a recounting of personal nonhuman pains and a socio-political concept of therianthropy.

therianthropy (def.): the belief that one is at least part non-human animal.

one of the earliest memories i have is of me playing with other wolfdogs.

i mean bodily wolfdogs, of course. i was a rascally, decidedly un-fuzzy little four year old covered in dirt. but i was rolling around and chasing on all fours all the same. i grew up with two wolfdogs (both black GSD mixes) and a German Shepherd dog.

The oldest was named Dummy and he was grey in the muzzle already as far back as i can remember. he was a big, silly, gentle old man and he liked to lick my face. im pretty sure my dad named him that because he would just. refuse to go inside in the cold. and he didn't understand the concept of fetch and give the ball back. he had a dog house with a sign made just for him hammered into the front. he was a very good boy.

the second oldest was Kia, literally named after the car, and she was also old as hell. she never came inside, her favorite activity was sit in her doghouse, sit in a sunpatch, climb on the roof and bark. she was extremely tolerant, which is incredible considering that i was a young puppy in a really weird fucked up body and she had no idea how to interface with that. but she would let me rest my head on her like a pillow and look at her guard hairs and go "whaaaat you have LAYERS?" she was a very good girl.

the youngest, and the one i played with most, was Spike. Spike was a little shit.(he's just like me for real) dad brought him home as a puppy when i was like, four? i think. he bit me when he was a baby because he didn't understand bite force. i cried, like a lot, obviously, because i was a toddler, but i didn't stop roughhousing with him. he was my bestie. but he was definitely not well enriched enough, and one day, as wolfdogs are wont to do, before [TRAUMATIC EVENT] he ran away for good. i imagine he went off and hung out with coyotes and ate some really good deer. i miss him a lot.

all these dogs were there before i was born, and stayed with me until i left that house, or they died of old age and long well lived lives. it feels almost like they raised me, or imprinted themselves upon me somehow. i know, through and through, that they knew that i was really

JUST ANOTHER DOG

a lot of my early experiences as a therian were characterized by dehumanization by my peers, or by reading about it obsessively on the internet. but where i could, i'd squeeze in outside time, and just get to roll around in the grass, or run through a meadow, or smell forest air. highly recommend trespassing on hunter's territory, sometimes you find cool bones. it was only in these small moments i really got to be myself. going into middle school, my species dysphoria got extremely bad, but because being nonhuman is literally not understood by broader society, i would keep searching for answers, or i'd have to insist to others i was just crazy and not to listen to me.

i started drawing furries in like, the third grade? to cope. after i had An Incident in class about my wolf identity, my teacher gave me an Animorphs book. (the one with Cassie turning into a wolf on the cover. #9. i still have it.) this is all i would do, all i would talk about. i justified my wolf-ness using these fictional tools, i'd say "oh, well i'm just like Cassie Animorphs" or "im a furry! look! its just art. harmless!" (as if being a wolfdog was like. dangerously offensive. humans :/ ) but. lets be real, here. i was coping. hard. i only ever stopped drawing wolves, and furries, when people started saying that shit was cringe. and then i kept doing it anyway, in secret journals. i'd cut out the papers and tape them on my walls. all i wanted was to escape my human form.

i think my first encounter with therianthropy proper was through a video of some therians in the woods, howling and playing with each other, wearing tails, and just, like. being animals in the woods. it made me feel weird jealousy pangs, and everytime my mom would leave the house, i would put the video on again and just watch. i wanted to be them so bad, they would stay out overnight and have fires and lay in the dirt and fallen leaves and look at the stars and howl at the moon. it was like actual fucking paradise to my then-10 year old brain. i wanted what they had so bad, and i'd do anything i could to get it.

when i ventured into witchcraft initially, it was from a childish desire and belief that magic was 1. physically real and 2. would give me the tail and ears and fangs and paws i needed to feel myself again. i would go out every single full moon and i would PRAY for it to fix me. to make me a REAL wolf, so i could be stronger and faster like i used to be, so i could move freely, to be awake at times that felt natural, to run on all fours and feel the dirt on my bare pawpads, to eat what i needed when i needed. the spell guide said to just do it once because it was SO POWERFUL (MAXIMUM POWER WITCHCRAFT SPELL WEREWOLF TRANSFORMATION). i would end up using it not dissimilarly to how in Catholicism you have to pray some amount of some prayer after confession. i'd use it IN PLACE OF Our Father when i'd be forced to attend church twice a week.

obviously it didnt work. i fell out of practice for a few years after that, because i'd burned myself out, but i kept reading about therianthropy on the community forums and wikis. never posting, just lurking and moping. i'd post & reblog about it on tumblr, until the war happened (iykyk) and that became a Bad Thing to do.

every single day i spent wishing and waiting, in agony, because my form was wrong. my body was wrong, and i was not supposed to be living in society like this, in this way.

i went down unsavory paths. transmedicalism is a hell of a drug when you hate yourself not just for your sex, but because your muzzle is flat and ineffective, and even walking feels wrong. you can pretty easily convince yourself your species dysphoria is just you hating your body fat, too, and that didn't bring me any closer to feeling integrated in my wolf-ness.

but most of all, i'd have the most vivid and intense dreams of forests and lakes and experiencing them, at the correct eye level, on my own four paws, chasing and howling and playing with other dogs joyously in the dark.

