Review : Enfants sauvages

Feral Children and Clever Animals by Douglas Keith Candland (Oxford
University Press, £12.99/$16.95, ISBN 0 19 510284 3) has a
lacklustre title for its contents: sensational stories of children nurtured by
wolves, and animals that seem to reveal their thoughts to humans. The idea of
communicating with minds whose concepts are wordless is fascinating, but the
results of attempts to do so are suspect, telling us more about humans than
animals. Poor quality photoographs are not worthy of the text.