Animal Quills

What is Instinct?

Wed, 24 Sep 2025 14:50:08 GMT

Posted by: leo_the_pard

Statements from individuals claiming that my animal nature is not a reason for socialization difficulties consistently provoke irritation in me. "You are in a human body, therefore you must behave as one." I have heard this phrase countless times from my mother and frequently from others as well. With ordinary people, I can comprehend their perspective. Accept it? No. However, I can certainly understand it. The last individuals I would expect to hear this from are therians. Who, if not they, should understand what it means to be a wild animal among humans, confined in a human body? Yet, this is where I have most often encountered such remarks in recent years.

What has always depressed me about the therian community is that many appear to underestimate the biological foundation of instincts, yet insist that all my behavior must be entirely under rational control, as if I could simply activate a switch. This is not how it functions. This perspective is not only naïve but also disregards biological reality. In this essay, I aim to explain why. To clarify from the outset: there will be no magic, mysticism, or romanticism here. Instinct is purely biological.

Let us begin with basic definitions. What is instinct? Instinct is a complex set of heritarily determined behavioral acts, triggered by external or internal stimuli and aimed at fulfilling essential biological needs. This is how science defines instinct. [0] The same holds for an animal in a human body, provided we mean instinct in its true, biological sense, rather than something else.

All animals confront essential tasks of survival, dominance, and reproduction. Behavioral motivations exist to achieve these objectives, while instinct serves as the practical mechanism for their realization. Learning overlays these, refining skills, and modulating these programs. Scientists debate whether learning constitutes part of the instinctive behavioral framework, but this is not our focus presently.

Instincts operate at the neurophysiological level. From this scientific perspective, instinct is manifested as a set of predetermined neural connections, which can only be modulated within certain boundaries through training or momentarily suppressed. Furthermore, instinct permits little variability: without training, the same instinct within a species functions similarly, adjusted for random genetic variations. Only the degree of expression may differ significantly. [2]

This explanation simplifies matters: instincts are also significantly realized through the architectural features of the central nervous system, particularly the limbic system. However, this is not critical here. Clearly, a human cannot possess the central nervous system of another species. Nevertheless, hypothetically, variations in the strength of connections between brain regions, their sensitivity to specific neurotransmitters, and activation thresholds could vary significantly among individuals, creating an innate predisposition to behaviors normative in other species. What is certain are neural connections. Ultimately, the same brain regions, shaped by shared mammalian evolution, govern basic behaviors in humans, canines, and felids. Biochemical reinforcement is also identical.

( Read more... )

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Being a Circus Animal

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 04:05:05 GMT

Posted by: leo_the_pard

...or how my leopard self shaped my career.

I often mention that my work as an electrician channels my hunting instincts. And, apparently, it is not an exaggeration or a metaphor. Years ago, when I was searching for myself and my place in life, I read a book on training big cats for the circus, and one detail struck me.

It is said that big cats have innate behavior patterns, such as hunting, climbing, and playing. These patterns are the "building blocks" of training. Animal trainers do not force cats to do something "foreign" or unnatural tricks; they redirect instincts. For example, jumping through a ring mimics a hunting lunge, climbing ladders echoes a leopard scaling a tree for safety, rope-walking resembles prowling along branches, and playing with props redirects prey-chasing games.

Training simply deceives the brain, framing tricks as natural through operant conditioning: behavior is reinforced with a reward, increasing the desire to repeat it. Success depends on matching the trick to instincts, minimizing stress, and respecting individual preferences: each leopard has a favorite pattern (some love jumping, others climbing). The trainer adapts to the cat. But if a trick strays too far from instinct, it stresses the animal.

Over my life, I have tried countless jobs. My first one was at an advertising agency in Moscow - pure hell. Boring, lots of communication with colleagues and clients, dress code, and limited privacy for eating. Transferring to the design department helped - less talking, more drawings and calculations - but it was still dull. Then I got part-time gigs installing ad structures. That clicked: climbing, physical work, quiet meals alone up high. The downside? Teamwork with blue-collar crews. My boss wouldn't let me switch full-time, so we clashed, and I quit.

On my next job, I serviced ad structures. It was better - flexible hours, good pay, mostly solo - but too much travel (foreign territory) and the need to visit the office several times a month (I hate offices!).

When I left my hometown after splitting with my mother, I had no education or clear path. That's when I came across that book. Money was tight, so I hustled. I did part-time jobs in warehouses, repaired household electronics, worked as a driver, a salesperson, an administrator in an art studio, tried myself in business, worked as a courier for almost a year, worked remotely as a programmer and vector designer, and didn't refuse part-time jobs in offices for variety. None fit.

Until one day, a friend invited me to work on a construction site with electricity. It was a massive facility - a heating plant in Moscow. The downside? The need to work in a team and obey the boss. I didn't mesh with the crew (a loner like me?), got fired, but fell in love with the trade. I sank my earnings into tools, studied theory all night, and practiced by day. Going freelance as an electrician painted my life in new colors.

When I moved from the metropolis to a remote village, it was already clear who I wanted to work for. The locals welcomed a "city pro" whose skills outshone the locals. Clients pay more, and I deliver. The only snag? Freelance work is patchy. The downtimes between the orders drive me wild: stereotypical behavior, pacing the house, mood swings from apathy to rage, exactly like a caged leopard. Before, I drowned it in alcohol, games, or street "adventures," but I've quit that.

I asked people for advice, and they recommended walking in the fresh air or doing physical activity. Naturally, this did not help: circling my territory isn't work - it's just a daily routine. Physical activity is certainly useful, but what is the point if it does not correspond to natural behavior patterns?

Back when I tried being "human," I thought I felt useless without work. "I just want to help people," - I told myself. But who am I kidding? When I was called to paint a fence or work as a cattleman on a farm, it brought income, but it did not bring satisfaction. Hard work took all my strength; there was none left for stereotypical behavior, but I fell into depression and felt like I was going crazy. Fixing electronics at home was interesting but boring. Remote work was downright stressful: I literally could not sit still and rushed around the house in circles, although they paid me much more for it.

When I got back to my roots and my leopard self, I remembered that book, and everything fell into place. Depriving instincts, which found their way in such "circus" form, caused the same distress as any other caged cat's pacing. Scientific literature was right on this matter: it is not enough to have all the resources for survival; the inability to satisfy instincts is excruciating and harmful to mental health.

Usually, my work begins like this: I receive a phone call. I don't want to pick up the phone, especially if the number is unfamiliar - a strange voice on the phone at home feels like an invasion of my territory. But, overcoming myself, I answer. I am offered a job and I agree. I always agree; I rarely refuse anyone. I arrive at the place of work: I am cautious and tense, feeling uncomfortable in a foreign territory. The first day of work passes sluggishly, and I walk more than I work and am not sure that this job was worth taking on at all. In fact, I am getting used to the foreign territory.

By day two, I'm hooked: tracking a fault feels like stalking prey. It's exciting! I climb ladders, roofs, beams - all of this is very natural, safe, and secretive. I cover distances of many miles at work - like prowling in search of prey. Hauling tools up mimics dragging a kill to a tree. Carrying a heavy load is like dragging a heavy carcass. Jumping structures, balancing on wobbly ladders, squeezing into tight spots - all this is deeply natural and leopardish. Work consumes me: I plan, dream, and lose track of time, sometimes working 16 hours until I'm swaying from exhaustion.

The climax? Flipping the main switch when the work is finished - it is like sinking fangs into the throat of the prey. Click - triumph, euphoria! Spotlights, loud music... all that's missing is applause. All that's left is to pack up my "props" and leave the "arena", freeing it up for other, two-legged artists.

It's easy to see that my job isn't just a way to make money; there are plenty of other ways to make money. It balances strength, dexterity, precision, and focus, matching my instincts. It's no wonder that remote work doesn't suit me - it's just a trick alien to a leopard, like walking on its hind legs. My favorite pattern? Heights, where I feel safe and comfortable.

Of course, there are things in my job that irritate me. The most stressful, unpleasant, boring elements are precisely those that go beyond natural behavior or require suppression of instincts. Making estimates and reports, communicating with clients, driving a car (I don't hate the latter, but I don't enjoy it). When I cross paths with chickens or calves, it's a pain; they taunt my instincts, but I can't pounce, so I take smoke breaks to cool off. Who ever thought that letting a predator into a livestock pen was a good idea?..

All of these are unavoidable costs that I can only minimize. But all of this fades when I look at the photo wallpaper on my smartphone screen and remember that my adopted cub - a cat named Mousie - is waiting for me at home. I return home from work: grimy, dirty, tired. No matter what happens, I always return with prey in my teeth. We eat, nuzzle, purr. And for a moment, I'm whole!

I wanted to share these thoughts with you. It seems that I'm simply built for hunting - without it, I unravel. Now that everything is crystal clear, there is only one question left: what if I can't do this job forever? I can't jump through circus hoops. Maybe you have some ideas?

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Fluid Ferality: A history of changing shapes

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 23:16:34 GMT

Posted by: kisota

I wanted to write something about the shapeshiftery part of my experiences, which I often don’t talk about, and how tricky they made sorting myself out!

Fluid Ferality

A history of shifting shapes

A cat stares out from under a desk, wild-eyed and and brimming with tension.

A horse tosses its mane mid-gallop through long grass.

Languid limbs of leopard drape over a tree branch.

A husky tromps through snow with abandon.

How do all the pieces fit together?

My early days understanding myself more formally as an animal-person were colored by stress and uncertainty about how to properly label the experience. At the time, the community pressured strongly toward single, neat answers. Anything else raised an eyebrow, so I went looking for the “True” self deep down. Wolf felt like an accurate name for it at first, but I started to have doubts fairly quickly. I wondered whether the frequency of wild and domestic feline feelings when I was a kid might be a clue. I contemplated foxes, another old favorite, and eventually coyotes, whom I’d never given much thought. At some point I dug a pit of doubt so deep I started looking at everything from rabbits to deer and various other mammals to find the singular heart of my nature. What the hell was I thinking?

Eventually, I snapped out of it enough to realize I didn’t need to start from scratch and discard everything I thought I knew about my own experiences. An herbivore I was not. Still, the feeling that almost any creature had the potential to ring true was confusing. I spent years agonizing over every brief experience and its possible significance.

I tried on broader labels as well, different models for wrangling my mental menagerie. I considered self-labeling with an entire phylogenetic clade. After all, I’d been trying and failing to find a single canid that always fit the bill. Maybe it’s just all of them? Every jackal and fox, worldwide wolves, dingos, dholes, the whole lot. But labeling it with the entire taxonomic family felt like an unsatisfying answer, a cop-out. And what about the other animals, those felines that still had a tendency to slink in at times, and other carnivores as well, albeit less frequently? If I considered all of Carnivora as a reference for myself, though, that seemed to include many animals I’d never felt like - too vague, too broad-brush. It also felt like it might grant too much significance to some of the experiences by making them all equivalent. Plus, what about the non-carnivores? Any line in the sand seemed arbitrary. And since it was often seen as worthy of suspicion to have more than one or maybe two animals as part of you, I resisted labeling these other vacillations as more than flukes.

But even my base experience was and is a bit blurry. For probably an entire decade I tried to find a perfect label for the medium-sized wolfish creature at the center of my animality - coyote, grey wolf, red wolf, eastern coyote, eastern wolf, some other particular species, subspecies or mix. All of them have seemed accurate enough. I can’t take the canine out of my head and look at its genes, so there’s really no proper objective label for the subjective experience. My canine feelings are probably general enough that any of the animals in the North American Canis “soup” are appropriate, as well as similar canines worldwide, with the exact perfect label simply fluctuating at any given time. Since coyotes vary so widely by locale and frequently contain an admixture of other canines, they represent a handily wide net to capture my variable small-wolf baseline. So, while sometimes I slide heavily toward grey wolf, red fox, or another canid, much of the time my experiences can be considered one or another flavor of coyote. Still, that desire for a crisp, neat label is hard to resist, even though the creatures in our heads have no reason to conform to taxonomy. Nature’s own idea of a species also isn’t very clean - no one species concept holds up consistently, so a perfect name for the creatures in our heads isn’t always even possible. But “coyote” at least usually covers it for me.

The feelings of other creatures used to throw off my sense of that canine center, though. I worried I was tricking myself with every bit of canid experience, since my baseline as a kid was largely feline. The soft-padded feet and liquid form seemed innate to me, the stretching of sheathed claws so real and right. The change to feeling more canine gradually happened when I was a preteen, before I ever learned of therianthropy, so I don’t think I was externally influenced by exposure to the concept and the popularity of wolves in the community. But the old feline ways weren’t totally gone. Every vacillation seemed to mark that I was missing something - how was I supposed to tell the difference between something integral and something passing? Or, as I now tend to think, maybe the significance is not only in the animals themselves, but in the fluidity between them?

