Janer says the young boy would have projected his social needs on to the animals and imagined relationships with them. “When Pantoja says the fox laughed at him, or that he had to tell off the snake, he gives us a version of the true reality, what he believes happened – or how, at least, he explained the reality to himself,” Janer told me. “Marcos’s mind was desperate for social acceptance,” he told me, “so instead of understanding the animals’ presence as incentivised by the food, he thought they were trying to make friends.”
I continue to be perplexed as to why otherwise intelligent people deny the possibility of personality and social relations among other species, or that of interspecies communication. Then again this is just the mildest example in this story of people's capacity for being awful.
There’s generally a large pushback against over-anthropomorphization in the scientific community I think frequently to push back a bit on the public only focusing on the most charismatic animals, and in the general public especially when people are confronted with the meat industry.
The problem is that field researchers who study almost species (especially mammals) tend to differentiate personalities and a lot of human like traits.
Understandable, but caution doesn't validate his own alternative claims. I was already in s skeptical mod from the mention by another person in the article of the 'alpha wolf', a ethological concept which has been discredited for a while now but which refuses to die.
Certainly over-anthropomorphization can lead people to make foolish assumptions, but the notion that animal behavior is fundamentally different from our own rather than existing on some spectrum of cognitive complexity is not really scientific either.
Some scientists, perhaps. But it sure sounds to me like a "no true friend" argument. [1]
Of course one could define "friendship" in a way that only human friendship qualifies, but that is certainly not the common definition.
We have three dogs and three cats, and every day I see behavior and interactions among them that I can only describe as friendship. Yes, between the cats and the dogs too. I think anyone watching them would call them friends, at least by any everyday meaning of the word. [2]
Scientists don't get to redefine a word that means something else in common discourse. That's not how language works. Next thing you know, they will say Pluto is not a planet!
Oops, they did, some scientists anyway. But not the science team that sent New Horizons there and brought back better pictures and more information than we ever had before. They call it a planet. [3]
Yeah, I think that Rodríguez absolutely has the right of it here. Animal communication is "simple" in human terms, but is quite rich on its own terms. To anybody who spends quality time with animals in their own comfort zones, it is utterly damned obvious that many animals experience and are entirely competent at communicating love, friendship, curiosity, jealousy, covetousness, and many other thoughts/feelings -- and, also, that they are just as able to blur species boundaries as we are. There are varying levels of complexity to this: snakes are too simple-minded to have a sense of humour, for example, but foxes definitely do. Fox humour isn't the same as human humour, but when you anthropomorphize them, and they foxopomorphize you, there's enough overlap for an intersubjectively meaningful exchange to take place.
I think that science's unwillingness to acknowledge this has multiple roots.
The first is a religious relict of wanting to put Man at the centre of the universe. Descartes, deeply religious, believed that humans were the only beings endowed with a soul, and that therefore animals were necessarily mere automata. This became the default "scientific" dogma, to be considered true unless proven otherwise. But it really is just dogma, with no basis in either rationality or observation.
The second is the scientific requirement for experimental controls and reproducibility, which is easiest to do in a laboratory. If animals really were automata, running on instinct, then that would be fine. But they're (mostly) social creatures, formed through interaction as much as we are. If your understanding of human psychology was formed wholly through the observation of humans who spent their lives trapped in Skinner boxes, you'd form some rigorously incorrect notions of what humans are capable of. Ultimately, there's no way to to get a proper understanding of humans in a non-subjective capacity. Same goes for animals.
"If your understanding of human psychology was formed wholly through the observation of humans who spent their lives trapped in Skinner boxes, you'd form some rigorously incorrect notions of what humans are capable of."
My comment's a tangent, but I suspect that's a significant reason why social media is so ridiculously hard for people to healthily use.
You know, you are undoubtedly technically correct, but I really love the use of foxopomorphize. Something about it just so perfectly encapsulates the OP's point about foxes and humans sharing a joke across species boundaries, in the way that "alopecomorphize" does not. I say leave it.
Alopecomorphize suffers from the fact that nobody knows the ancient Greek word for fox. I had to look it up. (And I left the comment for other people like me, who might wonder.) You could put the whole thing into a more recognizable Latinate form, "vulpiformify", but then you completely lose the parallel to "anthropomorphize".
I doubt "arachnomorphize" would have the same issues, though.
Although I still prefer OP’s version, I do appreciate you leaving your comment, because there was a small part of me that did wonder what the correct version of foxomorphize was, and now I don’t have to. Also, points for “vulpiformify” as a mid-grade poor man’s alopecomorphize.
