by Quentin Long ©2006 Quentin Long

   The furry subculture is all about an appreciation of animals with human-like chracteristics. But some members of the subculture take it a little farther than that; they don’t just appreciate anthropomorphized animals, they want to be anthropomorphized animals—for real. Of course, this sort of transformation necessarily means you’re giving up certain aspects of humanity, trading them in for the corresponding aspects of whatever-it-is you’re becoming. And some members of the subculture take this desire to its logical extreme: They want to be plain old, standard, garden variety, 100% human-qualities-free animals.
   Is it just me, or do these guys suffer from honkin’ big helpings of self-loathing?
   That was a rhetorical question. Of course they suffer from self-loathing! Regardless of what they want to be, what they actually are is human beings—who are perfectly willing (if not downright eager) to exchange hands for paws, intelligence for instincts, and speech for inarticulate noises. “Yeah, I just can’t wait to get my hands amputated and lose 60% of my brain!” Really, how could these guys not despise themselves?
   The good news is, the I-wanna-be-a-dumb-animal types are not representative of the furry subculture as a whole. The bad news is, what makes them nonrepresentative is not the simple fact that they hate themselves; rather, it’s the intensity of their self-loathing. Your average ‘furry on the street’ may not want to dispense with any and all aspects whatsoever of their humanity, but to the extent that their preferred corpus is something other than baseline human, they sure as hell want to distance themselves from humanity, to a greater or lesser extent! And how about those guys who write stories in which all the human characters are rabidly bigoted scum who embody all known vices while, at the same time, all the anthropomorphic characters are purely, unquestionably virtuous and innocent victims of the vile humans? Does anybody want to seriously claim that the human beings who write that stuff don’t loathe themselves, if perhaps to a lesser degree than the I-wanna-be-a-dumb-animal types? Yeah, didn’t think so.
   Folks, I’m here to tell you that human beings are not the Irredeemable Scum Of The Universe—and animals, likewise, are not the Stainless Embodiment of All That Is Right And Good.

• Cougars may be sleek and graceful—but the males also have a disquieting tendency to slaughter their own cubs. Lions, too, engage in infanticide on a regular basis.
• Chimpanzees are commonly regarded as carefree, clown-like figures. But thanks to Jane Goodall’s extensive observations, we know that chimps not only commit premeditated murder of other chimps, their ‘tribes’ (hunting bands) actively make war upon each other.
• The film March of the Penguins got bunches of people making noise about how wonderfully virtuous those birds are, but how many of those people realize that penguins use their fellow flock-members as involuntary one-shot predator-detection devices? How it works is, they mill around on the edge of an ice floe until some unlucky bastard falls off into the water… and if that one doesn’t get killed and eaten on the spot, the rest of the flock knows it’s safe to jump in.
• Rabbits are cute and fuzzy and all, but their ‘culture’ is an interlocking set of dominance relationships, very much like the form of human government known as totalitarian dictatorship.
• The entomologist E. O. Wilson famously observed that if ants had nuclear weapons, the planet would have long since become a radioactive wasteland.

   My point is a simple one: Humans are not any worse than animals—and likewise, animals are not any better than humans. We’re different, sure, but since when has ‘different’ ever been a synonym for ‘better’ or ‘worse’? If you want to admire animals, be my guest; all I ask is that you not view animals through rose-colored glasses, or humans through black lenses.