In childhood, it was simple to fully embody in play whatever animal seemed right at the moment. To be a husky in the snow, a leopard lurking in a tree, a wallowing crocodile, or a swimming otter were all equally accessible to me, all just as real as one another. Even if I don’t “play” as these animals in a voluntary way anymore, that fluid experience of feeling like other animals and perceiving parts of my body like theirs remains. I wonder at the cause - just a big imagination, or is it also related to empathy? Maybe some kind of mirror neuron hypersensitivity, responding to animals’ actions? I have struggled for most of my life with a hyper-empathetic bent, by which I mean no brag about my understanding of others. It’s more like being an exposed nerve. I can be prone to getting swept away in the current of others’ emotions, so, to be compassionate, I’ve actually had to learn how to shield myself and tamp down that susceptibility to emotional contagion. People have also remarked on my code-switching and social mirroring, but these often feel less like a skill and more like a survival mechanism, an automatic but protective mimicry. My lack of identification with gender and my tendency to hurl myself headlong into radically different work, housing, and social circumstances also seem to imply a high degree of openness to experience and flexibility. I wonder if all these traits are related. If adjusting and mirroring are inherent to the way my brain functions, and these traits can be generalized to how I respond to animals as well, it might help explain the variation of my animality.

Despite the variability, I’ve never felt lacking a sense of identity altogether, as some people report, and as sometimes appears to be partially responsible for unstable self-concepts. I’ve generally not struggled with feeling like “myself,” and internally there’s fairly strong consistency. After many years of trying to fit a moving target in a static box, I eventually had to accept that my struggle wasn’t the result of uncertainty, or a lack of a sense of self; the shapeshifting is part of who I am and how I function. My shapeshifting is also better thought of as its own distinct way of experiencing animality.

In my dreams, this flexibility is limitless and actually has a physical component. I’ll fly away from trouble on wings, dropping into a canine form at ground level elsewhere. Or I’ll take on the shape of something powerful like a jaguar, lion, or bear to defend myself. Sometimes, I’ll use insect forms or other small creatures for stealth. While it’s often that borrowing these shapes is mostly functional and comes without so much of a change in mentality, the rapid-fire experience of different forms is the most literal experience of shapeshifting. It is also often startlingly vivid. I’ve been many birds, from large raptors and mythological rocs to corvids and grackles. Each shape feels different, distinct. At times, I’m not even choosing a specific form and have to identify it by feel! The rounded heft of a pigeon distinguishes it from the swift dart of a kestrel or the magnitude and steel-cord strength of a golden eagle. I don’t see these dreams as having inherent meaning outside myself; they’re not revealing truths about the universe. Nor do I think they are any kind of memories. But they do have meaning personally; the way dreams manifest and the way I feel about them reflect truths about myself. The experiences are comparable to what I feel while awake, but intensified, and I have used lucid dreaming techniques to further explore what is possible. The physical shapeshifting feels automatic, like my very nature freed from real-world restrictions. Interestingly, in dreams, I am often less likely to take a coyote form if there is any danger. Since the coyote is in a way my core self, I expect dream pursuers to recognize me.

Many of my dreams, though, still feature my actual human body. I experience an appreciable amount of dysphoria about my body and the wrongness of its shape, like many animal people. I do, however, think that to some extent, my acceptance of my human body is improved by the polymorphic nature of my experience. This body is one form I can have; it can still feel like mine to some extent. But the discomfort is two-fold: first, there’s the fact that I feel like my default should be a coyote. Most of the discomfort I feel about my body is because of the incongruity between it and the internal persistent feeling that I should be a medium-sized quadruped with lean legs, fur, and fangs. However, there’s a secondary feeling of being “locked in” to one shape, when maybe, I should be able to slide between them. In dreams this ability is so natural as to be reflexive, an innate involuntary function. So, while having a coyote form to swap into would be amazing, the ideal would be to have limitless fluidity of form.

One tricky aspect of the shapeshifter experience is the difficulty in articulating the experience to others. We lack the language to describe our relationship to different forms - whether they feel like a core experience, a variation on the core, an alternative, or a shift of convenience, and why. Also challenging to describe is how incidental forms can be further integrated and thereby become more meaningful. Identity itself is fluid and sometimes leaning into an experience further solidifies it as part of you. I can try to put these things in plain language, but something is lost, and I often have to rely on analogy. Describing my experiences a bit like the electron cloud model of an atom is sometimes handy. The nucleus and at the center could represent the base of my experience as coyote (or coyote-like Canis / small wolf / whatever we choose to call it). Other canines are the next closest, followed by felines, then other carnivores, and the outer, more rarely-visited reaches include other creatures, often birds. Still, this is only a rough approximation, a useful comparison more than an accurate representation in words. I suppose that’s true of most descriptions of subjective experience. Since I don’t really consider any specific animals besides the coyote consistently central to who I am, I generally express myself in reference to them. It’s a bit of a simplification, since I don’t usually list out other specific animals that are still significant. Ultimately, though, the shapeshifter concept seems to most accurately reflect my experiences without dismissing any of them. In retrospect, it’s clear that community norms and language can be restrictive, even in support-oriented spaces. Everything from rigid terminology to community norms and peer pressure, intentional or not, can be barriers to self-understanding. Often, taking time away from communities or relinquishing a focus on labels can provide more clarity. I may still struggle to explain some of the intricacies of my internal life, but I am more able now to recognize the whole of my experience rather than shying away from it.

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Thoughts on Territoriality

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 00:23:37 GMT

Posted by: leo_the_pard

I have often heard that therians have their own attitude towards their own territory, different from humans. But what is behind these words? Comparing your behavior with the behavior of your species is, of course, fascinating, but it is much more important to understand why your species behaves this way and not differently. This, as it seems to me, is the key to understanding yourself and is a very important point, to which I will return more than once in my next articles. In this one, I suggest understanding what is behind the concept of territoriality, how animals perceive it and what it is needed for.

In my life, I have had to change dozens of different places of residence, so from the height of my experience I would like to share with you my thoughts and observations on this topic, starting with a short excursion into my biography and trying not to tire you too much. Later you will understand what this is about.

I spent the first years of my conscious life in a big city, in the same apartment with my adoptive mother, with whom I had a very strained relationship. The pressure from society didn't add to my comfort either, which is why I often ran away to the familiar forest, but not because I was drawn to nature - there were simply no people there. I spent my time no less comfortably in industrial zones - sometimes there were people there, but the main thing was that there were stray cats. I still adore sparsely populated industrial zones and prefer to work there.

As a child, I dreamed of living in the wild in Africa so much that I could not imagine my future life any other way. I literally burned with this dream, imagining in my sleep and in reality how I would live in the wild, where there would be no people. For me, it was a desire for freedom, which I simply confused with the need for security. Once someone told me that, "Freedom is not in Africa, freedom is within you," which at that time I did not take seriously, but now I understand how true these words were.

In 2011, one of my friends (he knows who) invited me to go hiking with him. Was I scared to do it? Of course, but not too much. As a child, everything was simpler: leaving my territory where I didn't feel safe was not the same as leaving the territory where I do feel safe now. And having a person nearby whom I trust (who is not territorial or less territorial than me and therefore calm) greatly dulls the feeling of fear. Unfortunately, there are no such people left for me now.

And so, having freed myself from the oppression of my adoptive mother and moved to a small town (it was also scary to decide on this, but it helped me a lot that other therians I trusted lived next door to me, for which I will always be grateful to them), I settled in a modest garden house, with an area of only 54 sqft. It was an absolutely tiny house with an equally tiny adjacent plot of land. But, strangely enough, I didn't feel uncomfortable there. Yes, I still wanted to build a very large house, but the small area even had its advantages: at least I didn't have to pay huge heating bills in the winter. And I didn't even have to get up from the table to make coffee.

( Guess what happened next?.. )

Now that we've figured out how this all works, let's get back to where we started:

My territory is a place where I feel safe - this is the very basis of territoriality;
My surroundings should be familiar and predictable, my territory needs to be marked. Not necessarily in the way you might think, it is enough to scratch things or rub against them, leaving my scent on them, which I recognize very well. My scent makes the territory cozy;
My territory needs to be protected from strangers, and if this is impossible to do, there is a desire to run away or hide. What to do with this urge - you should decide for yourself;
It does not matter at all where my territory will be, I will feel comfortable anywhere, as long as the point 1 is observed;
The size of the territory should be such as to ensure my survival. There is no need for an overly large territory;
Going beyond your territory is always stressful;
...but it can be minimized if there is a person next to me whom I trust enough;
Not all familiar places are mine, there are also "less mine" territories, where I feel less safe than at home - it is not binary value. I would gladly give them up, if it were not for the need to get food;
If strange leopards appeared on my territory... I would do everything possible to make sure that they were no longer there. No one from my kintype should live on my territory, except for me and my family. What did you expect? Therianthropy is not worship of a sacred animal, it is about being one. With all its pros and cons.

Thus, I can confidently say that I am territorial. Although my territoriality creates a lot of problems for me in life, it absolutely precisely corresponds to the territoriality of my species and there simply cannot be another. Otherwise, I will no longer be me.

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Dealing With the Food Aggression

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 01:43:35 GMT

Posted by: leo_the_pard

Since this topic is not often mentioned in the therian community, I think it is worth filling this gap. I have always experienced food aggression. I have no idea where it comes from, it has just been there for as long as I can remember. I don't think it is related to any childhood trauma - even during the hungriest times in my country's history, I always had food on the table.

Even as child, I almost never ate at the same table with my mother. I usually ate in my room. My feeding usually looked like this: my mother brought me a plate of food (mostly meat), put it on my table and left. If she disturbed me while I was eating, I would always get angry, but until my teenage years I did not allow myself to growl at her, but I took it out on our dog, who learned that when I was eating, it was better not to even look in my direction. If growling didn't save me from my mother, I would simply leave the food and never return to it, as I couldn't calm down for a long time and specific food would start to be associated with stress, which would completely destroy my appetite. However, when the feeding was over, I would become kind again.

Over time, we were able to come to an agreement, although it was quite difficult. From a moral point of view, my behavior was absolutely not beautiful: she got this food for me and brought it to me, and instead of thanking her, I snap at her. But this is the case when human morality is powerless when faced with animal nature: after she gave me food, it is already my food, which she cannot just take back. Condemning a person (or an animal) for something they cannot change only makes things worse. In any case, I don't remember it ever helping.

So, the problem of feeding me at home was solved, but feeding me in public places turned into an even bigger problem. In the school cafeteria, I usually took a place, at a safe distance from the other children, or, if there were no such places, I simply grabbed a bun and ran into the yard to eat it alone. If other children came too close, I got annoyed and either ran away with the food, or ran away leaving the food, or tried to gobble it up as quickly as possible, growling angrily. And since such situations happened almost daily, I ate rather poorly.

When I started regularly communicating with other therians outside the Internet, it was a big discovery for me that they do not have such pronounced food aggression as I do and can eat relatively calmly even near strangers, without experiencing at least too much discomfort. The way they allow their dogs to beg for food from them was completely unthinkable for me: if my dog came close enough to me while I was eating, believe me, it would not want to do it again. By adopting their behavior, I learned to restrain myself quite well, albeit at the cost of colossal stress.

When I went to my first job, the situation became a little better: I just took takeout food from a local cafe, and went outside, hiding in the bushes nearby, and sometimes dragged it up a tree to eat it in a calm environment lying on a tree branch, like a real wild leopard. I can imagine how strange it was: a person in office clothes gnawing on meat lying on a tree branch (good thing people rarely look up). Of course, I didn't growl at my colleagues, I learned to carefully hide it, but the stress and discomfort didn't go away. Yes, I can control the manifestation of my emotions, but I can't control the fact that they arise.

Once, by the will of fate, I had to live in a dormitory. The rules prohibited eating in the rooms and this became a problem again. Usually, I ate in the kitchen at night when everyone was sleeping, or again took food with me outside, or ate in my room secretly, breaking the rules. If my presence at the common table was necessary, I simply avoided eating, saying that I was not hungry. The day before my departure, I (or rather my roommates) were unlucky: the administrator invited me to the common table. I couldn't get out of it and I couldn't hold back, snapping at someone who extended his hand in my direction to take a slice of bread. I remember the frightened faces of my roommates and the administrator's cry, "Alia, what's wrong with you? I don't recognize you." Fortunately, after that we parted ways forever.

After many years of studying and observing this topic, I have come to some conclusions for myself. The level of stress from interference in my eating directly depends on how much I trust the interfering person. We never had a trusting relationship with my mother, and I trusted our dog even less. I don't trust anyone enough, either people or animals. There is only one exception - my cat, whom I perceive as my cub. The trust between us is almost endless: she does not feel discomfort when I disturb her during her meal, and she is allowed to eat from the same plate with me. Although, of course, I try not to give her food that could be harmful to her.

The same goes for the neighbors' cats and dogs, as well as the animals at my work: they don't growl at me, but they clearly show nervousness if I bother them. Some cats can even snatch food from my hands and run away, snapping at other cats - I used to behave exactly the same way at school. Usually they can just run away, dropping the food - no one is ready to fight to the death for food; any predator can be driven away from its prey if it decides that messing with you is more expensive for itself. Picked-up stray cats are especially prone to this, rather than those that grew up at home and are well socialized. I understand their feelings and just don't bother them.

