year and half.

"He's almost like a feral child," detective Ed Wallace, a spokesman for the Island County Sheriff's Office, told reporters.

But, as alienated, lost and unreachable as he might be, the daredevil teen is a far cry from truly "wild" children who have either lived in isolation from a very young age or in the company of animals in the wilderness.

"The case doesn't read at all like that of a feral child, except in the sense of 'feral' often used in English to mean wild," psychologist Douglas Candland, editor of Review of General Psychology, told Discovery News.

According to Candland, who has authored "Feral Children and Clever Animals: Reflections on Human Nature," there are some 4,000 situations of real human ferality for which some records exist, although adequate documentation is provided for only eight or so.

Often found in wilderness, often nurtured by animals, these deserted children are a far cry from their romanticized counterparts -- such as Kipling's Mowgli or Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle -- or their mythical progenitors Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of Rome, saved and suckled by a she-wolf.

All cases tell stories of human beings unfamiliar with human interaction and unable to speak intelligibly. It is a story of feral loneliness and difficult, if not impossible, recovery.

So goes the story of Peter, Victor, Kaspar, Kamala and Amala, just to name some of the most famous feral children.

Peter the Wild Boy was found wandering in 1725 in the woods of Hanover, Germany, "naked, dark-haired, tanned by constant exposure to the sun," as described in "Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children" by Michael Newton. He even went on to live for a time in London with King George I, but was forgotten when interest in him dropped. He spent the rest of his years munching onions and articulating only three words, "Peter" and "King George."

Victor of Aveyron, whose story was portrayed in the 1969 film "The Wild Child" by Francois Truffaut, was found in 1798 wandering naked and mute in the woods. He became a case study for medical student Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, but learned only a few words and died in Paris at the age of 40.

Eight-year-old Kamala and 18-month-old Amala, the wolf girls of India, were found in 1920 in a wolf den in the jungles of Midnapore. They were not related and appeared to have been taken by a female wolf on separate occasions. Amala died in 1921, while Kamala lived for another eight years, living in a orphanage where she developed a small vocabulary.

Kaspar Hauser, found wandering around the outskirts of Nuremberg in 1828, is perhaps the most famous and mysterious wild child of all time. Possibly locked for 13 years in a dark hole, he was eventually murdered in 1833, when he was about 21. Rumors begun circulating that the caged boy was a kidnapped German prince.

Tender and sad, disturbing and haunting, these stories of rejection and cross species sympathy have always fascinated people.

"Why are we interested? Our connection with animal life acknowledges that there is a continuum of behavior between ourselves and other living creatures. A natural question is what we human beings would be like without culture and civilization," Candland said.