Heheh -- I'm almost as much as a pedant as you! :-) I actually did realise that "op" went with "anthro", and agonised for a bit over whether to include it or do something that was more technically correct. Eventually decided that this would sacrifice comprehensibility for correctness, and that it was actually okay to make a somewhat whimsical point with whimsical language. But, yes, you're entirely correct.
> Descartes, deeply religious, believed that humans were the only beings endowed with a soul, and that therefore animals were necessarily mere automata.
Note that the belief that animals do not have a soul is relatively recent in Christianity -- it originated in roughly the 18th or 19th century around the time of the enlightenment. And still, not all Christians or Christian thinkers espouse this view.
> This became the default "scientific" dogma, to be considered true unless proven otherwise.
I would argue that instead of taking the cue from recent Christian thought, science owes this view to a strict materialist worldview arising out of 18th century philosophy, which underpins most of its inquiry and rules out non-material hypotheses a priori. Prominent atheist scientists regularly praise materialism as the enabler of successful science.
> But it really is just dogma, with no basis in either rationality or observation.
> it is utterly damned obvious that many animals experience and are entirely competent at communicating love, friendship, curiosity, jealousy, covetousness, and many other thoughts/feelings
I have definitely observed such sentience in cats and even crows, and many other examples are apparent in numberous animal videos on YouTube etc.
As a muslim I have to believe, and belief is knowledge, therefore I know animals speak and some humans are given ability to speak their language, below is a citing from the Quran where it says animals speak, this only works if you belive that God has said it, it's not a proof to you who disregard it that a human wrote it and who reagard other humanly text's on the subject to be true. anyway .....
And Solomon inherited David. He said, "O people, we have been taught the language of birds, and we have been given from all things. Indeed, this is evident bounty." And gathered for Solomon were his soldiers of the jinn and men and birds, and they were [marching] in rows. Until, when they came upon the valley of the ants, an ant said, "O ants, enter your dwellings that you not be crushed by Solomon and his soldiers while they perceive not." So [Solomon] smiled, amused at her speech, and said, "My Lord, enable me to be grateful for Your favor which You have bestowed upon me and upon my parents and to do righteousness of which You approve. And admit me by Your mercy into [the ranks of] Your righteous servants." nd he took attendance of the birds and said, "Why do I not see the hoopoe - or is he among the absent? I will surely punish him with a severe punishment or slaughter him unless he brings me clear authorization." But the hoopoe stayed not long and said, "I have encompassed [in knowledge] that which you have not encompassed, and I have come to you from Sheba with certain news. Indeed, I found [there] a woman ruling them, and she has been given of all things, and she has a great throne. I found her and her people prostrating to the sun instead of Allah, and Satan has made their deeds pleasing to them and averted them from [His] way, so they are not guided, [And] so they do not prostrate to Allah, who brings forth what is hidden within the heavens and the earth and knows what you conceal and what you declare - Allah - there is no deity except Him, Lord of the Great Throne."
So here is the prophet of God Suleyman whom God taught to understand animals. Yes animals speak. Once a dog told me there's electricity in the wire i was about to test by barking and I knew what he meant beacause i was thinking of the task, because that was the tast at hand, and so i decided to go up there and double check ,and yes i had switched the live wire and the zero wire and was putting a switch on the negative and that didn't turn it off, so he barked, and i listened, how did i know that's what he meant, because i knew. anyway i came back looked at him he didn't bark, and the switch was turned off cutting of the electricity and i didn't burn my fingers. no the dog didn't speak bosnian, that is such a human thing to say. Scientists say ants have ears and other oragans in place for talking and listening but they are deaf and don't talk they talk through chemicals, sure, when i clap my hands all of the little ants run away, and those who were sleeping wake up and go, well some don't care much for it , they're lazy waking up, they probably think fuck you im sleepy kill me, i don't kill them i like them, i try not to kill them they are creatures of Allah, like all other creatures.
Going back to the message, the Ant recognizes who Suleyman is, refers to him by name, and therefore saves her people, i mean saves her ants from being stomped on by horses and humans and Suleyman laughs at her words, not laugh like a mean laugh, but a honest one. Later on the bird is clearly in the service of the prophet of God who was also a king, and the bird went and came back and told the prophet there's a queen who and her people pray to the sun instead of God. the bird know's Allah, the bird clearly knew the prophet of Allah , the bird knows Satan, and the bird knows sun, surely the bird knows its a bird. people are retarded, i don't mean jurnalists here, here i mean scientists, most of them. I've seen a deer mom on the side o...