In my case, it also depends on who is "encroaching" on my food: if it is my friend, it is easier for me to cope with my emotions. If it is someone who can pose a danger to me (for example, my boss or a large dog), it will be more difficult for me, but I will restrain myself as much as possible. With people, in general, I will hold back more, but for a small dog in such a situation, safety is not guaranteed - there is no fear factor and there are no moral brakes. Much, however, depends on the subjective value of food: I will gladly share my cookies or chips even with a stranger, but even the closest people are not allowed to touch my meat. Drinks are not perceived as food at all.

There is no need to explain why animals behave like this. In my case, it clearly has similar reasons. But what about humans? I asked ChatGPT, "Is food aggression common in humans?" - and the neural network answered me that... no. However, I remember well how we were instructed when I was getting a job as a waitress that customers should not be disturbed when they are eating unless absolutely necessary, because it is unpleasant for them. Most likely, food aggression does exist in humans, but it is weakly expressed and suppressed by socialization and upbringing. I have been pretty bad with these things since childhood. However, we should not exclude the fact that if the tendency to it is genetically determined, deviations in one direction or another are likely possible within the population.

Is there any way to fix this? Veterinarians I know say that in the case of dogs this can be fixed by training and socialization. In the case of cats, especially those who have not had the proper socialization experience in a cubhood, things are pretty sad: their instinct is too strong and you can only create a situation where such behavior will be minimized. If you also face a similar problem and consider yourself a canine, perhaps you should seek the help of an animal trainer - there is nothing shameful about this, after all, I once even had to receive medical help from a veterinarian.

But since I am not a dog and it is too late to train me, I do not think that a psychologist or animal trainer will help here. Therefore, I solve this problem in this way: I simply avoid eating near other people, preferring to take food with me, eat in my car or at home. If this is not possible and you need to eat in a crowded place, feeding in the presence of a person you trust can help (if, of course, he or she is aware of this). His calmness is transmitted to me and in this case I can eat even at the food court in the mall, albeit sitting with my back to the wall and looking around restlessly.

I do not insist that my solution is universal and will suit absolutely everyone. But we have to admit that the possibilities of (zoo)psychology are not limitless and not everything can be changed. If you can't fix your issue, just try to build your life so that it stops being a problem.

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On Prairies, Woodlands, and Home

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 20:21:47 GMT

Posted by: kisota

A little ode to my favorite sorts of habitats and how they relate to coyote.

On Prairies, Woodlands, and Home

“This is the hardest stuff in the world to photograph. You need a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree lens, or something. You see it, and then you look down in the ground glass and it's just nothing. As soon as you put a border on it, it's gone.”

Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I’ve lived a lot of places. Chasing down the next opportunity has meant residing in a variety of biomes - everything from swamp to northern hardwood forest, subtropical islands, eastern deciduous forest, pinyon-juniper, sage steppe, or closed forests, deep and brimming with birdsong, thick with fir scent. I can’t say I’ve ever felt out of place in nature. I love all these ecosystems, each so rich with their own assortment of creatures, plants, and abiotic features. And heck, I’m a coyote; we get along just about anywhere. Even the remnants of natural spaces in cities can be places to get by.

But the wide open places have always called to me. The grasslands, or prairies, as we say in North America, feel like home. I knew even as a teenager where I needed to be, but it took me years before I finally made it back where I belong. The local habitat isn’t always of major significance to people, even animal folk, but for me, much of being animal is in how I relate to the land and other life.

My vision of paradise barely exists anymore. What I love best are lush tallgrass prairies with mixed forests, waves of rippling grass between stands of trees and underbrush. Highly arable, this habitat has largely been turned into farmland, the color and diversity trampled under by monoculture and manifest destiny. The remnants that survive exist along mountainous environments with enough moisture or along the edges of forests - transitional habitat, or ecotone. Luscious, thick grass grows in a patchwork of scrub and woods - oak savannah, scrappy evergreens, riparian refugia dense around the rivers. I savor the wet clean smell of cottonwood leaves and the sway of willows over thick underbrush. Coyote doesn’t exist in a vacuum for me - it exists alongside the plants and animals and natural features that give context to the experience and a sense of belonging.

Edward Abbey speaks of the desert as the sort of place you have to be within to truly appreciate. His estimation applies to the prairie as well. It’s not the sort of landscape you can stand back and absorb from afar. If you’ve ever been on a road trip and heard complaints the land is flat and boring, you know how quickly the enormity of it all is overlooked.

To really experience a grassland, you have to move through it. Go and look, listen, smell, feel. Weave through the tussocks, dodge the spines and brambles. Flip over some rocks, for gods’ sake! Inspect some milkweeds for velvety beetles and striped caterpillars, watch for birds to dart between trees or flee from the brush. If the grass is long enough, you can crouch at any given moment and be invisible. That’s the nature of the prairie - everything hidden right in front of you, if you’ll only go see it for yourself.

The grassland is also home to extremes that are hard to understand without firsthand experience. Rainfall tends to either be copious in a given year or scarce - an average over a period of years won’t tell you much about what the weather actually does. And fire is not just incidental - it’s built in, part of the function of the whole. In any given year, the temperatures reach intense heat and cold, with variations of powerful storms for every season. So the coyote and other denizens of grasslands are hardy, adaptable. Coyote is comfortable being uncomfortable and can roll with the punches.

Winters feature one variation on the storm theme, with wicked cold and ferocious blizzards that still kill people in the 21st century. My picture of winter is snowy skies so cold and grey-white they are continuous with the blanketed ground. Guard hairs grow out to long black-tipped quills, crafting a dark halo against the freeze. That crisply wet smell of snow and the soft silence, the weak, deep-slanted light - the permanent 4pm of the soul. Tiny rodents scuttle beneath the powder, morsels to be pounced and snapped up.

Spring dawdles. Just when you think the days are warming, just when the first tender tips of new grass appear, you’ll wake to a fresh, sodden slump of wet snow. That’s mud season, the time of wet, chilled foot pads and nowhere dry to lay. But one morning, you’ll wake up to a true chorus of birdsong and the vegetal smell of thaw. The warmth starts to come back to the light, and I crave a good sunbath.

Fall tends to skip out early - like spring, it is brief and tumultuous. The cottonwoods glow gold, and any oaks and maple will put on a good show of color (admittedly nothing compared to the true deciduous forests). But it tends not to last - the wind will kick up one day and tear down every leaf as if to say “alright, enough of that.” Sumac flares blood red in the understory, while the fields bleach to mosaics of wheaten blonde, gold, dusty blue-green and bronze. The prairie takes on a thick, faintly sweet scent of sequestered sugars. Dead grass ferments in low spots and leaf potpourri seasons the dust with autumn. Time to carefully pluck cactus fruit from the cactus pads and find ripe pears and apples. My inner perception of myself grows a thick, plush coat and I curse that it’s not a physical reality. I pile soft wool around my throat, a makeshift ruff, while hoods down my back stand in for the thick cape of hackles - a little wolf in sheep’s clothing.

And summer! I’m most nostalgic for summers in the prairie. The extremes of the seasons play out in microcosm every day, particularly in summer. In a grassland, you can tell time by scent. Many mornings, even in summer, start out brisk with the fresh smell of dewy grass and the crispness of transpiration. In a tallgrass prairie, the smell can be grassy the way a lawn is, tinged with sweetgrass and herbal sage, maybe fresh like watermelon rind. In a mixed or short-grass prairie, the smell is increasingly spicy and dusty - the skunky smell of fetid marigold. I can’t help but wonder how many complexities of smell I miss with my weak olfaction. To sniff out the night trails of animals would seem so natural.

Many mornings, almost precisely at dawn, you’ll hear the wild chorus of coyotes. When I’m alone or unlikely to disturb anyone, I sometimes join in. And if there’s a moderate amount of clouds, you’re likely to be treated to some of the best sunrises you will ever see, fire in slow motion burning through every hue from smoky rose to crimson to flame-orange and blaze gold.

Not uncommonly, though, morning is also a gusty time, with steady winds that will tear the breath right out of you. My ears should be furred inside and out, able to be pinned protectively flat. But they aren’t, and I’ve learned the hard way that the wind in bare ears isn’t just annoying - I’ve had an osteolith knocked loose in one of these morning windstorms and had vertigo for two weeks!

By mid-morning, the wind has usually settled, and the moisture deserted. The smells are steady and clear. It’s a good time to feel the sun warm your back before it gets too hot, and to see the last of the more nocturnal wildlife bedding down for the day. This is among the most refreshing time for a good long amble. You might see prehistoric-looking pronghorn gliding smoothly across the ground, or bison with fluffy thundercloud heads. Snakes and lizards warm themselves on stones or open ground, rapidly growing too fast to catch. Summer food, if you’re quick enough - the animal in my brain cues in on any small scampering thing during these sort-coated, lean days.

In afternoon, the heat sets in and wobbles the air above the ground. Sun-baked ground acts like a pizza stone, radiating back blazing heat. You can watch the cumulonimbus clouds build upon themselves all day, blooming and rolling taller as they scud across the skies. By evening they’re crackling fit to burst and hurl down earth-shaking lightning and torrential rain. But many afternoons are simply sunny, hot, abuzz with grasshoppers, and seemingly endless. Now is a good time to seek shade in the dense underbrush or work your way down to streams, rivers, and lakes to slake thirst and sniff around. The mud and vegetation smell of freshwater is proper to me, much moreso than the briny mist of the ocean. Here you might snag a frog, a musky garter snake, a shining trout. The humid air hosts a rainbow fleet of dragonflies. There’s always so much to see around water sources.

Sundown in a grassland can bring the same explosion of colors as a sunrise if there are clouds to catch the fire. Without that cover, the sky will gradually fade to hazy orange and dusty purple. As the colors deepen, the cool breath of plants rises as mist, releasing moist, grassy, crisp scents.

This is when the first stars flicker on in the deep blue portions of the burgeoning night. If you’re lucky, they’ll be mirrored on the ground by the living glow of fireflies. Summer nights as a kid were alive with fireflies, fresh and thoroughly invigorating. I want to feel cool grass under paws and trot at a vigorous pace, refreshed by the night air. The chorus of crickets brings the night alive. I feel I should slip into the darkness, wish my eyes had the tapetum lucidum, that shimmering layer that grants effective night vision. How many more insects and small creatures could I see, smell, hear, and hunt with proper senses?

My mind will sometimes traverse these landscapes in dreams - both familiar and new locales. If I’m really lucky, I’ll even get to explore them in the body my brain thinks I should have. For quite a few years, dreaming was the only time I would get to be in these habitats, as I spent my days in the claustrophobia of cities or closed, skyless deciduous forests. I’ve been able to appreciate so many dramatic landscapes, the sort you can stand back and take in, or simply take a photo to admire. But for me, home will always be deep within those subtler places that must be explored on foot. The mountain announces itself, but the prairie beckons.

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The Canine-Person Companion

Fri, 15 Dec 2023 14:56:15 GMT

Posted by: kisota

Suggested by another canine person, this essay touches on what socialization, friendships, and partnerships feel like for me as a canine person. It is a little mushier than I usually tend to be, but I felt like restraining that in this case made the writing miss the mark a bit.

The Canine-Person Companion

Friendship and relationships for canine people

(This shouldn’t be necessary, but just in case: standard disclaimer here that what’s written here are my perspectives and experiences alone; these words should not be used to confirm or deny your own experiences, validate or delegitimize your own inner animal, denigrate or exalt your relationships, or diagnose or treat any disease. Your mileage may vary. Batteries not included.)

I cannot lay claim to the clear simplicity of dogs’ love. But I think there is at least something of the nature of canine love in the heart of the canine-person.

Both wild canids and dogs are noted for their expressiveness to others, their attachment to mates or close associates, and their devotion. Most wild canids are (generally) monogamous and maintain long-lasting relationships. Domestic dogs are famously faithful.

The expression of affection and love from a human canine, or canine-person, in my experience, bears some similarities. My own feelings about love and affection color the way I form relationships and pose some difficulties for me in navigating standard American culture.

First, there’s the sterility of it, devoid of physical touch. Watch any group of canids and you’ll see much jostling, bumping, pawing, contact always. I crave this kind of interaction - it seems natural to nudge, to lean against, to shoulder or hip-bump in gesture, in greeting, as affection.

There’s nowhere for this feeling to go. It seems to me it should be casual, but it’s not, at least after high school. American culture is mostly bereft of casual contact; the most you might see is a handshake. Oftentimes, touch is seen as sexual. So I tend to walk through most of my life a bit touch-starved, and I have to try to moderate my interactions so that my friendliness isn’t misinterpreted as flirtation.

With friends, there’s often a little flexibility, and many of my closest friends have been the ones willing to play a little rough, verbally or otherwise. Banter and roughhousing have been key to many of my friendships. Some of the good-natured teasing with my closest friends can shock the outside observer. But it’s the verbal equivalent to an inhibited bite, that seemingly vicious but carefully applied play-attack. It’s a show of intimacy and care to demonstrate that you know where the boundary is and won’t cross it. We play rough with each other because we know each other well and love the game. And if occasionally a fanged remark lands awry, all it takes is one whine and a pause to acknowledge the error. Then game on.

