Russian police take feral girl into care

RUSSIAN police have taken into care a five-year-old girl who has been shut up in a flat in the company of cats and dogs for her entire life, police said yesterday.

The girl, who lived in the eastern Siberian city of Chita, could not speak Russian and acted like a dog when police took her into care.

“For five years, the girl was ‘brought up’ by several dogs and cats and had never been outside,” a police statement said.

“The unwashed girl was dressed in filthy clothes, had the clear attributes of an animal and jumped at people,” it said.

The flat had no heat, water or sewage system.

A police spokeswoman said the girl, known as Natasha, is being monitored by psychologists in an orphanage.

Her mother was being questioned but her father has not been found yet.

Despite sharing a three-room flat with her father, grandmother, grandfather and other relatives, the girl has not learned to speak, and makes only animal-like noises.

She laps her food from her plate like animals and cannot hold spoons or forks.

She appears to be about two-years-old, though her real age is five, refuses to eat with cutlery and has taken on many of the gestures of the animals with which she lived, police said.

“When carers leave the room, the girl jumps at the door and barks,” the police said.

The police said the apartment was searched after a tip-off.

The father was not in the flat when police found the girl, and his whereabouts are unknown.

The girl’s mother reportedly lives somewhere else with her three other children.

Feral children, the stuff of folklore all over the world, usually exhibit the behaviour of the animals with whom they have had closest contact.

The condition is known as the Mowgli Syndrome, after the fictional child from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book who was raised by wolves.

Such children have usually built strong ties with the animals with whom they lived and find the transition to normal human contact extremely traumatic.

The girl could understand Russian but could not speak it and tried to communicate through barking instead.

She was more comfortable with her animal companions than with her relatives.

She is being given medical and psychiatric treatment.

Police are treating the case as a criminal investigation into alleged child abuse.

In March, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev urged action on child abuse, saying 760,000 children were living in “socially hazardous conditions”.