'Feral dog' child found in Russia

STUNNED cops have discovered a five-year-old "Mowgli" girl who barks like a dog, laps up her food and walks on all fours.
Feral Natasha cannot speak and experts fear her family treated her like one of their pets.

She lived in filthy conditions in the same home as her parents and grandparents in the Siberian city of Chita, Russia.

One neighbor said: "They never let her out, we didn't know she existed.

"They walked the dogs — they have three really vicious and angry ones — but we never saw this child."

The girl, physically underdeveloped and more like a two-year-old, was not registered with local doctors or hospitals.

Natasha is now under close observation in a local social rehabilitation center.

Specialists are shocked at the way she jumps on people and plays dog games yet they say she is not mentally retarded, just starved of love and attention from humans.

Chief of the center Nina Yemelchugova said: "When I went out of the room, she jumped at the door and started barking, not just mewing or something, but barking.

"She eats well, she's got a good appetite but she can't behave at the table, she throws away the spoon and laps up food from the plate."

Natasha shuns the company of other children and gets nervous when she hears unexpected noises.

Local police chief Larisa Popova said officers entered the flat on Monday after a tip off from neighbors.

"We had to fight to get this girl away," she said.

Her parents were not there but the dogs sought to protect her.

"The child was living in absolute filthy conditions, the flat smells awful. There were a lot of animals, dogs and cats, and the girl was living with them.

"When we went into the flat we were almost knocked over by the stink."

Natasha was wearing torn and soiled clothes.

Yekaterina Novikova, who lives nearby, said: "These neighbors are unsociable, they only come out at night or early in the morning to avoid meeting with other locals and they never open the door."



The mother — who has three other children living at another address — was arrested after going to police following local TV coverage of the girl being taken into care. She is now under interrogation.

Experts hope Natasha can recover with intensive education. She showed delight when an art teacher drew a picture of a flower.

The parents could face around three years in jail, according to Russian media reports.

This is the latest of a number of cases of feral children in the former Soviet Union. Neglected by their parents, these youngsters sought love and solace from animals, usually dogs.

Psychologists — who call the phenomenon Mowgli Syndrome — have blamed the social dislocation and economic woes which followed the break-up of the USSR.
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