With very good friends, there’s also often been physical roughhousing. I’m not terribly fond of organized sports, but a good informal tussle is welcomed, and I’m keen to get back into martial arts eventually. One friend has introduced me to acro-yoga as well, a circus-like and more cooperative type of physical interaction - again, it brings the simple joy of touch with bonding and building of trust. Knowing one another’s strengths and physical trust seem like no-brainers for animals that are often cooperative hunters. But simply being fun-seeking and easily caught in the sympathetic joy of a mutual game also seems to be common among the canine-people I know.

Many of us also seem to have a strong drive toward having a small, stable, and close-knit social group. Of course, this is also often true of humans, but a lot of canine people I know, especially the more wild-animal sort, find casual interaction lacking. A social group is supposed to be more enmeshed than that, symbiotic and reliable. It is a difficult thing to establish after adolescence, unless you’ve got a lot of family around. Many canine people I know tend to crave that connection and miss old friend groups perpetually. Getting dinner every second Tuesday of the month to sit and have polite conversation with work friends doesn’t cut it.

Another commonality seems to be expressiveness. A canine person likes to be unrestrained and unselfconscious in expression - even to the point of silliness. Coyotes are especially known for extreme expressions and gestures. I likewise find myself tending toward gesticulations, postures, and almost Jim Carrey-level facial expressions - the best I can do without a long, fangy muzzle, tall swiveling ears, hackles, and a tail!

Of course, in public, I keep most of it to what I hope is an acceptable level, the same as I do with any kind of physical interaction. I am not often outspoken about being an animal person, but a partner needs to know and be able to accept it - happily, mine is more than just okay with it! And so the full canine assortment of candid affection comes bursting out. I run and leap into my spouse’s waiting arms, showering him with kisses and wiggling with delight in his grasp. He delights in my twitterpated, giddy nuzzles, love bites, and full-body rolling on him. To be able to be so unbridled and demonstrative with my feelings is a great joy and a relief to the frustrations that come with human bodies and expectations.

I am fortunate to have a partner who understands and welcomes my brand of affection - as well as recognizes and isn’t made jealous by displays of affection towards friends. But certainly there are ups and downs to living with a person who is also a wild animal. Like any good dog, I’m emotionally responsive, open, and sensitive. But the neuroses of the wild creature come out in hypervigilance. The tiniest micro expressions in a loved one’s face tend to fill me with anxiety - a superficially blank expression writ with unspoken troubles. I’m rarely wrong, but my keen awareness and concern about other peoples’ state of mind is something I’ve had to consciously learn to manage.

The intensity of a wild animal versus a dog is also apparent to me in the other challenges my partner graciously accepts about living with me. For one, I’m intensely high-energy, a restless, pacing creature. I run three and a half miles almost every morning just trying to burn off enough nervous energy to be able to relax for indoor downtime. The morning solitude also helps with my peculiar need for large amounts of space and alone time. When I’m with my people, they’re my whole focus, but I need to be regularly away from even those I love most. Maybe a wolf would be okay with nearly constant company, and a dog even moreso. But sometimes coyote time means going off by yourself. I intentionally seek a lifestyle that includes regular travel and solo work, which also helps immensely with the wanderlust and need for my own company. In my experience, many people struggle with spouses being absent, so I’m grateful mine recognizes this need and is supportive.

In the home, I can also be a bit of a jumpy wild thing. With only my partner present, my guard is let down a little - he seems to be the only person who can regularly sneak up on me! He’s learned not to touch me if I’m facing away and not expecting it, or pop around a doorway, simultaneously speaking and jumpscare me. We’ve both learned that some feral part of my brain feels frantic if cornered, so I don’t like to be blocked in if I’m in a small room or the corner of the counter. It’s amusing in one sense - that is, that these are almost identical rules to handling rules often taught to handlers of captive canids. But it’s also annoying and feels silly to be so neurotic we have to set guidelines like this. Still, my spouse is happy to comply and very thoughtful about trying to help. I suppose most couples have to work around things that are tough for one another.

For us, another hurdle is sensory difficulties. I can be very sensitive, particularly to sound and smell. Sometimes the world can feel overwhelming and make me want to bolt into the brush. All of these things can be frustrating, but if it bothers him, he doesn’t show it and is compassionate in helping me find solutions.

The hobbies of a scavenger could likewise be a barrier to a relationship. People know canines can be gross. But it takes a special kind of person to be relaxed about their partner and not just their pets bringing dead critters home, eating strange foods, or dumpster diving. I warned my partner about the squirrel I’d stashed in our freezer after scooping up the roadkill on a morning run, smuggling the stiff rodent home bagged up under my hoodie. He barely blinked. Another day in the life, I suppose?

I’m a lucky dog in that my mate not only celebrates all the weird feral quirks I have, but gives back so much of what a canine person would hope for - affection, play, attentiveness, and frank, honest communication. A canine wants a partnership, a teammate who both respects your independence and will support you, share in your joy, and help when you need it. I think canine people tend toward partners that are truly their best friends, and I will be forever fortunate to have that in my marriage. It’s the kind of love that multiplies all joy and more than halves all sorrow. He not only makes my tail wag, but knows and loves that it does.

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Homologies

Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:08:02 GMT

Posted by: kisota

Homologies

In predawn glow alone, I take off at a brisk trot, floating in diagonal symmetry.

It’s about the closest I can come to peace in my body. Homologies are apparent – and there are many. Vertebrates are all built off the same body plan, the sum of modifications to the same blueprint. Natural selection guides our forms purposefully toward better survival and reproduction, crafting multitudes of shapes. But look closely and it’s recognizable we’re all cut from the same cloth, running on variations of the same foot.

Padded metatarsals. Digitigrade, at least for now.

Bipedalism, still half-baked evolutionarily, feels dissociated from the physical. I want to drop, feel the ground push back, engage my back. Dorso-ventral flattening of the rib cage is all wrong. I’m scrunched and stretched into a size and shape that can feel bizarre. But I’ve done the best I could with it. When the body discomfort peaked, I knew things might never be perfect, but they could be better. So I got fit, as close to the human equivalent of a coyote’s lean-muscled form as possible.

Latissimus dorsi, serratus, obliques, the sleek torso definition of a canid or hominid. Functional strength.

I hit the transition from pavement to packed dirt. Dawn warms the horizon with rosy glow. Liminal space, liminal time, somewhere human and animal. The pond will be frozen soon. My legs power on.

Soleus, gastrocnemius. Achilles tendons springing. Calcaneus, that hammer of civilization that beats ungracefully, ungratefully, on soil dense with death.

My breath floats to frost my hair and neck warmer, that makeshift ruff. I let my jaw open to pull in more air, smelling frost and decay.

Temporalis. But what are they without a sagittal crest as anchor? Rostrum nearly absent, nasals truncated. Canines a bit ironic. Pinnae pitiful.

But the pieces are mostly there. And it’s possible, even with limited hardware, to catch a vole, a whiff of old cottonwood, a rustle of magpies. As I crest the highest ridge, the sun strikes just the treetops. I take it in with eyes lacking the tapetum lucidum, that eye-mirror that would catch more dusky pre-dawn light, but with the cones to appreciate red and orange and peach hues of daybreak. My breath ragged from climb, I pause to savor the instant before treading on.

The path forks and I take the overgrown one littered with detritus. Here the tall grasses ripple along ribcage, and the vegetation is thick even when barren. It’s here we cross paths.

A flash of motion. Slipping through the brush, a wraith in every shade of dust and senescent grass. A pause. Molten gold gaze. Just that moment, and then he’s gone, winding between the blades to become invisible again.

I pad along, striding over familiar roots and ducking overgrown branches. Muscle memory. I know he’s still in the field somewhere, also running, sharing this cursorial lifestyle molded by evolution. But I keep moving. People will be awake soon, and here with their dogs, and we both would like to be gone by then. The sun spreads across the tips of the grass just as I turn back into the neighborhood, back into shadows.

By the time I return, the morning is in full swing. Slowing to a walk, I take a few deep breaths.

I shed down to skin and step inside, civilized enough for now.

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The Omnivore’s Opportunity

Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:06:55 GMT

Posted by: kisota

The Omnivore’s Opportunity

A coyote-person’s experience with food

There’s a stereotype that canines are all stomachs on legs. Barry Lopez wrote that wolves are “more or less always hungry,” being adapted to a feast-or-famine existence and therefore continuously scoping for the next chance to eat. Food is survival.

Coyote hunger comes in that ever-present way, where senses are constantly calibrated to sense danger and opportunity. I’ve been told I’m observant, but really, that sensory sensitivity means the world is just big and loud to me, frequently bordering on overwhelming. On the bright side, it’s a bit funny to spot a miniature peanut butter cup on the ground from a moving car, even if all the movement and traffic are simultaneously making me on edge.

Ubiquitous food in modern America means that the feasting-fasting habits of the wild predator aren’t necessary. But I’ve found it useful to mimic that lifestyle anyway, through intermittent fasting. Long hours in the field for work can feel like the roaming of the local wildlife, and I’ve found myself a little keener, a little more focused, when I’m not snacking. A larger meal at the end of ten or twelve miles in the heat is satisfyingly like finally filling up after a long day on the hunt.

The urge to snap up every opportunity especially didn’t serve me well during grad school. I had to train myself out of taking advantage of every office snack - a world of excess means having to use restraint against the urges that would in other places or times be beneficial. But at least office snacks are pretty socially acceptable things to grab. The scavenging urge also appears in much more literal ways – in restaurants, parking lots, roadsides, dumpsters. To walk past a pristine abandoned basket of naan in an Indian restaurant is difficult, and I’ve nicked some when I can – less so post-pandemic! The sense of all the waste of the world and all the squandered resources creates a real sense of stress in me, one that I can’t explain from any actual food insecurity in my life.

The impulse to take advantage of easy opportunities is sometimes even less socially acceptable. At least once I’ve found myself, pulled over on some rural road, gripping my steering wheel as I have to sit and reason with myself why I can’t take a freshly hit deer. Some of that desire has at least been satisfied in dreams, trotting through grass or the snowy edges of a forest where I’ve sampled long-dead elk, stringy and wind-dried, or hunted rabbits. I even dream vividly enough to feel and taste. In luckier waking circumstances, I’ve been fortunate to be able to salvage smaller roadkill (in accordance with safety protocols and local regulations – after all, a dream carcass is safe to go face-first into, but a real one carries real dangers). And while “freeganism” has caught on somewhat, you’re still likely to raise a few eyebrows by salvaging even the most intact food from a dumpster. That waste-not-want-not philosophy leaks into my lifestyle in general, and I have recovered everything from a charcoal grill to backpacks, aquariums, and shelving units from the trash.

Of course, the scavenging isn’t really the primary strategy of the coyote. Coyotes are predators, and predatory impulses toward things that register as “food” are something I can remember dealing with even as a kid. But the chase and eating drives are somewhat separate even in animals. So it’s possible to satisfy the desire to “hunt” independent of eating – hobbies like insect collection and herping can help with that. Fishing is even better, and while traditional hunting has been somewhat inaccessible to me, a certain amount of vicarious satisfaction comes from hawking with falconer friends. Beating the brush to scare up game is a wonderful way to feel the pleasure of cooperative hunting.

The omnivory of the coyote comes out in gustatory adventurousness as well. There’s little I don’t like and less I won’t try. Generally my objections are more ethical than from squeamishness. Insects, offal, fermented foods, peated whiskeys and sour beers, even exotic things like balut are on the menu. When I do find something that’s offputting, I work on training myself out of the aversion, which has expanded my tastes even further. I’m always on the lookout for something new to try. Learning to take advantage of all the food on offer had the side effect of bolstering my interest in cooking. Trying new techniques, food substitutions, and recipes from around the world is very satisfying to the coyote’s curious stomach.

Though I can’t indulge every feral urge around eating, the modern world is a wonderland of novel resources for the human coyote. Even if I can’t hunt with my own fangs, I can still eat my own catches. I can schedule my eating to feel my best. I have access to many of the coyote’s natural foods. Better yet, I can have those foods off-season and know with some certainty that they’re safe. So, while I do live with challenges around my perceptions and desires around food, there are ways to mitigate the struggles and cultivate a more positive perspective. With care, a coyote can exult in the boundless novelty and opportunity of the human culinary world.

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The Gracile Wolf

Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:04:03 GMT

Posted by: kisota

The Gracile Wolf

“Coyotes, it turns out, are also a kind of wolf.”
- Dan Flores, Coyote America

gracile (/ˈɡrasəl,ˈɡraˌsīl/): adj. slender, thin in build.

Wolf seemed the obvious answer, as it does for many people. As a preteen, my journal entries started referring to the animal – replacing felines in my mind as the pre-eminent beast. In short, I was a wolfaboo before the phenomenon, let alone the word, existed.

So when I first came across the term “therianthrope” and began to understand that there was a word for the way I felt about myself, that persistent animal self-perception, I didn’t initially think to look any further than the wolf.