I think this is one of the consequences of Carnism[1]. For most people, it's a lot harder to eat or exploit someone with a personality and rich emotional life, than something that has no feelings or desires. This creates all sorts of cognitive distortions and biases.
A Dog saved my life, he barked, and I knew I had misplaced the live wire and the zero wire when installing a breaker, which I was about to test by getting close to the wire and then the Dog barked, I looked at him, and he reasured me. Then I went up there at the beginning of the wires where i plugged it in and voila, I did have them swapped. The dog knew, and I knew what he meant, he could have merely said ummm, in human language, and that would have mean't something. I came back and he didn't say atythinkg, i tested the wire and I didn't burn my firngers or got electricuted. Now you standing next to us not knowing anything about electricity, which the dog might have had, you would say i'm lying, just like you will say now. there are no proofs in life, just a belief.
I think it's interesting to understand how feral children/adults adapt into society, as this gives a glimpse of what people are actually capable of learning in extreme niche cases.
I had done a fair bit of research on this topic in the past, out of sheer curiosity. Mostly to see determine what animalistic instincts are retained, if any at all, and how well someone can acclimate learning a language like English in different age brackets. Also to determine what the fine line between what human/animal instincts /intuition actually were. As you get older, it becomes much more difficult to learn new things, due to new stigmas associated with things you had learned previously. You have to unlearn just as much as you have to learn (e.g. smarter everyday, riding bike backwards). I would watch videos on this topic, gauging effectiveness of speech information rate VS years of learning based on how long someone has lived in animalistic captivity.
I compared this with people who had been born without vision or sight growing up, or if it was lost later in life. Whether learning to speak without ever hearing a word spoken was possible. Extreme examples would be things like Helen Keller, amongst others. Using niche cases like these is one of the best ways to validate a theory, as there are less unknowns and its in a more controlled environment. Its qualitative research over quantitative
On the other end of the spectrum, I would research things on child prodigies. People who were austic savants and prodigies in music, or were off the scale in what was considered average.
On another spectrum would be prisoners of war, during WWII and the effects of solitary confinement / deprived senses for extended periods of time and its effect on human psychology. I wanted to compare the effects of PTSD studies and how this compares to feral humans / PTSD research here.
The research was mostly just my obsession over optimization of learning patterns & discovery of learning antipatterns. I wanted to validate what was truly effective and what was not, based on actual research with extreme examples, and narrowing it to down what I personally found works for me, and basing it on different personality traits found in myer-briggs/disc/etc.
I don't even remember all the impliciations of this research I did. I would read psychology papers/books on these topics and compare it with things in DSM. Learn about linguistics, etc. Spent 2 months interested on this given topic. I narrowed it down to 2 distinctive methods of thinking, with potential subsystems inside of those. The first being fast, e.g. recognizing someone you've seen before, simulated mostly by sensory information. The latter being triggered as a result, based on "slower" iterative thought processes.
And I would test to see the limitations of expanding the "slower" approach by seeing how much information I could cram in short term, e.g. how many words could I memorize short term with a memory palace. It was only like 10 words/locations at best, for one given type of application. Meaning I could remember at most, 10 todolists for a given day if I really made an attempt, but it became extremely difficult to do.
With this system of (faster) thinking, I was curious how someone who lacks one sensory resource (sight) and is able to compensate elsewhere (sound). People who are blind generally process audio information at a much higher rate, if you ever watch a programmers NVDA speech program the number of words it spits out is incomprensible to most people to understand.
I would conduct studies on myself, seeing if I could apply these same principles, in speedwatching youtube videos with captions, podcasts, audiobooks, etc. I would be obsessed with learning about speedreading, shorthand notetaking, incremental reading, among other things. I ran tests on myself t...
What clickbait nonsense. Do people really believe this? Are people this naive?
He was raised by humans at least to the age of 7. Then he was "abandoned" and he lived by "himself" in heavily populated spain? A few miles from cordoba, madrid and other spanish cities? He wasn't raised by wolves. He lived near wolves. Using this logic, everyone in spain was "raised by wolves".
Aren't journalists supposed to be skeptical? Aren't extraordinary claims supposed to demand extraordinary evidence?
This article is on par with history channel's aliens built pyramids.
I walked through central park when I was younger. I guess that means I was raised by squirrels.
