'JUNGLE' KID LIVED WITH THE MONKEYS
India’s shocking real-life Mowgli tale
A group of lumberjacks working in a remote area of India made a discovery right out of a storybook when they rescued an 8-year-old girl who had been raised by a troop of monkeys.
The child was found walking on all fours and screeching at humans like a simian when government officials, alerted by the woodsmen, found her two months ago in the Bahraich region near the Nepal border.
The girl was nearly naked, unable to talk like a human, and had wounds on her elbows and legs — but she appeared to be living “comfortably” with the animals, according to authorities.
“She was terrified of us. She could not speak or hear properly. She was surrounded by three monkeys,” Inspector Ram Avtar told Cover Asia Press.
“She looked weak and was very hungry. We gave her some food to eat. She looked miserable. If we hadn’t rescued her, she could have been eaten by other animals.”
Rescuers soon dubbed the child “Mowgli girl,” after the boy in Rudyard Kipling’s “The Jungle Book” who had been raised by wolves.
The girl appeared to have been abandoned in the wilderness by her parents, Avtar said.
When she was brought back to civilization and taken to a hospi- tal, she had trouble adjusting, he added. She acted with feral violence and even ate her food off the floor.
Video posted by the UK’s Mirror shows her thrashing across a hospital bed as she screeches like a monkey.
“When she was admitted here, she was scared of us and she was always [behaving] like animals, like monkeys,” chief medical officer Dr. Dinesh Singh told CAP.
“We took care of her, bathed her, fed her and cleaned her. She was suffering from malnutrition. She might have eaten what animals did.
“She gets angry sometimes, and we have to calm her down.”
The youngster eventually will be sent to the government’s childprotection office, doctors said.
Officials are trying to locate the girl’s family — and figure out how long she had been alone in the woods.
Officials said she has taken a lot of steps toward transitioning back into the human world during her two-month hospital stay. Among other things, she has made improvements in eating food more like a typical human being.
“She has marks on her skin, looks like she has lived with animals for quite some time. Now she is better and healthy, showing improvement,” Dr. Singh said.