It wasn’t too long before I started having doubts. I’d felt more animal than human all my life, playing as and seeing myself in a broad variety of creatures, including wolves. But wolf wasn’t something that had been consistent or really matched my typical “baseline” in some ways. For one, the hulking size and robustness of the wolf didn’t align with my feeling that my body should be lithe and relatively slight. I’d also started to realize that while I’d originally thought group-hunting and sociality were central to my experience of animal, that may have been another idealization. The truth was that I often wanted to be alone, and the animal in my head seemed social but mostly self-reliant.

So I started to consider the red fox. There were certainly some improvements! The sleek, light body, so much smaller. Some climbing ability – almost catlike. That was really appealing to me, since I’d spent so much of my earlier childhood feeling distinctly more cat than dog. I could even remember times embracing fox feelings as a kid. It seemed a proper marriage of feelings old and new, canine and feline. And foxes were not as driven by social structure.

Yet, though I also admired foxes, there was something a bit foreign about them. The body language doesn’t ring true. Their sounds, from the vixen’s woman-like scream to the bizarre fight-sound known as “gekkering”, don’t match up. Foxes don’t even have the facial muscles to lift their lips into a snarl. The deeply omnivorous habits of the fox and its tendency to hunt bite-size critters didn’t really resonate with my hungry desires for anything up to and including bison. And foxes were maybe too solitary.

I was stymied. Here were two animals I’d felt strongly about throughout my life, animals that matched how I felt myself in some ways, animals I’d like to be, that somehow weren’t quite a fit. Most of the animals I’d felt closest to as a kid were even farther from my current self.

Staccato notes in the dark,
Violin voices of a summer night.
I’m picking my way toward the bonfire, electric with wild energy, crossing a ditch across a makeshift bridge. I emerge from the shadows of trees into the clearing and it’s like entering some magical space sequestered from the normal world and bounded by ethereal elements of nature itself.
Fire emanates and crackles.
Have I never heard the coyotes before?

I’d never given much thought to coyotes. I liked them, surely, and I remember touching the pelt at the local nature center with a particular appreciation. But I’d not had any personal experience with them, and besides thinking of them as one of the more appealing of the local fauna, I had no special connection to them. Coyotes seemed kind of mundane, common, with little reverence paid to them - vermin to the locals of my hometown. “Smoke a pack a day,” as the bumper sticker says next to the outline of a coyote. My own mother talked about the ones she saw in California as mangy and scrawny.

But I remember contemplating coyote one night, laying in my bed and trying to envision my body in that form. There was an odd sort of comfort; maybe something clicked. Here was something I hadn’t considered before, something that contained elements of the wolf that still felt so close to a match, as well as the fox that contained some of the other, more delicate features and generalist traits that mirrored my experiences.

“Molded by nature into the perfect combination of fox and wolf, the coyote’s long muzzle and perky ears have enabled it to be a highly efficient mouser, while sharp canid teeth and exceptional speed strike fear in ungulates.” – Todd Wilkinson, “Track of the Coyote”

I didn’t embrace it early on. Wolf had a strong pull, a whole mythology. Foxes and even cats were more appealing. Frankly, I didn’t want to be a coyote. I even remember an older wolf-person on a forum calling them “wannabe wolves.”

I guess the persistence of the coyote pays off. And after all, the coyote is a type of wolf itself.
So what does coyote actually feel like, then? Mark Twain called the coyote “a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray wolfskin stretched over it,” and that’s the most flattering part of his description!
But, in fairness, there’s a sort of scrappiness. The coyote possesses neither the hefty paws nor the deep keel of the wolf’s chest. The paws are light and long, narrow compared to a dog of the same size. There’s a buoyancy, a lightness that is tangible. Deft and nimble. Without the need for marathon-running ungulates regularly, a coyote doesn’t need the deep chest and huge lungs of the wolf. No, the coyote is streamlined, shallow-chested, narrow through the ribs, so that a coyote resting in the sun can appear to have deflated.
The sleekness follows from tip to tail. A slender muzzle, less square and bulky than a wolf’s. Proportionately long teeth and large eyes, tall, expressive, pointed ears. Thin and leggy, a coyote is often mistaken for underfed.

The energy of a coyote seems to be constantly in tension. When I worked with captive canids, it was always the coyotes I saw up and about during any hours of the day. They’d get up and move around at any time, brightly alert and seeking anything there could be to perceive. I feel that restlessness and alertness like a tightly-wound spring in me. Sprightly, busy, almost frenetic at times – coyote is motion. I joke that my 5-kilometer runs at dawn are what I need to take the edge off and be a less insane person to have to live with. But it’s true that coyote is the antithesis of stagnation.

That high-voltage intensity and comes through in the way the coyote moves, too, not just the amount of motion. A captive coyote requires more extensive fencing than a wolf; in addition to their anti-gravity pogo-stick jumps, they have another bizarre and satisfyingly catlike habit: climbing. Much like the occasional escape artist husky, a coyote can learn to hook its feet in a chain link fence and ladder-climb out. They’re also known to climb trees – maybe not with the dexterity of a red fox, and certainly not with the semi-retractable claws and flexible wrists of the grey fox, but coyotes will still hop and climb, paw over paw, limb by limb, 20 feet or more into a tree for apples or pears.

On the ground, the coyote is a swirl of silver-tawny-cream wind. Coyotes at play are almost ribbonlike, lithe bodies bending and twirling, banner tail-brushes waving. A coyote is light on its feet, the fleet rogue class to the wolf’s sturdy fighter.
As in body, the coyote is flexible in behavior. This plasticity is part of what has made them so successful, even in circumstances where larger and more aggressive predators have failed. Coyote deftly adapts to the situation at hand.
One way that is apparent is socially. The sociality of the wolf is basically compulsory; they are large enough that coordinated hunting of large ungulates is a regular and essentially required part of their schedule. As a result of that, the social group is more rigid, more necessary.

That’s not to say that the coyote isn’t a social creature. In fact, they more or less follow the basic family-group pattern of wolves. But the coyote is socially flexible, and that resonates. Coyote embraces interaction with gesticulation, enthusiasm, exaggerated facial expressions. Reading the room. Code-switching. But when it’s time to go, solitude suits the coyote as well. Loneliness can hurt, but you can flip the narrative and savor it, too.

The coyote is also a mesopredator – that is, a mid-sized carnivore, not the apex, not the all-consuming corner of the food web to which all arrows eventually point. I think ego can get in the way of people seeing mesopredators in themselves – everyone seems to want to think of themselves as top dog. But this evolutionary history as underdogs might be part of the secret to the coyote’s success. Coyote knows how to kill and how to avoid being killed. There’s a tension between threat and opportunity, fear and curiosity, boldness and caution. I often feel my senses are like an exposed nerve in the universe, with narrow thresholds before the input overwhelms. And the startle reflex - hair-trigger, but with quick recovery. It’s important to a coyote to be ready to instantly seize an opportunity or dodge a threat.

That moderate size means a flexible prey base, too. Insects through ungulates all trigger that kind of bunching-muscle predatory eagerness. I remember feeling that way even as a kid, though there’s always been a strange conflict between the desire to chase, even to kill, and the (probably uniquely human) empathy that makes that prospect difficult to consider.

Insect catching and “herping,” the reptile and amphibian enthusiast’s more hands-on equivalent to birding, are useful outlets for those chase impulses. Hunting and fishing are thankfully accessible as well, and the ability to be humane alleviates some of the internal conflict.
While I still continue to have that shapeshifter feeling of experiencing a broad variety of animal feelings – including fox and wolf among many others – coyote continues to be a good representation of the baseline around which my sense of self balances. I feel coyote in all the flexibility and opportunity-seeking in my life. Learning to adapt and be comfortable being uncomfortable for a time is a coyote’s road to success. Coyote is burning curiosity, immune to morbidity or squeamishness, the desire to perceive and experience all there is and to learn from it, good or bad. It is a lot of the things wolf is: gregarious, playful, predatory, intelligent. But coyote is a different sort of wolf – the small, streamlined generalist, the ultimate survivor, the curious and adaptable seeker. Recognition of my inner coyote was a valuable development in knowing myself, and it continues to help me live better.

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A very late intro!

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 15:17:40 GMT

Posted by: kisota

Hello! I understand Animal Quills hasn’t been truly active in a while, but since I’m hoping to add some of my writings here, I figured I should post an intro for anyone who wanders by.

I’m Kiso. I’m a coyote person and what the community calls a “shapeshifter” - ie, my experiences flux around and I experience a variety of animals in addition to the base feeling of coyote. In my case, it’s often other canids (my experiences vary enough that “coyote” is really just the best way to encapsulate the center, but it slides more wolf or fox at times). Sometimes other carnivores - especially felids - show up too, and birds, and more besides.

I’ve been in online therianthrope spaces for over 20 years now, with generally fairly limited engagement. I’m much more interested in hearing about other people’s experiences and in the nature of having a self at all than in meta-discussions about the community itself, terminology, or who does or doesn’t belong.

So I’ve been trying to contribute by putting more out there myself! It’s rather beyond my comfort zone. I really admired all the personal writings I read back in the 00’s but have never felt I could accomplish the same or really had anything valuable to say. But I will try all the same!

I also like to contribute a lot of art - masks, digital art, handcrafted pieces. Art has always been a huge part of my expression and I love sharing that enjoyment with other people.

I spend a lot of time outside both for work and fun, and my relationship with the land is also a big part of being animal for me. I love to hike and camp when I can, I’m a “herper”, and I collect and clean skulls (which I also often provide to other animal people, in true scavenger fashion, haha).

I’m looking forward to dropping writings here as I complete them. I’ve long been happy that this group exists and would love to have my own work included.

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Alternatives: Pathfinding

Tue, 21 Apr 2015 02:56:45 GMT

Posted by: sonne_windsoul

[Sort of ramblings tonight that turned into something I felt worth posting in some places.]

Animality, or more accurately, human-animality, is such an essential part of who I am: my very life, self, mind, and soul are painted with it and have been that way ever since at least my early childhood. It’s not just therianthropy or being otherkin. It’s not just liking or having a connection to animals or even “animalistic-humanoids”. It’s not a fetish or being a fan. It’s the life-blood of me, and though I can describe aspects of it with certain descriptors and labels, it ultimately goes above and beyond those terms and runs deeper than maybe I have tended to want to admit to myself, let alone others. Why, oh why, have I consistently remained feeling like I am “out of place” or lacking a sense of belonging amongst otherkin, therians, and nonhuman fictionkin (and fictives), seemingly no matter what their ‘type(s) or what they share about their views and experiences? Granted, yes, I’ve felt connection to such people and online communities—I still do—and I genuinely care about members and groups of individuals in such communities as I’ve sympathized and empathized with them, which has led me to offer what efforts, help, and resources I have contributed in the past (at this point) about 10 years. And yet, there remains something major, something fundamental, missing for me that these ‘communities’ have come closer to satisfying than any other people, interests, or communities I’ve come across thus far, but that still doesn’t change the fact that it’s not “enough”. But I don’t even know what “enough” would actually be, let alone how or where to find it, if it even *can* be found.

The focus of my Tumblr blog “Shifting Animality” fits, in general, much more what I’m seeking and wanting to express, but it’s not just what others can so far see on that blog, but also dozens of other posts, many are text-based, some of them by me, that I have saved under drafts, as I wait for the “right time” to post them—waiting for more or maybe the ‘right’ people to follow the blog who will really appreciate that content and, most especially, engage me in discussion about it. However, it’s also on Tumblr, so the likelihood of getting that better or deeper discussion is unfortunately rather low, even if the medium in ways allows me to potentially have better capacity to reach out and find others of similar mind to share thoughts with. Why does my damn mind have to have such specific needs for a kind of people that are so hard to find and seemingly so few in this world? Yet the need is something that remains in me, unshakably, regardless of what I do or don’t do—regardless of pushing it away, desperately hiding it from everyone even trying to hide it to extents from myself for the better part of 20 years or more, and sometimes shaming myself for it (or parts of it). Sure, I could try to “move on” from the therian and otherkin communities to focus on trying to satisfy this similar but different need and desire, but I haven’t even *found* a place or people to move on *to*.

I’ve offered my help, my writings and thoughts, and so forth in the therian and ‘kin communities for years in large part as a means to reduce the isolation that numerous other therians/’kin can and do feel. And within the past few years, I’ve come to realize that I, myself, am still isolated too much when it comes to various things regarding my human-animality, and no resources, discussions, increased acceptance in the communities, higher diversity within them, or individuals have managed to remove that feeling.

It also doesn’t help that since probably my early childhood some part of me has felt like I, in essence, “should” be physically nonhuman, humanoid, and it’s of course something that I can never actually have—I completely realize and understand that, yet consciously knowing such doesn’t ultimately take away the subconscious longing for me to be, physically, ability-wise, behaviorally, etc. something humanoid but not actually human. I don’t actually see my body or human life as a “cage”, and I don’t want superficial body modifications to try to somewhat satisfy my longing, as those aren’t what I’m looking for either. No one will ever be able to really see me for who and what I feel I really am—a sentiment that I know many therians, otherkin, and fictionkin can relate to, among others. But maybe when that’s stacked along with other issues in my life, my future, my goals, and so forth, it makes the reality of it harder to bear, especially chronically. I’m already feeling like I’m basically “floating” through life with no real, set direction, and have been for years, so anything that additionally makes me feel more isolated is enhanced and made significantly more difficult to bear.