I especially doubt so much the anecdote about the she-wolf that fed him like Mowgli (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNcBAI6iOn0). That's just what people want to hear and is totally in tune with the guy that seeks social acceptance.
Not to mention that people are in strong demand with "nature is so cool", and "human are evil" narratives where it totally fits.
Yeah. It's obvious that these claims are lies or at the very least exaggerated. And if they aren't lies, then we should be demanding real evidence. I don't get why people are downvoting me. Of all places, you would think that HN would be where skepticism reigns supreme.
That's not how skepticism works. A cursory search reveals that his case is quite well-attested to since the early 1970s, and the verifiable facts are not in dispute. What happened when he was alone in the wilderness is not verifiable, so "I won't believe it without evidence!" is a hollow and useless bellow. There are many situations in which evidence will never be available -- there were no webcams set up to observe wolf-child interactions in the mountains of Spain in the 1950s -- but that doesn't mean its untrue. A skeptical mind, in such cases, needs to rely on other faculties rather than complain about a lack of evidence.
I agree the lack of evidence doesn't mean it's untrue. But it doesn't mean it's true either. So here we have to believe the story of a man. Some people do, some don't...
This is a quite well known story in Spain. It made the news at a time when everything to watch on TV was the same news program, so everybody talked about it. The general belief is that his story is indeed exaggerated, but there is no consensus if he really believes all of it or is exaggerating on purpose, or maybe he exaggerated at the time because they wanted a better story and he was just a child and it is too late to know what really happened.
However, calling people naive and comparing yourself with him because you have been in Central Park is not going get you many upvotes. Expecting otherwise is naiver than believing the raised-by-wolves story word by word.
Rural and urban worlds were much more isolated then than now. Only a few people had cars and the roads were very bad. All distances were much more wider then.
It seems that he was not only tolerated, but also feeded by wolves occasionally. He played, sleeped and gave food also to wolves for many years.
hah, I also thought it was a clickbait article like all others, but for the reason on the other side of the extreme. This writer was a sceptic, actually I don't mind him not believing it as much as I minded using this guy to tell everyone else's opinion, such as your own, including his own indirectly, instead of just telling me what was so funny that the snake was laughing and what did she say. So that I can decide for my self, or I don't even have to decide, it the theme of the article is his growing up with the animals and talking, the subject isn't the ex president of spain, the other people, their opinions, because he really didn't live with the people, so therefore they're irrelevant, they're relevant to this story as much as Australians are relevant, because he didn't live with them either. Scope, scope.
I would definitely not say "raised". He lived, and interacted with, humans until he was 7, which is around the age you enter school. At 7, I suspect the average human is far more intellectually advanced than the average grown wolf, so I very much doubt that there was much "raising" going on.
I doubt most modern 7 year olds can forage for food effectively and provide effective shelter for themselve etc. So, he could have learned some extremely valuable skills for living in the wild from interacting with wolves. IMO, a reasonable proxy for being raised by.
Personally, I find his story extremely unlikely, but taken at face value it does not seem to be impossible.
44 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadI continue to be perplexed as to why otherwise intelligent people deny the possibility of personality and social relations among other species, or that of interspecies communication. Then again this is just the mildest example in this story of people's capacity for being awful.
The word "com-pan-ion" literally means sharing food together.
The problem is that field researchers who study almost species (especially mammals) tend to differentiate personalities and a lot of human like traits.
https://io9.gizmodo.com/why-everything-you-know-about-wolf-p... has a good summary of the rise and fall of this animal behavior theory.
Certainly over-anthropomorphization can lead people to make foolish assumptions, but the notion that animal behavior is fundamentally different from our own rather than existing on some spectrum of cognitive complexity is not really scientific either.
Of course one could define "friendship" in a way that only human friendship qualifies, but that is certainly not the common definition.
We have three dogs and three cats, and every day I see behavior and interactions among them that I can only describe as friendship. Yes, between the cats and the dogs too. I think anyone watching them would call them friends, at least by any everyday meaning of the word. [2]
Scientists don't get to redefine a word that means something else in common discourse. That's not how language works. Next thing you know, they will say Pluto is not a planet!
Oops, they did, some scientists anyway. But not the science team that sent New Horizons there and brought back better pictures and more information than we ever had before. They call it a planet. [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship#In_animals
[3] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/pluto-rsquo-s-sec... (Full article is behind a paywall, but the subtitle has the relevant quote.)
I think that science's unwillingness to acknowledge this has multiple roots.
