Animal Quills

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. 

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. 

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.