What do I want—sincerely, deeply want—at this time? I’m not actually sure—I keep trying to figure that out and keep coming up with no answer or something too cryptic for me to yet decipher. However, I can at least say that: I long and crave to have my art and art muse back and well alive again (I fucking miss that so much), and I want to be able to let my human-animality SING through my art (in whatever form) without me goddamn worrying about how others may view it or respond to it. To let me throw parts of myself in depth and detail, symbolically into my visual art, poetry and poetic prose, and personal essays and tossing them out in some form of public view for others to see and react to, and to not feel like I’m losing pieces of myself or making them vulnerable, but instead *strengthening* and enhancing parts of myself. I would love for others to find inspiration in my artistic ideas and these aesthetic displays of my soul-parts, and maybe actually get to connect with some of those people and find notable similarity, possibly even friendship or more.

I don’t want my art muse to be hidden, scared, and near-comatose anymore—I haven’t wanted it to be stuck like that for years and years—and I wonder if somehow pouring myself into my art through a lens heavily colored in human-animality is a way to significantly help bring it back from its place of high vulnerability. No bigger, especially other-people-changing goal here: just to be able to use my art to throw myself out ‘there’, open-armed and exposed, and not regretting it or shaming myself for it, and to stand through it time and again in confidence—increased confidence—for somehow “showing” parts of my true self to the world that I can never show by other means. To not be so damn “hidden” and loving myself for doing it.

I am a creature of fantasy, of fiction, of humanity and nonhumanity, monstrous and not, and these things do not need to be physical reality for me—they are parts of me, my very Soul, and I continue to live with them entwined and melded into my essence and being. Wings, claws, fangs, feathers and fur, ferality and domesticity, angels, monsters, chimeric creatures, prey and predator, guides and guardians of spirit and animal; they’re all, and more, parts of me that can’t be seen remotely near the surface but are integrated into the foundations and pillars of that which is Me. And this is something to embrace and appreciate within myself, not to continually disguise and hide from everyone in nearly any form for the rest of my life.

I don’t want to *shout* my Self to the world, but I do want to let myself breathe and sing it into my art where it can have some form of expression and escape for those more obscured parts of me.

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Werelist Art and Writing Contest

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 05:03:52 GMT

Posted by: feralkiss

I usually avoid posting anything in here other than actual writings so as to not clutter the community with "publicity", but this actually works: the Werelist is hosting an "Art and Writing Contest" at the moment. I thought people in here may be interested; feel free to post your submission on Animal Quills if it falls in the "written work" category - the contest welcomes entries posted offsite and linked to.

The Great Werelist Art and Writing Contest of Fall 2014, which lasts from the fall equinox to the winter solstice, is now officially started. The rules are simple: You submit a piece of writing or art, and a the end of the contest period, it gets voted upon, earning you a nifty prize (we do not currently have prizes officially lined up, but we had at least one person offer to do prizes for the short contest done previously, so we should be able to officially put up prizes soon).

The theme for this contest is the way we relate to our theriotype’s species. These should, preferably, not be guides like the ones on Project Shift. While those are an important form of literature in the therian community, this contest is not designed for them.

Entries are split into two parts: visual and literary. Visual art covers anything visual, whether sculpture, masks, drawing, glassworking, or carving. Literary covers poetry and other creative writing. At the end of the period, we will have a two week voting phase conducted via anonymous poll (though if you wish, you’re welcome to state your reason for favoring a particular piece), after which the top three entries in each category will be officially acknowledged.

Entries may either be hosted offsite and linked to, or posted in their own topic (or as part of a topic you’ve made a while back for your art/writing). If you are hosting your entry offsite, to make sure we see it PM the url to either myself or Mobius. If it’s put in a topic here, either PM myself or Mobius a link to the post, or add the tag “fall-2014-contest” to the topic.

Entries must be original and created during the period of this contest, though they don’t have to be done specifically for this contest (if you drew something which qualifies for some other reason, you are welcome to submit it).

This may be reposted or linked to on other sites (LiveJournal, Dreamwidth, et cetera) to gain traffic.

-- Citrakayah

The original topic: http://www.werelist.net/forums/showthread.php?t=34277

If you have any question on whether your stuff is appropriate material for the contest, or any other doubt, please contact citrakayah.

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Fox is like a companion.

Mon, 15 Sep 2014 12:29:54 GMT

Posted by: foxboi

Mods, I apologize if I've already crossposted this here- checked, and at a glance it did not look so.

Fox is like a companion.

Sometimes we are one as one can be, just me with pointed flicked back (but usually only one) ears; all my teeth at the ready to smell the wind and neatly flick-and-curl around every leaf in the forest on my way home. Or persons in a crowd, more likely.

Sometimes, we are less we, but halfway only me, in an odd ephemeral place that doesn't really distinguish itself well to words or thoughts. Not an in-between point, but still a liminality.

Sometimes, I'm just borrowing a little extra silence powder; my feet are no longer all toes and flat, but tiny lit-in-the-night pinpricks of pressure, the kind of... - remember when you did this on all fours in another life, in another book, many moons ago? You remember how it is to fly sing and dance so now let's combine all of those and put on a soundless (mundane) show of being invisible and stealing those damn sweet things and getting away. Cross reference.

Fox is I, me, companion, not separate, always there, sometimes sleeping like a cat-yawn-stretch-turn. Sometimes dis-consciously forgotten, but never never never not there.

I notice. Others don't unless they're animal too, and even then, we don't read minds, just habits and quirks and, if we're good at it, smells.

(Fox guide is sometimes not there, despairingly empty and I'll keep on trotting forward into my sleep without whispers of guidance, but it's not His or their jobs to be there all the time - just send me mail every once in a while with ordinary things like the milk and my groceries.)

It is my job to listen, always.

It's come to a point where, like learning literary theory, though I'm very capable, intelligent, even by about half of the people I know's standards, I still feel like I've gotten tired of distinguishing between things, tired of the specifics, tired of having to retell a story of an ever-changing beautiful picture.

(Can't you just see all of those be’s and inbetween’s and really - just go and fucking read the whole book will you already? It's all there, I’m all here, plain as day, dusk, and night. I’m separated and distinguished in flames and pages and phrases, writing for myself and you, except, I don’t really have to for myself, so why do I describe and redescribe myself to you?

I feel as if I should be present in your imagination, crystalline, legible… I should I should- But I know this and I may also be dismayingly as clear as mud.)

I don't feel this feeling that I do now in a deflated sort of way for the most part, but really, I know all these atoms and thoughts and furs are one and one only and I can see the parts and pieces, not usually all at once, but I'm slow and aging-edging away from wanting to try and gather words to describe the flash of teeth that are snapping in a strong stance, or just the melting into a warm cozy space and sometimes curling belly up... - back scratches are really the best.

(I digress…)

And the best may simply be to just be and quit describing. It's one thing to want to excavate and discover, another to just feel and be and record the occasional thought that is usually forgotten until it's rust-melded into its surroundings.

I do not like being prompted and forced to search for my calendar and toolbag of words, but every time I read something, it prompts me to have pictures and sounds that jangle in front of my eyes, only to skitter away when it's time that I decide yes, I have enough of these that I could take my ark and rebuild the world in a paragraph.

Fox is an intersection of body, physicality, tweaked and colourful mentality. Fox is with me always, when I'm lonely, sad, - maybe then I don't feel so lonely, except they-and-we also feel lonely so it's twice as lonely sometimes. An odd distinguishing thing, we are.

Him and I; I and me.

(We're wild gods, you and I.)

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Intro from a snow leopard person

Thu, 26 Sep 2013 23:30:34 GMT

Posted by: mountainghost

Hello all. I’ve lurked around AQ a bit now and found this to be a wonderful and thought provoking collection of writing from animal people, so I thought it was about time I introduced myself and stared doing a little more writing if I can.

In simple terms, I could call myself a snow leopard person. A year ago, I embarked on a six week snow leopard conservation project in Siberia that I initiated myself. I scaled steep, snowy scree slopes in the biting wind for the chance to stand for a moment by a shallow snow leopard scrape and drink in the views on the edge of Mongolia. It was an unforgettable experience to live in snow leopard country and listen to the locals speak of them and of their own lives, and I’ll do my best to relay some of those stories at some point if there is interest. I’ve given a good number of lectures on snow leopard conservation in my area and have spent years pouring over journal articles, following current research projects and developing personal relationships with those in the snow leopard conservation community. In other words, if you have snow leopard questions or just want to talk about them, ask and I’m quite sure I won’t be able to stop talking. I fervently look forward to the next time that I can heed the siren call back to central Asia…back to snow leopard country.

I experience the “shifts” and “phantom limbs”, so-to-speak, of those who feel deeply bonded with a species, though it’s at times exasperating to me to feel like I’m parroting back the same words I hear on forums. However, I’ve long felt more comfortable behind the pale grey-green eyes of a snow leopard and the physical features perpetually flow, ebb and mingle with my own. In short, my bond is with the reality of the flesh-and-blood animal; the snow leopard as it is, to the extent we’ll ever understand them.

My experiences and perception of reality don’t stop at being a snow leopard person, though that can be wordy to explain, so I’ll refrain from doing so here. In my mind I experience forms, animals and elements of the natural world from a variety of perspectives almost constantly, so the content of my stories will range far beyond only snow leopards. Essentially, snow leopards represent my strongest bond with a species on an emotional level, but in a more general sense any other natural form is something my mind lives to explore, with a focus more on the physicality aspects.

A few tidbits about me, to get a sense for the person behind this blurb: I’m a recent college graduate with a degree in geology (and almost in biology as well in all but name). My partner and I just moved into a new place and for the time being I’m dabbling in some things, teaching a fencing class, and exploring the idea of freelance travel writing on the side while I go through the process of researching grad school options. I’m a bit of a dabbler by nature, especially when it comes to all things science so I don’t know what might catch my interest next. I recently worked for a paleontology lab and some environmental remediation projects and before that an immunology lab and a planetary science lab (got to work with date from the Phoenix mission!). I hope to head in the direction of environmental conservation, perhaps with some travel writing on the side, but really, anything that allows travel, excessive outdoor time and the ability to work on snow leopard conservation projects at least as a hobby…that’s all I need.

I’ll close with random stuff I guess. I’ve fenced on the national level for most of my life and I also love sailing, skiing and windsurfing dearly. I also have adorable pet rats, nothing makes me happier than the fall/ early winter season, my boyfriend and I have big plans to someday construct our own part-treehouse, off-grid (as much as possible) home and we semi-seriously want pet emus someday. We have a wonderful habit of trekking off to barely-planned nowhere and setting up camp for the weekend, preferably during the winter. Snow camping! I will try any food at least once, including the horse sausage, barely cooked pig entrails and Mongolian yak cheese I consumed more than once in Russia. My rock/mineral/fossil collection is growing faster than I can manage. I’m very serious in my goal of hiking the Annapurna circuit and also visiting Hemis National Park, among other travel goals in the region. I dream of long-term “useful project” travel, as opposed to being a tourist for two weeks in a place. I…can’t stand chocolate but ginger is my one true food weakness.

That’s enough for an introduction I think. I love to talk when I find the time, and I tend to write in bursts, so posts are likely to be relatively infrequent, but lengthy. Hello again!

PS. I like to go by Ghost online, as tribute to the “ghosts of the mountain” as snow leopards are sometimes called. Their rarity is not romanticized mystery, as the name might imply, but rather in part a result of the challenges the species faces in the wild. The name is out of respect for them.

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I am not the grace of the doe, draft II

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 02:18:07 GMT

Posted by: yourdeer

(Rewritten to minimize rant, to add more of my own experiences, and to try to make the words a little prettier. Hoping to submit to the call for therian writings.)

There is a beautiful and romanticized image of the doe: she is graceful, elegant, and delicate. She is shy and unattainable, disappearing softly at the slightest sound. Her eyes are a cliche for the vulnerable, docile feminine, and a glimpse of her, staring back at you for a profound moment before she flies, is precious and moving.

I am not this doe.

In a way, I hate this doe, because no doe is really this doe. This doe is all loveliness, and when we think of her as real, we are ignoring that deer are animals with all the smelly, uncomfortable, awkward, violent, and inescapable truths of being a living animal.

When I ignore those truths I feel like a liar. I have never found it good, in myself, to pretend that what is pleasurable is not also without grace or dignity, or that what is often visceral or disgusting is not also beautiful or pleasurable. To pretend that all is sweet and beautiful is to halve my joys and bury truths, whether it is about humans or deer.

Does are not all gentleness or vulnerability. They are fussily aggressive and can easily be called cruel by human standards. In the hungry depth of winter, a healthy doe, a survivor able to stand her ground against others of her kind, will certainly do so. She will actively prevent other does and fawns from food, even if she has had her fill. She will fend a starving family away from food she has claimed, and wait until they have left before walking away from the excess.