The first is a religious relict of wanting to put Man at the centre of the universe. Descartes, deeply religious, believed that humans were the only beings endowed with a soul, and that therefore animals were necessarily mere automata. This became the default "scientific" dogma, to be considered true unless proven otherwise. But it really is just dogma, with no basis in either rationality or observation.
The second is the scientific requirement for experimental controls and reproducibility, which is easiest to do in a laboratory. If animals really were automata, running on instinct, then that would be fine. But they're (mostly) social creatures, formed through interaction as much as we are. If your understanding of human psychology was formed wholly through the observation of humans who spent their lives trapped in Skinner boxes, you'd form some rigorously incorrect notions of what humans are capable of. Ultimately, there's no way to to get a proper understanding of humans in a non-subjective capacity. Same goes for animals.
My comment's a tangent, but I suspect that's a significant reason why social media is so ridiculously hard for people to healthily use.
The op is actually part of the word for human, anthrop·os.
Substituting "fox" in for "human", you'd get "alopecomorphize".
I doubt "arachnomorphize" would have the same issues, though.
Note that the belief that animals do not have a soul is relatively recent in Christianity -- it originated in roughly the 18th or 19th century around the time of the enlightenment. And still, not all Christians or Christian thinkers espouse this view.
> This became the default "scientific" dogma, to be considered true unless proven otherwise.
I would argue that instead of taking the cue from recent Christian thought, science owes this view to a strict materialist worldview arising out of 18th century philosophy, which underpins most of its inquiry and rules out non-material hypotheses a priori. Prominent atheist scientists regularly praise materialism as the enabler of successful science.
> But it really is just dogma, with no basis in either rationality or observation.
Indeed.
I have definitely observed such sentience in cats and even crows, and many other examples are apparent in numberous animal videos on YouTube etc.
And Solomon inherited David. He said, "O people, we have been taught the language of birds, and we have been given from all things. Indeed, this is evident bounty." And gathered for Solomon were his soldiers of the jinn and men and birds, and they were [marching] in rows. Until, when they came upon the valley of the ants, an ant said, "O ants, enter your dwellings that you not be crushed by Solomon and his soldiers while they perceive not." So [Solomon] smiled, amused at her speech, and said, "My Lord, enable me to be grateful for Your favor which You have bestowed upon me and upon my parents and to do righteousness of which You approve. And admit me by Your mercy into [the ranks of] Your righteous servants." nd he took attendance of the birds and said, "Why do I not see the hoopoe - or is he among the absent? I will surely punish him with a severe punishment or slaughter him unless he brings me clear authorization." But the hoopoe stayed not long and said, "I have encompassed [in knowledge] that which you have not encompassed, and I have come to you from Sheba with certain news. Indeed, I found [there] a woman ruling them, and she has been given of all things, and she has a great throne. I found her and her people prostrating to the sun instead of Allah, and Satan has made their deeds pleasing to them and averted them from [His] way, so they are not guided, [And] so they do not prostrate to Allah, who brings forth what is hidden within the heavens and the earth and knows what you conceal and what you declare - Allah - there is no deity except Him, Lord of the Great Throne."
So here is the prophet of God Suleyman whom God taught to understand animals. Yes animals speak. Once a dog told me there's electricity in the wire i was about to test by barking and I knew what he meant beacause i was thinking of the task, because that was the tast at hand, and so i decided to go up there and double check ,and yes i had switched the live wire and the zero wire and was putting a switch on the negative and that didn't turn it off, so he barked, and i listened, how did i know that's what he meant, because i knew. anyway i came back looked at him he didn't bark, and the switch was turned off cutting of the electricity and i didn't burn my fingers. no the dog didn't speak bosnian, that is such a human thing to say. Scientists say ants have ears and other oragans in place for talking and listening but they are deaf and don't talk they talk through chemicals, sure, when i clap my hands all of the little ants run away, and those who were sleeping wake up and go, well some don't care much for it , they're lazy waking up, they probably think fuck you im sleepy kill me, i don't kill them i like them, i try not to kill them they are creatures of Allah, like all other creatures. Going back to the message, the Ant recognizes who Suleyman is, refers to him by name, and therefore saves her people, i mean saves her ants from being stomped on by horses and humans and Suleyman laughs at her words, not laugh like a mean laugh, but a honest one. Later on the bird is clearly in the service of the prophet of God who was also a king, and the bird went and came back and told the prophet there's a queen who and her people pray to the sun instead of God. the bird know's Allah, the bird clearly knew the prophet of Allah , the bird knows Satan, and the bird knows sun, surely the bird knows its a bird. people are retarded, i don't mean jurnalists here, here i mean scientists, most of them. I've seen a deer mom on the side o...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnism
I had done a fair bit of research on this topic in the past, out of sheer curiosity. Mostly to see determine what animalistic instincts are retained, if any at all, and how well someone can acclimate learning a language like English in different age brackets. Also to determine what the fine line between what human/animal instincts /intuition actually were. As you get older, it becomes much more difficult to learn new things, due to new stigmas associated with things you had learned previously. You have to unlearn just as much as you have to learn (e.g. smarter everyday, riding bike backwards). I would watch videos on this topic, gauging effectiveness of speech information rate VS years of learning based on how long someone has lived in animalistic captivity.
