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. 

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.