The demons of physical pain are an interesting phenomenon. Although extremely annoying, uniquely irritating - they sometimes know how to guide a person through the expanses of memory, through the boulevards of remembrance and dig up words and sentences from some long-forgotten times, expressed or written down in some completely irrelevant places. One of the basic questions to which there is still no final, clearly defined answer is what defines us as humans.
Genetics says that we are the physical incarnation of the DNA record, psychology and sociology explain that it is about the influence of the programs that we download through our biological hardware and further process them through our software in our head, religions speak of the creation of an Almighty being according to "His image". One phenomenon that clashes a little with all these situations (and perhaps even supports some of them) is that of Feral Children, who from a very young age or as babies are left to die and then, by chance (or fate if you prefer), are "adopted" by animals, where they live, eat, behave and socialize just like the animals they move with, for example, they walk on all fours, bark, bite...
You may have heard from grandparents that in some village there was a child who was left to the bears or wolves, etc., Tsepenkov writes about the feral child "Mecho", and on the Internet you can find stories like the one about Oksana Malaya, the dog-woman. Oksana was found in the Ovidyopol region in southwestern Ukraine.
Her appearance would be typical of a girl from those areas. But Oksana is not a girl. She is not even human.
Oksana is a dog.
Born into a family from the bottom of the late Soviet reality, father and mother alcoholics but also pioneers of severe drug addiction in that region from Ukraine via the newly arrived "Afghan", heroin that was dragged by war veterans in the early eighties. Extremely cruel and raw, the pair of human-like scum left Oksana next to some grove, fortunately not having enough sociopathy to kill her, but in any case preferring the Horse to their eight-month-old daughter. From then until the early nineties, no one took an interest in Oksana's fate. Only the occasional chatter of the local people remained that they had heard from someone about a girl who moved on all fours, included in a pack of dogs.
This time the information was not an urban myth but reality. It is not known exactly how, but after several encounters with the girl who barked, howled, sniffed and urinated while raising her "paw", Oksana's return to homo-sapiens was organized, where she was caught after a big fight that also included biting. Not knowing what to do, people took her to the local home for mentally retarded children.
From then on, a painful epic of a person who had to go through a dramatic metamorphosis from a dog to a human began. And this in post-Soviet Ukraine. Over the years until adulthood, Oksana had a hard time getting used to life at home. The kennel became a common educational measure, and the neighborhood where Oksana constantly ran away from home became a magnet for people who wanted to see something unusual, to see something mythical. Ukrainian unfaithful Toms found her joining dog packs and overturning garbage cans, gnawing on bones and growling at them in an attempt to resist. Constantly returned to the home, over time Oksana began to learn to walk on two legs, somehow use her vocal apparatus to form words, and defecate in the toilet...
Oksana gained relative fame through a BBC documentary when she was about twenty years old when she was still more dog than human. Today Oksana is still more human than dog, lives somewhere in Ukraine, speaks with some difficulty in speech, gets angry when called "dog woman", in a display of sentimentality (a purely human trait) she wishes one day to find her mother who left her as a baby to die in the forest...and she has a boyfriend with whom she lives. Thousands of similar cases have been known since ancient times, documented and confirmed cases of child-dogs, child-chimpanzees, child-gorillas, child-kangaroos, child-bears, child-leopards...
The most famous case is perhaps that of Wild Peter from Hanover in the 18th century who spent about 12 years as an animal, before being found and being sensationally displayed at fairs, markets and village gatherings throughout Germany and England as the "man-beast". He gained great fame and in the 60 years he spent in society he learned three whole words.
The strangest thing is perhaps that these children are fed the same food that animals are fed, they walk around without clothes, exposed to all kinds of temperatures, and their voices and movements are indistinguishable from those of the animals they live with... and they survive and grow for years and years without any problems. These cases indicate a bridging of genetics, at least when it comes to the mental world, for man as a removable hard drive onto which a life program different from the one genetically reborn can be downloaded, deleted, and transferred again. Where does biological predestination end and where does the possibility of a completely new paradigm begin? What is the way to find a new path through the crossroads of fate, without the tragic games of life and without the cruelty of Chance?
These are the questions that make their way through the pain and remain in the memory for at least a few days, through the prism of vague empathy and the occasional stray tear...
(Roger Mortis, 160)