I compared this with people who had been born without vision or sight growing up, or if it was lost later in life. Whether learning to speak without ever hearing a word spoken was possible. Extreme examples would be things like Helen Keller, amongst others. Using niche cases like these is one of the best ways to validate a theory, as there are less unknowns and its in a more controlled environment. Its qualitative research over quantitative
On the other end of the spectrum, I would research things on child prodigies. People who were austic savants and prodigies in music, or were off the scale in what was considered average.
On another spectrum would be prisoners of war, during WWII and the effects of solitary confinement / deprived senses for extended periods of time and its effect on human psychology. I wanted to compare the effects of PTSD studies and how this compares to feral humans / PTSD research here.
------------------------------------------------------------------
The research was mostly just my obsession over optimization of learning patterns & discovery of learning antipatterns. I wanted to validate what was truly effective and what was not, based on actual research with extreme examples, and narrowing it to down what I personally found works for me, and basing it on different personality traits found in myer-briggs/disc/etc.
I don't even remember all the impliciations of this research I did. I would read psychology papers/books on these topics and compare it with things in DSM. Learn about linguistics, etc. Spent 2 months interested on this given topic. I narrowed it down to 2 distinctive methods of thinking, with potential subsystems inside of those. The first being fast, e.g. recognizing someone you've seen before, simulated mostly by sensory information. The latter being triggered as a result, based on "slower" iterative thought processes.
And I would test to see the limitations of expanding the "slower" approach by seeing how much information I could cram in short term, e.g. how many words could I memorize short term with a memory palace. It was only like 10 words/locations at best, for one given type of application. Meaning I could remember at most, 10 todolists for a given day if I really made an attempt, but it became extremely difficult to do.
With this system of (faster) thinking, I was curious how someone who lacks one sensory resource (sight) and is able to compensate elsewhere (sound). People who are blind generally process audio information at a much higher rate, if you ever watch a programmers NVDA speech program the number of words it spits out is incomprensible to most people to understand.
------------------------------------------------------------------
I would conduct studies on myself, seeing if I could apply these same principles, in speedwatching youtube videos with captions, podcasts, audiobooks, etc. I would be obsessed with learning about speedreading, shorthand notetaking, incremental reading, among other things. I ran tests on myself t...
He was raised by humans at least to the age of 7. Then he was "abandoned" and he lived by "himself" in heavily populated spain? A few miles from cordoba, madrid and other spanish cities? He wasn't raised by wolves. He lived near wolves. Using this logic, everyone in spain was "raised by wolves".
Aren't journalists supposed to be skeptical? Aren't extraordinary claims supposed to demand extraordinary evidence?
This article is on par with history channel's aliens built pyramids.
I walked through central park when I was younger. I guess that means I was raised by squirrels.
Not to mention that people are in strong demand with "nature is so cool", and "human are evil" narratives where it totally fits.
However, calling people naive and comparing yourself with him because you have been in Central Park is not going get you many upvotes. Expecting otherwise is naiver than believing the raised-by-wolves story word by word.
It seems that he was not only tolerated, but also feeded by wolves occasionally. He played, sleeped and gave food also to wolves for many years.
Personally, I find his story extremely unlikely, but taken at face value it does not seem to be impossible.
Psychologists seemed to agree on the authenticity of his story and there has been similar other cases.
What's maybe the hardest thing is the cold, during the night. Unless he stayed in the warmth of the den, during those times
No he FUCKing didn't.
Generally these tales come from the piss poor way people deal with mental illness.
I understand how incredibly poor communities struggle to deal with such issues but the fact HN plays along is where it is disgusting.
If you want a mythical story to have fun with stick with Richard Hammond being "gassed" this week.
It's more fun, and doesn't make fun of mental illness.