Nor do deer always flee in the face of danger - several accounts chronicle deer attacking dogs and humans when threatened, in some cases quite brutally. Not many animals hold up closely to their romanticized stereotypes when their survival is put into question, but the desperate deer can be the exact opposite of its gentle popular image. Its slim, delicate hoofs become formidable and unexpected weapons that bruise, lacerate, and break bones. There is no obviously toothy snarl – with no top teeth, an open mouth is not incredibly threatening – there is less expression in the face than in thin legs flailing and aimed to hurt.

In these, I know my distrust and the unexpectedness of it when I express anger. I know the stamp and the annoyance of simply remaining unwelcoming until someone I dislike just goes away. I know the attack that is dormant until one of my own, rather than me, is threatened. I know the unpleasantness of social distrust and dislike that is present in most creatures, but I know it in the often-quiet, near-expressionlessness of deer.

The deer is no peaceful vegetarian. We now know that deer do kill, sometimes to eat, and that they will scavenge corpses – in winter, yes, but also in the rich-grassed summer. The beached fish, the young grounded bird, the dead rabbit or pile of refuse have all found their way into the deer’s ruminant stomach.

I have never linked my diet and the deer’s – there are few things that are as wonderfully, pleasantly human to me as the way we prepare food. And yet we are both omnivores, and I take some pleasure in knowing that there is no “only this” or “none of that” even in the deer’s diet.

Deer are not always shy or skittish, nor does shyness equate to solitude. There is coalition between the whitetail and the turkey; there is play with rabbits or raccoons; there is tolerance of the lone coyote or the harmless pet dog. There is not even always shyness of humans – as many longsuffering suburban or rural gardeners can attest to. The safe deer can be a bold one or a friendly one, and deer have been known to take social interest in many other species including geese, rabbits, and cats, among others.

The deer that is bold in safety is the deer that I am. Skittish and untrusting until someone has proven themselves to be no threat, I have utter openness with those closest to me – I can do exactly as I like, most of the time, and fear nothing. And as the deer, I like to keep those I feel safe amongst close to me.

Deer are not all grace and preciousness. They are cervids, and cervids are very olfactory animals. As deer, to communicate is to smell; as nonhuman mammal, a primary tool in this communication is urine. To advertise one’s presence is to wallow in one’s own fluids or to mark one’s hoofs with urine. Courting, and therefore mating and surviving, is dependent on what we might think of as a disgusting fact. And yet we would not have deer without it.

As a human, it puzzles me to be leery of sex fluids. Barring concerns related to pregnancy or diseases, it is an alien concept to that some may enjoy sex but be discomfited by the thing that gives the activity its smell, its texture. Thankfully, I do not need to use urine to communicate my interest in my partner, but to rid myself of the smells of sex is a sad thing. It may be a human impulse, but knowing that the deer does what it can to strengthen its smell during the rut allows me to accept my own tendency to wallow in the smell of the body.

It is rare that in the realm of animals we see a mating that we can call romantic or dignified. Deer are no exception whatsoever. And in the indignity of the mating animal, I can remember that the cultural image of human sex as a flawless, seamlessly, gracefully passionate event is only a construct by omission. The undignified vocalization, the silly sound or awkward movement, is no less wonderful than the more idealized aspects of the experience: I know this in the grunt and bellow and low-thrust neck of the deer.

The grace of the doe, the elegance, is not what makes me deer. The romantic stereotype exists, certainly: A deer does flee, and I do usually feel more inclined to flight than to stand ground. The deer can be elegant, and there are times when I feel lightness of foot and ease of movement in a tall, heavy-boned but lithe body. The deer is vulnerable, and I feel vulnerable in the way that I recognize deer are very, very easy to kill – living in a rural place with a deer population larger than the human one, I saw a great deal of dead deer, and the mortality of the whitetail was impossible to ignore in a hunting community that also supports a healthy population of eastern coyotes.

And yet I do not feel graceful. Usually I feel colossally awkward, and something about deer speaks of that awkwardness to me. Being spooked about nothing, the awkward indignation of being disturbed, the skittering flight, the leggy leaps and funny-mouthed chewing – these are all deer. Some of these things are aspects of the romantic stereotype, but I do not perceive them in a romantic way. I do not think being deer makes me beautiful, desirable, or delicate.

To believe that being deer is a naked positive, without its stupid, its gross, its unpleasant-to-think-of, is to lie. Yes, there are things about deer that I think are lovely and ideal and that I relate to, often very much. I love the flick of the ears, the clarity of the gaze, the small cloven hoof poised not quite touching the ground, the flag of the tail, the sudden and fleeting bounding away. These are things that I can feel. But I can also feel the awkward stretch of the neck for browse, the indignation of being encroached upon, the need to hide, to flee, to fear. I can feel the undignified sound of the grunt and wheeze, the frozen discomfort of surprise and being caught in the headlights of night blindness, the flailing hoofs, and the hurried skitter away.

I can't deny the beauty and seriousness of feeling deer, or of following a deer path through the woods. I can't ignore the rough comfort of bark and the darkness of the woods’ smell, the depth of moss and flat beds in tall grass. But I also can't ignore that deer paths are liberally punctuated with droppings, that fur and gristle sticks to the front bumper for too long, that the deer’s bawl and bellow are ridiculous on the ears, or the way a buck’s carcass hangs without ceremony in November. The subtlety and quiet of the deer path, yet unavoidably littered with small piles of scat, for me, is an adequate metaphor for my experience of being doe: I can acknowledge the beautiful and wonderful, but must take into account the awkward and uncomfortable as well. I would not be deer if I could not accept both the loveliness and the unpleasantness of the doe.

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People Scare Me

Sun, 19 May 2013 14:56:15 GMT

Posted by: emilyshadowwalker

(I hope this is okay as a first post. It'd probably would have been more polite to do an introduction post first, but the guidelines weren't exactly clear about whether that was a requirement or not. If you require a certain clearance or acknowledgement before posting, I'd be more than happy to take this down/have it taken down)

Some therians subconsciously view people as prey. There’s a sense of superiority, an underlying knowledge that everybody around you is a step down on the food chain. They don’t acknowledge it, but it’s there all the same. In the wild, an ordinary lion is going to eat an average human. In a shopping centre surround by slightly overweight, lumbering, distracted people, a hungry lion would be having a field day. At the least, there’s an understanding that ‘I have teeth and claws and am bigger and stronger than you,’ which leaves a lot to be desired when there’s any possibility of a physical altercation.

You’d probably assume that on the other hand, there are therians that are instinctively afraid of humans. Maybe a wary, easily startled deer, or a rabbit, caught in the headlights. Maybe these therians flinch at sudden movements and sounds, or freeze and then skitter away when someone elbows into them in a crowded space.

As someone who identifies as a wolf, I fall into the latter category, perhaps surprisingly considering others I have spoken to. I have maintained, and will always maintain, that wolves; natural, wild wolves, are shit scared of people. A wolf isn’t going to attack a person. It’s going to run away at the very sound of someone approaching. And that’s the truth for me as well. I’m acclimatised to people. If someone walks into me, I can deal with it and internalise it, but that doesn’t mean there’s not a part of me that treats everyone as suspicious. I never really understood that, when you’re in a room and a stranger walks in why, do people automatically assume they’re okay?

Realistically, unless they’re wielding a sawn off shotgun, strangers in the same space as you are not out to get you. This isn’t paranoia, and your chances of getting murdered are statistically pretty low. However, that doesn’t necessarily make other people safe. They’re unpredictable and a little crazy, and the problem with being as I am is that I am all too painfully aware that my teeth are not well suited to biting, and I am not stronger than most people, and I am not even faster than people. If somebody limps, my eyes are drawn to them. If they are ill or weak or slow, there’s a certain manner of singling them out from the group. Yet even then there’s a knowledge that they are not easy prey. They are not to be underestimated.

The instinctive reaction for some people appears to be aggression, and that’s not how I experience it. When cornered, probably, when defensive or protective, likely. But put me toe to toe with some guy outside of a tournament and I’m going to run the heck away as fast as I can.

Last year, I was bitten by a large, white, German Shepherd type dog whilst delivering papers. My reaction was not to growl, or to attack, or even to run away. I stood there. I looked at my arm. Saw the puncture wound. And then I calmly instructed my friend to ring my dad so he could take me to the hospital, as my arm was shaking too much to hold the phone properly. I distinctly remember apologising profusely to the woman who owned the dog and telling her that I was perfectly fine, because English politeness dictates that I should comfort the slightly hysterical woman regardless.

My instinctive reaction to fear is not then, to act aggressively. It’s to freeze. The image is easy to recall, the dog is running towards me, and the last thought I can remember is ‘Oh, shit’ before I put my arm up to my chest/face area to protect it. I didn’t move from the spot. And when people scare me, get too close, behave in a way that makes me uncomfortable, that’s also my reaction. I stop internally, I stifle any feelings deep inside, and I carry on.

People are not something I see as prey. I see a herd of horses or deer, and there’s that instinctive reaction, the rush of knowledge and longing. A group of people do not bring about the same effect. A group of people make me want to be invisible, quiet and small and unnoticed. I want to be able to pass by quietly, so I do.

This isn’t to say that I am shy, or do not interact with people. I have brilliant, wonderful friends, a girlfriend, and I’m more than happy to be the person who goes and asks a stranger where the closest bathroom is, or order food from a waitress. I can walk head held high down the street all I like, and make cocky arguments in debate with total strangers, but I still have an instinctive reaction of suspicion and negativity towards people’s intentions which as a rational, thinking human, I like to optimistically believe is not true.

People are a lot like wolves, in the end. A lot of what I feel, everybody feels, even if I base it in something rather more eccentric. I believe that if you pitted a human and a wolf against each other in a room, chances are the wolf would come out on top. But probably not before it tried to run away first.

Emily
(http://lifeandlycanthropy.wordpress.com/)

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Writing on Horse

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 23:36:31 GMT

Posted by: yourdeer

Sometimes, horse is comfortable. There is respite, relaxed head angled towards the ground with eyelashes drooping close to one another, and there is high-spirited energy and determination, and there is strength for another’s need. But frequently, horse is irritated, angry, tired, panicked, overworked; it is an intolerant nag with thick legs, a heavy nose, and a poor temper. When I am horse, I am a huge animal – a creature that belongs in front of a plow or cart with straining legs or heavy clattering hooves, rather than one of flowing mane and gracefully bent trotting legs. I am not frequently a fun horse to be around; I am fussy and likely to kick, and will only grudgingly enjoy the pleasure of the curry-comb or carrot. But when I do, I will sigh heavily, close my eyes, and lean into it, grateful.

Anger, irritation, overwork, panic, and yet determination and pleasure to serve: I am horse in these states because other animals don’t fit the way I feel these things.

My anger does not have sharp teeth or claws or an agile, twisting body. It has flat, mean teeth, blunt hoofs, and weight, and sudden unexpectedness. It is not predatory – it simply desires to rid itself of all that is in its way. It will not rip or tear or devour; instead, it will bludgeon, and it will crush.

My irritation is the sharp slam of hoof on stall wall. It is the likelihood of lashing out with a swift and bruising kick or flat-toothed bite. Don’t come near me, don’t touch me, don’t make me do. It mistrusts. It has flattened-back ears and locked thick knees and obstinacy.

Horse is the foul mood of overwork, of being overburdened. It is the difficulty to relax after being demanded to do what benefits others. Though I need to feel useful and take great pleasure in it, there is that point where I balk, resistant to being useful for a moment longer. It is the indignant squeal, the little tricks to make it harder – puffing up to sabotage the tightening of the girth, keeping my head out of reach of the bridle, nearly squashing your foot without a thought. There is the bitter anger at those who should be working alongside me, but aren’t, and the open rage at the lazy thing pulling in the traces beside me.

There is panic, too, at being too crowded or faced with those unthreatening threatening things that come as sudden changes. It is a rearing, bucking sort that nearly topples itself and will damage others as much as it will break me. Though my body remains still, internally I rise and plunge, wild and sweating with white-rimmed, rolling eyes. It breaks when the crowd is gone and I am in the fresh air or home, or when I am spent, legs shaking, head down and done.

In these times, when I am the horse that is nag, it is comforting to remember that I am human, though somewhere inside there is an unpleasant and unhappy equine. I remember, when I am one human body packed tightly among many on the commute home, that I can will myself to stand still; picturing what I would be if I were the kicking, rearing horse reminds me that in my human body, I can remain as I am without hurting myself or those around me. I can quell my panic and wait to get home. The horse that I am would kill without qualms or intention, and most likely end up with broken legs myself – as a human, I can grit my teeth until “Next Stop: Washington Square” and then rush through the crosswalk and home.

But besides all this there is determination and hard work. There is the big, hearty energy to give to another, to take directions and leap forward with them, to pull with all my strength with the result of joy and satisfaction, shared. There is the plodding work, the steady, persevering, low-headed forward movement towards the end goal of rest or praise. When I return home, it is the comfort of cozy stall or pasture, of my own space where I can do as I like, whether it is to roll without dignity or to sleep or to frolic. There is the feeling that horse was first remembered from, when deer pulling carts didn’t make sense, but horse, yes – heavier hooves and a more purposeful movement forward, carrying the purpose of others besides myself. It is, too, the rollicking carrying of big love, the wealth of my heart in the wagon on which perch the people I love.

