A Life Among Wolves: The Story Of A Wild Child

Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja is a man from Spain. He  lived among wolves in the middle of nature as a child after the Civil War. Ha n  sums up his experience like this: “I feel that I have learned a lot of wolves and little from the people.”

For twelve years of his young life, Marcos was responsible for his own survival, and he survived. He learned to hunt his own food, make his own clothes and live in a herd.

His father was too bad to take care of him. So he sold him to a shepherd. But the goat herder died in the middle of the desert, leaving Marcos alone, at the age of just seven years.

No one would have thought that this wild child, twelve years later, would have survived. He had become the strong 19-year-old man that Spanish law enforcement eventually found.

But Marcos felt he could not adapt to society. Ha n  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 among wolves because he learned to hunt and therefore never got hungry.

Wolves were his only family: Marcos, the wild child

When Marcos was alone in the desert, he never thought a family would come and take him. But what happened was that his family became a pack of wolves who decided to make him part of the pack.

He started feeding his crumbs to the cubs, which made the older wolves trust him and treat him like one of them.

Contrary to what you may think, Marcos did not want to return to society. As a child, he was abused by his grandmother and neglected by his father. He experienced so much hatred, cruelty, hunger and poverty that he no longer wanted to have anything to do with that world.

The “wild child” felt loved when he was among wolves and other animals. The fox, the rats and especially wolves, took care of him like no one had done before.

Anthropologist Gabriel Janer, who wrote his thesis on the matter, noted that Marcos did not invent anything, but he tried to imagine a love that meets his need for love that he did not get as a child.

And among wolves he could get it. Thanks to them, Marcos felt loved and cared for, and that made him happy to live in nature.

When he thinks of the day the Spanish police found him and returned him to the community, 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 harder than living among wolves.

The wild child begins to live in society among humans instead of among wolves

Returning to society meant doing potentially unwanted things, like working to make money, buying food, feeling the pain of envy and anger, and being ridiculed by other people. According to Marcos, he should not deal with any of it among wolves.

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

Society as we know it makes people believe that we need things that we really do not need.

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

Lessons we can learn from the wisdom of a wild child

Marcos, the wild child, never came to understand why people complain so much in a world of such abundance. There is no need to hunt, our clothes are already made 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 to do what they want us to do: consume. They tell us when we should wake up, how we should dress and what jobs we should have.

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

Marcos says he does not feel that way. Instead, he lived in the now. “I just knew the sun was rising and then it got dark, no more.” This way of living in the moment made him freer and happier.

None of us want to know what it’s like to live among wolves like Marcos did, but we would feel much better if we started freeing ourselves from these ridiculous needs.

We need to walk more easily and notice abundance around us so that we can gain clarity and get rid of unnecessary suffering.