She’s had a wild life — literally.
Barking, growling and walking on all fours wasn’t just a fun game of mimicking a beloved family pet for Oxana Malaya.
Instead, at age 3, adopting the savage traits of animals became a way of life for the feral Ukrainian girl who was raised by stray dogs after her alcoholic parents locked her outside in the cold.
“Mom had too many kids; we didn’t have enough beds,” Malaya, now 40, explained to “60 Minutes Australia” of her abusive upbringing. “So I crawled to the dog and started living with her.”
In an effort to survive, the toddler made a home for herself inside of pup Naida’s kennel. Within the confines of the cage, she dwelled alongside the critter for the next five years of her life.
Malaya was quickly embraced by the undomesticated animals in her poverty-stricken village of Nova Blahovishchenka, Ukraine.
And as a welcomed member of the pack, the troubled tot abandoned her developing ability to speak for the woofs and snarls of her newfound fur family.
“I would talk to them, they would bark and I would repeat it,” said Malaya. “That was our way of communication.”
However, for the brunette, assuming the brutish behaviors of man’s best friend wasn’t limited to guttural snarls.
Malaya also licked herself clean, ate raw meat, rummaged through garbage bins for food, panted and walked on her hands and knees.
“She was more like a little dog than a human child,” said Anna Chalaya, the director of the special care institution where Malaya now resides. “She used to show her tongue when she saw water and she used to eat with her tongue and not her hands.”
After barking at a neighbor at age 9, Ukrainian authorities were alerted to the child’s canine-like condition. However, efforts to rescue Malaya were initially thwarted by the gang of hounds that fiercely fought to protect her from the police. It wasn’t until officials distracted the dogs with food that they were able to remove the girl from the kennel.
But extracting Malaya from what had become her natural habitat and reuniting her with humanity didn’t immediately rehabilitate the hapless tyke.
“I don’t think she’s ever going to be able to read or do anything else that is going to be useful,” child psychologist Lyn Fry said of Malaya, who has the mental capacity of a 6-year-old. “If you haven’t got language by about [age] 5, you’re probably not going to get language at all.”
In fact, direct human contact has been proven to be crucial in speech development patterns for babies.
An August 2023 study on the detrimental effects of “screen time” for children as young as age 1 found that excessive exposure to televisions, cell phones and tablets could permanently hinder a growing child.
“Screens can disrupt or displace interactions with caregivers and limit opportunities for verbal exchanges, which can impair communication and social skills,” warned analysts from the University of California, San Francisco.
Research has also determined that infants will begin muttering small words like “this” and “that” months before saying “dad” to get their parents’ attention.
But Malaya, who’s just one of the approximately 100 known feral cases throughout history, used her platform with “60 Minutes” to finally garner the attention of her father. She’d long to be reunited with both her mom and dad for years.
“I want to see them with my own eyes so desperately because I have been told I have no parents,” said Malaya, “but actually I do have them.”
The brunette awkwardly reconnected with her dad and a half-sister in 2006.
However, the meeting did not sufficiently heal Malaya’s enduring trauma.
“When I feel lonely, I find myself doing anything I crawl on all fours. This is how lonely I feel,” she said. “Because I have nobody, I spend my time with dogs, I go for walks and do anything I want to.
“Nobody notices that I walk on all fours.”
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