- MOSCOW -- A Mowgli-like wild
boy who appears to have been raised by a dog since he was three months
old has been discovered living in a remote part of Siberia seven years
after he was abandoned by his parents.
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- Andrei Tolstyk, now seven, was found by social workers
who wondered why the boy had not enrolled at his local school in the beautiful
Siberian region of Altai.
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- Deprived of human contact for so long, Andrei could not
talk and had adopted many dog-like traits including walking on all fours,
biting people, sniffing his food before he ate it and general feral behaviour.
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- Andrei, like Rudyard Kipling's fictional Mowgli in The
Jungle Book, had spent almost his entire youth in the company of animals.
According to the local press, his very existence had been forgotten. His
mother left home when he was just three months old, entrusting Andrei's
care to his alcoholic, invalid father who also appears to have abandoned
the boy soon afterwards and drifted away.
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- The hamlet of Bespalovskoya, where the family lived,
was so sparsely populated and the house so remote that the parents' absence
went unnoticed by the few other inhabitants. Instead, Andrei reportedly
forged a close bond with the only other living thing around, the family
guard dog, which somehow helped him survive and grow up.
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- Doctors say Andrei was born with speech and hearing problems
but that his wayward parents made no effort with him before their departure.
Known as the "dog boy" by some in the Russian media, he has now
been moved to a shelter for orphans in a nearby town where he is being
encouraged to mix with other children.
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- When he first arrived at the shelter, staff told the
Russian news agency RIA-Novosti that he was afraid of people, behaved aggressively
and erratically and continued to sniff all his food before eating it. They
were, however, able to communicate him using basic sign language. Two weeks
after his arrival they say he began to walk on two legs and has since mastered
the art of eating with a spoon, making his own bed and playing with a ball.
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- The other orphans are reported to be suspicious of the
boy they call "wild" but Andrei is said to have struck up a friendship
with a little girl with whom he communicates using sign language.
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- Doctors, paediatricians and psychologists are currently
trying to work out whether Andrei can be taught normal human behaviour.
If the answer is yes he will be transferred to another children's home;
otherwise he will be dispatched to a specialised boarding school. Police
are hunting for his parents, who are likely to face charges of neglect
and endangerment.
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- Andrei Tolstyk's is not the first case of a "feral
child" in Russia. In 1998, police near Moscow rescued Ivan Mishukov,
then aged six, from a pack of wild dogs with which he had lived for two
years. Ivan had left the family home when he was four to get away from
his mother and her abusive alcoholic boyfriend. He took to begging and
won the dogs' trust by offering them scraps of food. In return, they protected
him, from the cold and from ill-wishers, and made him their pack leader.
Police finally managed to separate the boy from the dogs by leaving bait
for the pack in a restaurant kitchen.
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- There have, however, been a number of "feral child"
hoaxes. The website FeralChildren.com website lists some far-fetched cases
- among them are the "The Wild Boy of Burundi", "The Delphos
Wolf Girl", and "the Syrian gazelle-boy".
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- © 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=547689
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