Marcos Rodriguez Pantoia claims not only that was he raised by wolves, but that he had a guardian pet snake.

It’s very rare for someone who’s lived with wild animals from a young age to be able to re-enter society and talk about their experience in a coherent way, but that’s exactly what Marcos does. So what’s his story?

Marcos states that when he was six or seven, his father sold him to a farmer who took him to the Sierra Morena mountains. There, he helped the ageing goatherd who soon died.

Left by himself, Marcos began to hunt small animals with traps made from sticks and leaves. This is when the magic happened; Marcus claims that he became part of the wolf family:

One day I went into a cave and started to play with wolf cubs that lived there and I fell asleep. Later, the mother brought food for them and I woke up. She saw me and looked fiercely at me. The wolf started to rip the meat apart. A cub got close to me and I tried to steal his food, because I was hungry as well. The mother pawed at me. I backed off. After feeding her pups she threw me a piece of meat. I didn’t want to touch it because I thought she was going to attack me, but she was pushing the meat with her nose. I took it, ate it, and thought she was going to bite me, but she put her tongue out, and started to lick me. After that, I was one of the family.

In 1965 when he was 19 , Marcos was found by the Guardia Civil, and taken by force to the small village of Fuencaliente.

A Spanish writer and anthropologist at the University of the Balearic Islands who has studied Marcos for some years, states that what Marcos tells us is most likely not what happened but his interpretation of the events. By saying that a snake returning for milk that Marcos fed him was his “guardian”, he was able to survive the solitude of the mountains.

Marcos struggled to return to society, and eventually it was the nuns that taught him to eat properly and tied a piece of wood to his back to help him walk straight. He is now in his 60s and living a relatively normal life in a small village.

[Source : BBCNews]