when i got really online and shut inside in COVID, i met a bunch of people who were about as open-minded as me. and through them, i learned about queerness on a way deeper level than i ever knew before. i got really into deep ecology for a bit, really unpacked and unlearned all that transmedicalist bullshit, learned what a communism was (my brother helped too, thanks for puppy's first copy of Das Kapital.)

and i finally, FINALLY got the stick out of my ass, and started identifying as nonhuman, publicly. i dont remember what exactly flipped the switch. i think it was just… because everyone stopped shaming us for existing. at least online. it felt okay to do, and i saw other therians online coming out of the fucking woodwork, finally after YEARS, coming together to talk and joke about being nonhuman.

it was the most freeing thing ive done yet, and im insanely grateful that the specific series of events that happened, happened. because if it hadn't i literally would still be suffering. thank you to my friends, human & otherwise.

even still, being literally trans-species is a hard sell to people. we want to dress it up in all sorts of fancy psychological or spiritual language, or our enemies will politicize the mere idea to hurt other marginalized people, or we want to attempt to insist or assert that anthropomorphized non-humanity is "strictly a visual interest or an artistic subculture". i won't be the one to say if any of these things are necessarily correct or incorrect. you can make your own interpretation of what it means to be simultaneously a human and not a human if you'd like.

but ultimately, people are uncomfortable with the assertion that humans and animals are not only inseparable, but even more so with the idea that we could be similar or the same. most anti-vegan sentiment is based on this, actually, founded on a fundamental ideological separation between humanity and the rest of the animal kingdom. refusing to see reality in all of its separate-together parts.

because, of course, if we acknowledge our similarities, if we acknowledge human animals, we have to reconcile with the humanity of all animals.

so instead we keep it as a pet theory. its just an idea, its just a visual style, its just metaphor. nobody thinks about this literally, of course not. no one literally wants to look like this, or do this or be this. that would be insane, and we are not insane.

^ (REAL SENTENCES said by 'PEOPLE' who are DEFINITELY NOT REPRESSING SOMETHING)

i'd be remiss to not mention the sanism, the ableism, and the queerphobia in this sentiment. i won't go into it in massive detail, as thats for a secondary part of this essay, "on antitherianism". but the consistent desire to paint therians as delusional, or just mentally unstable, or as queer fetishists gone too far (anyone remember the good ol' derogatory 'furfag'?) is a blatant display of the socially normalized & enforced fear of the Other. the fear of the unknown, the fear of the wild, the fear of things that are so unlike you, it must mean they could only cause harm.

the idea that a person could also be an animal challenges the idea of humans at the top of some 'natural hierarchy', with animals all subjected to a position underneath. people find comfort in the delusion that animals do not live alongside us, within us, without us. animals like dogs are 'dumb, loyal, submissive' and animals like cats are 'intelligent, apathetic, independent'. wild animals are hunted for sport, named with numbers instead of names, predators like wolves are genocided with poison. animals are dangerous, inherently, and we 'have' to do this to 'protect ourselves'.

all in service of a 'natural' hierarchy, a hierarchy which definitely does not exert mass violence to reaffirm itself in reality, and definitely doesn't come from a base fear of being eaten by tigers. its NATURAL for humans to behave in this overreaching, extractive way, they'll insist, ignoring the mass outbreak of prion diseases among prey populations due to the lack of predator species *we caused*. its NATURAL that we would end up fragmenting their homes and slaughtering them indifferently, sometimes without even knowing it, turning a real living thing into red paste on pavement. this is incredibly normal, they say, shoveling live baby birds into meat grinders.

ahem. anyways,

human domination is not natural. it is the invention of fools who are too scared of the sound of rustling in trees. i wish everyone who insists this is true a very "go walk the entire Appalachian trail and maybe it'll fix you."

humans are humans. but what exactly does that mean, again? humans are homo sapiens, weird naked bipeds who keep writing books and have weird hangups about body hair. but what do humans *do*? humans have Big Ideas, yes, they create Technologies, they Industrialize, they Systematize, but moreover, humans exist as a class. a class of beings, situated above the class of nonhumans. they wield their power in the upper class to subjugate the lower classes, in both their society and in animal society. frequently enough they decide one group of humans isn't human anymore, and tries to exact the same level of violence they enact on nonhumans on humans.

therianthropy, then, is the purposeful refutation of this hierarchy, this idea of what it means to be human. trans-speciesism acknowledges the human form, and then says "but there's more to it than that." the refusal to continue being human is the refusal to continue pretending that humans and animals were ever anything more than one species of animal, and all the rest. the refusal to continue being human comes with the refusal to continue partaking in human systems of oppression, in human systems of hierarchy. species fluidity is simply an expression of this understanding of what it means to be an animal. an animal, in our world, is anything deemed non-sapient, non-humanoid. and all animals are subjected to domination through subjugation, through ownership or violence. in theory, all therians understand this much intuitively - an animal is anything that has been sufficiently dehumanised by humans. in that sense, anyone who feels like their humanity was stripped from them, can absolutely turn to being an animal instead.

i personally welcome you with open paws. :3

therianthropy (def.): the understanding that humans are just animals.

part one of a series of writings on nonhumanity. to be continued