10 Unbelievable Details Surrounding Dina Sanichar, The Feral Boy Who Was Raised By Wolves

6 /10 A Dog’s Life

Sanchar was kept by the orphanage for over 20 years, as he never indeed grew out of his feral habits or mindset. He never learned to talk but seemed to understand language, about the level that a trained dog might have.

He also learned to use cups for drinking, albeit awkwardly and would tolerate clothes but never put them on by himself.

He did learn to walk on two feet, but it was awkward and shambling, unnatural looking. Until the end, he preferred to act like a wolf instead of a man.

5 /10 Lost Boys

Sanchar was not a one-off curiosity. There were other instances of wild children, particularly in India, which raised some concern about the parentage and protection services of the area.

Even throughout the early 1900s, more children were raised by all sorts of creatures from the forest, some even adopting the habits of wild chickens or had been mercifully spared by panthers and other predators. They all had similar actions and patterns to Sanchar.

4 /10 Feral Man’s Best Friend

Although Sanichar showed no interest in human bonds or learning basic human emotions – he never learned to smile or laugh – he did open up to another feral child taken in by the same orphanage.

The child came in young, and Sanichar seemed to recognize it for what it was, a being just like him that seemed unfit in its human body.

He eventually taught the child how to use a cup, one of the few human tricks he’d learned, but still communicated with the same canine grunts and barks, he knew when he was young.

3 /10 Talking With Animals

Sanchar never learned to speak, but he did know how to communicate.

He served as the first of many exciting studies where neuro-psychologists and scientists began to draw links between the brain states at different ages and what core functions develop the fastest during those times.

His strange case eventually led to many highly lauded works, including Syntactic Structures by Noam Chomsky, who opined that a child or group of human beings abandoned with no access even in the absence of a culture or education to language would make one up that they all understood.

It’s possible that Sanichar could talk to wolves or at least understand them better than a regular person.

2 /10 The Wrong Habit

Though Sanichar was around many people in his life, the only thing that he did and a human was smoke. He was introduced to smoking tobacco and did it constantly, becoming a chain smoker.

He died in 1895 of tuberculosis which was thought to have come on due to his smoking. The hunters who first found him smoked him out of the wolf den, and in the end, it was smoke that drove him to death.

1 /10 The Jungle Book

The strange life of Dina Sanichar reached author Rudyard Kipling, a writer, and researcher who lived in India and would come to pen The Jungle Book about Mowgli, the Indian child raised by wolves who could talk to animals.

This was later adapted into a famous Disney animated movie.

Though the real story is far more tragic and lacks the charms of singing, dancing bears, and orangutans, it still invites a sort of fantasy over the still untamed wilds of the world that are so close to us yet seem so far away.