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Essay / Feral Children Essay - 1133
Feral children are children who grew up with minimal, if any, human contact. They may have been taken in by animals or survived on their own in the wild. Normally, they are lost, stolen or abandoned in childhood and then, years later, discovered, captured and collected by humans. Known cases of feral children are of great scientific interest. They constitute a sort of degree zero of human development and it teaches us what we would have been without the support of humans, therefore it shows the fragility of our animality, and reveals the precarious root of our human life. In terms of language, feral children only know mime and the sounds made by the animals they lived with, particularly those of their foster families (Melson & Fine (2006). Their ability to learn a language upon their return in humanity society is