Question: If a newborn baby was raised soley by dogs/cats/wolves or any animal, would it learn to speak animal language and give us insight into the animal world or not be able to communicate with the animals?

Tim Stephens answered on 29 Jun 2012:

I think the baby would struggle to communicate by speaking with humans to begin with if it was raised by animals, but I think that it would learn quickly. I don’t know how much conversation you’d get with animals though – it wouldn’t be much more than “Hello” and “Where’s Lunch”.

There are scientists who’ve learnt to understand animals. There’s a famous book called “Born Free” by Joy Adamson, who raised lion cubs and could communicate with them, and there’s DIane Fossey who lived with mountain gorillas and could communicate with them – that was made into the film “Gorillas in the Mist”
There are also stories about other animals caring for human babies. I saw one on the news a year or two ago where a child fell into a gorilla enclosure at a zoo, and the biggest gorilla in the enclosure came over and protected it like it was his own offspring until the zookeepers could get it back to its mother.