Nature & Animals influenced The Jungle Book

Kipling names the place. The Mowgli stories are set in the Seoni hills of central India, and the animals in them are the animals of that forest: the Indian wolf, the sloth bear, the black panther, the dhole, the python, the tiger. The specifics come from natural history rather than from folklore. The Seeonee wolf pack, the Council Rock and the Law of the Jungle are built on wolf pack structure as it was then understood; the monkeys have no law because the book takes them to be a species without one; and the red dog chapter turns on dhole hunting behaviour. Behind it sits a documented phenomenon rather than a myth: Sir William Henry Sleeman's 1852 account of wolf-raised children in Seoni district, which Kipling had read.