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Call for Therian Writings

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 03:30:48 GMT

Posted by: citrakayah

(Posted with permission from Feral and Yourdeer)

We are looking for essays from therians to be included in a publication, tentatively titled Under the Skin: Therian Community Voices. The goal of this project is to compile written works by therians or animalistic otherkin which describe their experiences with therianthropy/animality.

If you have essays, stories, or poetry about your animality, or on topics such as shifting, phantom limbs, discovering your theriotype, species dysphoria, or anything else pertaining to your therianthropy, please consider submitting them for this publication.

Nominations are also welcome if there is an essay or poem written by someone else which you would like to suggest to us to potentially include in this work.

Submission requirements:

- The topic of the work must pertain to therianthropy or experiences of animality from therians and otherkin.
- The work should be creative and original; consider what makes this experience unique to you, as we want to share a wide variety of experiences and voices.
- The work must be completed to a relatively polished degree. Please check for grammar, spelling and continuity. If you have a learning difference or if English is not your first language, or if for any other reason you need assistance bringing your writing to a higher level of craft, contact us - we can help.
- Works of up to 5,000 words in length will be accepted.
- The author must be available to be contacted for copy-editing.
- You may submit as many works as you wish; however, only two pieces per person will be selected for inclusion.
- Please list an author name you would like to go by for your accepted submissions.
- The deadline for submissions is July 15, 2013.

To submit your work or someone else’s, or to ask any questions about this project, please email it to yourdeermails@gmail.com, or post to the “Under the Skin” subforum in the “Werelist Media Center” section of the Werelist forums, making a new thread for each submission.

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The Dark Side Essay

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 19:49:43 GMT

Posted by: elinox

I was thinking this morning that I should submit something here and these thoughts came to me. Warning: some of this might be a little gory for some folks.

“From one monster to another.” – Dr. Whale, Once Upon A Time

Wolf is not a cuddly puppy. Despite the romanticized ideals society has attached to wolves, they are not the soft and gentle, noble creatures, often portrayed in popular media. Sometimes, I am not a noble wolf.

During the winter months, when wolf is more prevalent, I want to use my teeth to tear and bite at my meat. To sink my maw into hot, fresh blood and sate my hunger on my prey. I want to use my blunt claws to rip at the underbelly and get at the tender innards too. I want to crack bones with my jaws to get at the delicious marrow inside. Then I want to lick my fur clear and sleep for days.

In the midst of hunger, I see weak humans around me and children as prey. Easy prey. Soft, tender flesh which is easy, too easy, to tear into. Wolf sees humans as lazy, slow and fat and there for the taking. If it limps, my attention is instantly snapped towards it. If it shows any sign of being weaker than the herd, it’s also singled out immediately. Wolf’s mouth has been known to water at all the food nearby.

But the hunter is also wary, knowing these pink monkeys are nothing if but intelligent and therefore dangerous. When I find myself slipping into the starving wolf’s mindset, I need to remind myself that humans are not food, despite being so easy to kill.

My fur is not clean, but rather is flea bitten, has burs, sometimes with patches here and there, and is mangy. Not cat-clean. Not rabbit-fur soft. Rough and wiry to the touch. And wolf does not like touch. Humans touch to show affection, but they do it wrong to wolf. Wolf touches noses, and smells companions, rubs heads and along bodies, wags tail, paws at the ground. Sometimes mouths pack mates. Wolf does not like to be petted, wolf likes to initiate contact.

Sometimes wolf will lick in fondness, to invite proceedings and nuzzle. But then wolf wants to bite during romantic interludes, to pull away and snap to draw blood. To snarl and growl and not in an enticing way. The reaction to pain, intense sensations, heightened emotions, is always to bite. Wolf courtship is rough and not romantic.

Wolf wants to hunt, eat, sleep, fuck. Wolf is definitely not the family dog.

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The Anorexic Animal: Therianthropy and Eating Disorders

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 23:15:34 GMT

Posted by: epsilon_pegasi

( TW: eating disorders )

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Power Bird

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 06:44:47 GMT

Posted by: epsilon_pegasi

I hate to post twice in one day but I just so happen to be typing all these up now. As a great horned owl person, I have trouble relating to most other birds and bird people, so I thought this would be of interest too.

Great horned owl is intensity, power, fire and earth. It is defined by action, feels alive in aggression, is prey to nothing.

For this owl, flight is about strength. Great horned owl is all muscles, pushing downwards against air, against the wind with exertion and the subtle flicking of feathers. Wings are symbols of power, not freedom. Flight is for survival, find the prey, and dive with silence and speed born of strength. Talons clench, crushing bones. Beak snaps necks, tears into flesh, while the filoplumes feel the tickle of fur and the tongue feels the hot blood. Swallowing whole, until the facial disk fluffs forward and an ache comes from the belly. The bones fall to the base of the tree. Owl lives on the graves of those who give it life.

Gripping a rough branch, beak preens feathers, gently rearranging the prickling shield against the cold winds. Ear tufts perk at surprise, flatten when aggressing. Head turns and bobs to locate the rustle. The owl hears the world as much as sees it, keeping an image in the mind of the world based on sound. Location is judged by the change in sound at the turn of the facial disk. Sight drawn to motion, the rustle of leaves, a pigeon taking off is a sensory bombardment of motion and noise. Its relationship with its mate kept strong with calls as much as mutual preening.

Owls can be sensitive, and have been known to die of grief after a mate is killed. Great horned owl reacts with anger to pain. Annoyed easily, it threatens at the mobbing of crows. It is devoted to persons and places, territorial and possessive, stubborn. Owl takes itself very seriously. It attacks intruders without hesitation, and will eat any other owls it kills.

The great horned owls call is an omen of death to many cultures. It is the only species of owl recorded killing a human.

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Skyward & Grounded

Sat, 05 Jan 2013 23:55:26 GMT

Posted by: epsilon_pegasi

I'm typing up my writings in preparation for a personal site and thought this short introduction to "my" giraffe might be of interest:

What giraffe sees is far away.

Giraffe belongs to the open spaces. Wide and lacking coverage, the giraffe feels safe only where all is visible. Above it, and breathing it in. Aware, vigilant seer who is always seen. There is no hiding when you’re a giraffe. Always seeking threats, never relaxing the aerial visions. The giraffe fears only what it cannot see, too many lions to focus on, what unknowns lurk in shadows and bushes. A giraffe must know. But the threats, when found, are either far away or close enough to kick. Cautious of the world though it may be, the giraffe is above-it-all in more than a literal sense, feeling almost otherworldly in its consciousness. Detached.

Eyes wide on the horizon, stilts walk without feeling the ground, giraffe lives in the treetops while the hooves remain earthbound. But for the tickle of grass against the ankles, the world of under-foot is too far to know, or care. Giraffe moves as if levitating, drifting through life without attachments. The giraffe does not form lasting bonds, groups being loose and ever-changing. A giraffe may make company of zebras, or birds even, but isn’t prone to kinship.

Neck is more than height. It is for touching, a way to communicate desire or competition. A strong appendage that will take beatings of bones and poundings of flesh. Feel the air blowing around it, catching scents from above, and hearing the distance. Blood rushes through it, pounding, for war, for love, for food. It is the life-giver to a giraffe. The tongue extends onwards towards leaves, wrapping around rough branches, taking even the thorns, which the mouth is hard enough to devour without feeling their pricks. Many things to the giraffe are without feeling.

The Egyptians made the hieroglyphic of “prophecy” in the shape of a giraffe, and depicted them in tombs as a means to foretell danger, because its keen vision saw beyond the horizons of others. In The Book of Going Forth by Day, the giraffe is said to be a demon that guards travelers in the underworld. They were kept as pets by many cultures, and the giraffe, though wild, can take captivity in stride, not being a creature willful for wildness.

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A Moment of Red Wolf

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 17:27:35 GMT

Posted by: faolchu_rua

I hesitated posting this here, largely because it was stream-of-consciousness this morning and doesn't necessarily aim to make any real argument or point. If it doesn't really suit the goals of the group, please do let me know.

---

I am sitting in a small classroom at the run-through for national conference presentations. Men surround me, older, physically larger than I.

Is there ever a moment when I am completely unaware of how out-numbered I am in this place? Thinking, and yet not -thinking-, of survival strategies in any new territory?

I scope out safety: the new, female capoeira scholar to my front-right, a young female professor behind me to the left, the trans-identified man directly in front of me. In their own way, in their queerness and in their gender, I know they will protect me if this goes sour. I have established a pack of four in an inherently volatile space.

The presentations progress; my potential dissertation advisor -- huge, arrogant, intimidating to everyone, including the younger professors in the room -- gives a bumbling presentation in which technology fails and a shallow argument is made. No one questions him; even amongst humans hierarchy is recognized. One other professor, male, makes a largely complimentary comment.

Annoyed by the silence the presenter turns on me, eyes angry though his voice is mockingly amused.

"You know this material, Kaitlyn. Say something."

Blood rushes to my face as my heart pounds thick against my chest. I do not count the beats, but take some comfort in the awareness that my body is doing as it should in the face of a potential threat. A tail I do not have tucks, though my every physical muscle is taut, ready to fight or flee if the words coming out of my mouth -- submissive, agreeing with the statement given moments before, expanding on them just enough to get the aggressor to leave me alone -- are not enough of a display to prove that I am nothing. Nothing to pursue. Nothing to hurt.

He backs away, and I realize that I have been staring at my desk since he confronted me. A quick glance to those named earlier reassures, and I exhale. I take in air once again through my mouth, allow the tension in my back to release. The tiny hairs behind my neck fall as though they had risen as ruff, protective in display and in function. I played the game successfully, but even such a brief encounter is enough to leave me yearning to move on and away. I allow my mind to wander through the bulk of the remaining presentations; the freedom of imagined movement through a familiar Maryland forest soothes. I do not see the body in which I run, for I am behind the gaze, wholly myself.

This is red wolf to me of late. Instantaneously, fluidly here; albeit most often in moments of duress or physical pain. There is little conflict between something human and something not; I am what I need to be in any given moment and thus inherently, permanently both. I have created myth around her in order to have a way of putting the identity into words that others would understand, I have pondered psychological definitions as well, given the recognition of how that aspect of self comes to the fore when I need protection or strength.

But red wolf, in and of itself, is not something so readily written in words, just lived. Accurately conveying that way of being continues to elude me.

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The Me in Marbled Cat

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 18:37:15 GMT

Posted by: epsilon_pegasi

Trying to identify the essence of the marbled cat is like trying to identify the shape of smoke. Like smoke, the marbled cat is defined by its ever-changing, paradoxical shifting form. The marbled cat is smoke in shape, having traits of both the large and small felines. For a long time it was a loss to find where in the gene classification it belonged. A cat made of the pieces of other cats.

Subtle and unseen but striking to behold, the marbled cat has many traits unlike other felines entirely, making it both feline and other-than-feline in essence and form. The full zygomatic arch of the skull, the long canine teeth which are remnants of another time, combined with their own recent adaptations of smallness, a tail the length of the body, an arched back, and a coat pattern unique to the species, make the marbled cat a creature of its own design. Indefinable, it undulates between past and future, large and small feline.

The marbled cat may curl its tail in a circle when sitting and holds it parallel to the spine and upwards when moving, never letting it fall lower or touch the ground. The tail is a most important appendage, more than claws, or teeth, it is necessary for movement in the treetops, necessary for the agility and balancing abilities that allows this cat to capture it's life's blood. An acrobat with its baton.

The spine is supple as oiled sinew. Arched, then contorting, curving, forming to the shape of the branch it stands on. It's like a young green sapling itself, strong enough to hold the fruit but flexible enough to bend to the strongest wind. The back legs are longer than the front, looking clumsily made of mismatched parts when on the ground. Paws are large and toes conform to every nook in the branch, pads feeling the shape and roughness underneath, claws keeping the contact. Legs muscles made for springing, balancing branch to branch. Form shifting from round crouch to straight leap, sleek in body, light, formless.

Each cat has their own unique coat pattern that can vary more wildly between individuals than in any other cat species. Each is like a quilt made of parts of other fabrics. Mottled down the spine, spotted on the legs, marbled down the sides, rosetted on the shoulder, striped on the face, running random down the tail. But always soft, thick, tongue rough against the plush.

The marbled cat perceives the world mainly through sight and touch. Large eyes capture every light. Movement fascinating to behold, shadows and sparks of bright through the branches giving definition to the forms it will chase. Cheeks rub against bark to define boundaries. Whiskers feeling every twig and leaf brush past with a tingling pressure on the cheeks. Scent is a signature. Sounds give shape to the unseen.

The marbled cat energy is intense and subtle, sweet and spicy, easy to see and impossible to behold. It cannot be captured, categorized, or caught in a grasp. It deludes touch, defies shape, a substance that is everything and nothing. In-between here and there. It is said to be a ghost.

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