Life Among The Wolves: The Story Of The Wild Child

Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja, a man from Spain who lived in the middle of nature with wolves as his only company as a child after the Civil War, sums up his experience like this: “I feel that I have learned a lot from wolves and little from humans.”

His father was too poor to take care of him, so he sold him to a goat herder. But the goat shepherd died in the middle of the desert, leaving Marcos all alone when he was only seven years old.

No one would have thought that twelve years later the child would have survived, having grown up to be the strong 19-year-old man that Spanish law enforcement eventually found.

But Marcos felt that he could not adapt to society, and thought that the human world was too superficial. “People care about the clothes you wear and whether you look good or not.”

He could never understand why people complain so much when we have everything we really need to survive and be happy. As he says, he was happier with wolves because he learned to hunt and therefore he never went hungry.

The wolves were his only family: Marcos, the wild child

When Marcos was alone in the wilderness, he never thought a family would take him in. But what happened was that his family became a herd of wolves who decided to adopt him.

He began to feed his remains to the wolf cubs, which led the older wolves to start trusting him and treating him as one of them.

Contrary to what you might think, did not want Marcos to return to society. As a child, he was abused by his stepmother and neglected by his father. He experienced so much hatred, cruelty, hunger and poverty that he wanted nothing more to do with that world.

Anthropologist Gabriel Janer, who wrote his dissertation on the subject, noted that Marcos did not invent anything, but he tried to imagine a love that met his need for affection, which he did not receive as a child.

And the wolves were able to give it to him. Thanks to them, Marcos felt loved and as if someone cared about him, and that made him happy to live in nature.

When he thinks of the day when the  Spanish police found him and returned him to society, he does not know if it was a good or bad thing. From that moment on, the wild child began to live as a man, which in his opinion is more difficult than living with wolves.

The wild child begins to live in society

Returning to society meant doing potentially unwanted things, such as working to make money, buying food, feeling the pain of envy and anger, and being ridiculed by other people. According to Marcos, he did not have to deal with any of this from the wolves.

Since he had so little experience of living in society, people took advantage of his naivety. “I did not know or care what money was. I did not understand why you had to have money to eat an apple “, he says.

People suffer because of false needs, when most of us already have everything we need to live well. We are bombarded with fraudulent ads, which is partly to blame, but we are the ones who give them power by passively absorbing messages that others send us out of self-interest.

Lessons we can learn from the wisdom of the wild child

Marcos, the wild child, never understood why people complain so much in a world with such abundance. There is no need to hunt, our clothes are already made for us and ready to be bought, we have clean drinking water, and it is easy to find a roof to live under. So…?

Society tries to control us and manipulate us so that we do what they want us to do: consume. They tell us when we will wake up in the morning, how we will dress and what jobs we will have.

That is why we suffer. This de-naturalization of us as humans fills us with anxiety.

None of us want to know what it is like to live like Marcos did, but we would feel much better if we began to free ourselves from these ridiculous needs.

We should go easier and notice the abundance around us so that we can have clarity and avoid unnecessary suffering.