Insane Stories From People Who Lived With Animals

We've all heard tales of wolf children — kids who were abandoned or lost and found sanctuary living with wild animals. Those stories are actually pretty uncommon and are often totally made up, but there are some true stories of human adults voluntarily living with wild creatures that are just as remarkable. Here are some of the most insane modern stories about people, both scientist and non-scientist, who moved in with wild animals and had totally weird, sometimes deadly experiences.

In 1946, Farley Mowat was hired by the Dominion Wildlife Service to prove that wolves were to blame for the declining caribou population in the northern Canadian wilderness. His employers hoped his research would give them a good reason to shoot wolves because everyone knows that Mother Nature made the caribou for human hunters, not for wolf predators. Mowat's employers were probably fairly annoyed when he told them that the wolves in northern Canada weren't even eating caribou, they were eating rodents. And because observation wasn't enough, Mowat had an extra layer of proof: he knew that a large predator could survive eating nothing but voles (the small rodent that populates the Arctic wilderness) because he'd done it himself. Gross.

Now, much of what Mowat wrote in the 1963 book Never Cry Wolf about his experiences in the Arctic has been more or less discredited as heavily fictionalized, but no one really disputes that the vole experiment actually happened. In fact Mowat was almost gleeful about it — The Seattle Review of Books noted that he even published his recipe for "Souris a la creme," which means "Mouse in Cream." Funny, it doesn't actually sound any more delicious in French.

Stories of quirky non-scientists moving in with dangerous predators don't always have to have tragic endings. When he was in his 20s, Englishman Shaun Ellis sold everything he owned to buy a plane ticket to Idaho, where he began a career as a wolf researcher. But unlike ordinary wolf researchers who are mostly happy tagging wolves with radio collars and collecting their poop, Ellis thought he could learn more if he ditched the scientific method and integrated himself into the wolves' culture, sort of like language immersion except that in most cultures they won't literally bite your face off if you mispronounce a word.

In a 2011 essay for the Guardian, Ellis wrote about his one-year experience living with a wild wolf pack. In the essay, he said he "moved to the wild" and set up camp near a wolves' den, and eventually the pack started to trust him. That seems odd given that most humans wouldn't trust some strange dude who set up camp near their kids' bedroom, but okay. The wolves came to not only accept his presence but to let him babysit their pups. They brought him tasty treats like raw deer and elk and, yes, once tried to bite his face off — he said he deserved it because he ate the filet mignon instead of the chuck roast, or something. Happily, Ellis got out alive and now runs a wolf research center in Devon, England.

In this bizarre tale of a research project gone horribly, horribly wrong, a 23-year-old research scientist named Margaret Howe Lovatt moved into a flooded house to teach a dolphin how to speak. Yes, that is correct. She was going to try to teach a dolphin how to speak actual English, as reported by the Guardian.

The house was flooded so the dolphin, named "Peter," had enough room to swim around and Lovatt could wade, though she was also given a desk and a bed that were physically suspended above the water so she wouldn't have to be soggy for 24 hours a day. Not long into the project, Lovatt realized the dolphin was courting her, and since his romantic desires were getting in the way of the whole "speaking English" thing, she decided to just ... do some stuff. (She helped him out with her hand.) 

Anyway, it wasn't the ultra-disturbing nature of the whole scenario that ended the project but rather the lead scientist, who was doing other unethical things, like giving LSD to the rest of the dolphins. The project ended, and Lovatt and Peter went their separate ways. But the poor love-struck dolphin never went on to form normal relationships with actual girl dolphins — instead, he fell into a deep depression and "committed suicide" by deliberately failing to surface for air. For never was a story of more woe, than this of Lovatt and that really freaking weird thing that happened with the dolphin.

It's fairly easy to see why someone might want to live as a wolf or as a bear, because wolves are cool. And bears are cool, though mostly just when they're not eating you. But turkeys? Sure, they won't maul you or eat your face or anything, though there might be a small risk of eyeball pecking. But living with turkeys isn't exactly glamorous, which is why Joe Hutto's year-plus "life as a turkey" (via NewScientist) is so amazing — not just because it takes a special kind of dedication to shun all human contact with nothing but your future Thanksgiving dinner for company (just kidding, Hutto didn't eat any of his turkeys), but because the cool-factor isn't that high. Actually there isn't any cool-factor at all.

Hutto's project started when a neighbor brought him some wild turkey eggs he'd found on his plantation. Hutto knew if he hatched them and wanted the poults to stay wild, he was going to be committing to something pretty crazy — he'd have to abandon everyone he knew, move out into the wilderness, and become a turkey mom. Which also meant learning how to speak turkey and wearing only pale blue (because turkey moms have pale blue heads). The Casper Star Tribune said Hutto took his job so seriously that he wouldn't eat in front of his turkeys, because turkey moms don't eat sandwiches, and he wouldn't take pictures of them because turkey moms don't scrapbook. That's dedication.

According to a completely unscientific statistic that we totally just made up, four out of five children wish they could grow up in Africa and be best friends with a bull elephant. For Tippi Degre, that was her actual childhood. Her parents were wildlife photographers living in Namibia. As a small child, Tippi didn't play with Barbie dolls or Tonka trucks; she played with giant toads, elephants, and lion cubs. She thought of the animals as her brothers and sisters, and was particularly close with a 5-ton, 10-foot-tall African elephant named Abu. She rode on Abu's back and on his trunk. She petted leopards, played with meerkats, snuggled toads, and rode ostriches. Since she's still living, we assume she stayed mostly away from chimpanzees.

When you consider that Tippi was a very small child during these experiences (she left the continent when she was 10), it seems pretty insane that her parents were so cavalier about letting her play with animals known for trampling humans, mauling humans, and singing Hakuna Matata — but her mom told The Telegraph that she only ever interacted with animals that were tame or accustomed to humans. Although we all know how well that worked out for Charla Nash.

In 1976, Scottish wrestler Andy Robin had the brilliant idea to buy a grizzly bear cub so he could train it to be his sparring partner. What fun it would be to wrestle with a giant fuzzy teddy bear with 3-inch claws and an appetite for human flesh! Robin and his wife, Maggie, purchased Hercules the bear from a zoo in Scotland for ￡50, and he grew to be 9 feet tall and weigh nearly half a ton. According to the Telegraph, Robin's training philosophy went like this: show an animal enough love, and it will never hurt you. (Note: not effective for human teenagers.)

In 1980, Robin took Hercules for a swim in the Sea of the Minch, and the bear made a break for it. He was missing for 24 days, and pretty much everyone who had an opinion said it was only a matter of time before he was munching on someone's livestock, or on someone else's person, since Hercules had never been taught to fish and people and livestock were the only two other items on the menu. Instead, the bear elected to starve — when he was finally captured, he'd lost more than half his body weight. In fact the most insane thing about this story is that Hercules never killed, mauled, or injured anyone, ever. He died of natural causes in 2000.