The psychiatrist diagnosed “delusional parasitosis”, the false belief that parasites have infested the body. The roughly 1-in-100,000 people who suffer from this condition imagine that ants, worms, ticks, mites or other bugs are moving around under their skin. It is, as the label suggests, a delusion, often brought on by schizophrenia or dementia. When the insects strike, nothing can persuade patients that the critters aren’t real.

Delusional parasitosis is a relatively rare condition, but it is indicative of a phenomenon that is surprisingly widespread: the presence of animals in psychological disorders. The medical literature contains tens of thousands of cases in which animals or thoughts of animals played a significant role in the expression of mental distress.

For the examples above, we could substitute the childhood victim of sexual assault who grew up obsessed with rats; the pet-loving psychotic whose facial tics made him look like a snarling dog; the mother in West Africa who woke from a dream convinced she had been impregnated by a baboon; the young woman who believed she was being controlled by her cat; or, closer to home, the child of a friend who took to howling like a wolf during the Covid lockdown.

Or we could consider the long history of sociogenic illness or “conversion disorder”, in which seemingly benign behaviors, often in imitation of animals, spread rapidly and without apparent cause within schools, religious orders and other close-knit institutions. Medieval records from France and Spain describe groups of nuns barking like dogs while running through the fields, or mewing like cats for hours each day, or bleating like sheep, tearing off their veils and convulsing in church.

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Of course, wild animals have been almost completely absent from most people’s lives for centuries. We have long considered them inferior: less conscious, less intelligent, less self-aware, less rational. An animal is everything humans are not, the quintessential “other”. Yet they feature in our psycho-pathologies, hallucinations and dreams, in art and story-telling, and in the mental lives of children. They creep into our psyche in spectacular and sometimes alarming ways. 

That’s especially true of people who suffer from medical disorders: whether blindness, or dementia, or schizophrenia. Their visions can be exceptionally strange. In 2019, a group of psychosis patients taking part in a medical study reported seeing snakes crawling out of their arms, a rhino crossing the street, a cow in the corridor of a school.

Fantastical creatures of this ilk can just as easily be summoned by swallowing psychedelic drugs like LSD or psilocybin — the chemical that gives certain mushrooms their magic. On trips of this kind, animals are almost always part of the landscape. During my first and probably last experience with psilocybin, I found myself in a world of reptilian and parasitic freakery, in which snakes, lizards, worms and other legless lifeforms crawled and slithered about a garden trellis, taunting me with grotesque faces that resembled the carved gargoyles on Gothic cathedrals. It sounds terrifying, though my feeling was more of benign interest. 

Nor am I alone: the psychologist Benny Shanon, who drank ayahuasca several hundred times while researching a book about its effects, encountered animals in his visions more frequently than anything else, mingling with lizards and crocodiles, fish and bees, butterflies and jaguars. All the while, many of us cross paths with animals, both magical and mundane, in our sleep. And if it’s tempting to seek meaning in such visions, they may tell us more about the animals than about ourselves. 

Alison Hawthorne Deming, a poet frequently visited by dream animals, describes them as barging into her brain, self-willed and unconstrained. After dreaming of a horse that had turned up for treatment at Sigmund Freud’s consulting rooms, she concluded that it was “a messenger from the animals’ homeland telling me that we’re driving them crazy and they have no science with which to treat themselves”.

The truth is that what causes highly realistic animistic images to surface in the non-conscious mind remains a mystery. Yet one compelling possibility is that the brain, when deprived of its usual stimuli, tries to make sense of the information it receives by providing a hypothesis or story of its own, or by over-activating the default mode network, a set of brain regions that supports daydreaming and introspection. Its tendency to conjure up an abundance of animals, rather than, say, inanimate objects, may relate to the fact that the human visual system evolved to be acutely sensitive to living things.

Over the hundreds of thousands of years that Homo sapiens and our antecedents lived as hunter-gatherers, individuals with the ability to detect animals quickly in the landscape were more likely to survive and reproduce, and this trait was gradually selected for until it became a universal inherited characteristic of the human brain. To coin a phrase, we became “animal-minded”, preoccupied with the circumstances of our fellow creatures and highly attuned to their anatomical forms and ways of moving.

Derek Hodgson, an archaeologist whose expertise also includes neuroscience and psychology, suggests this mechanism likely evolved in our ancestors over successive generations in response to both the persistent threat they faced from carnivores and the intense competition for food. An intuitive emotional reaction to the slightest possibility of an animal would have considerably increased their chances of survival. “They were competing with predators who were predating both on them and on the animals they were hunting for food,” Hodgson explains. “If they made a mistake and they didn’t react, they were in trouble. They had to be keenly aware of animals that used camouflage to remain concealed, otherwise they would have lost out in the long game of hide and seek.”

Modern brains still possess this attribute. Neuroscientists have discovered a dedicated neural pathway linking the visual part of the brain (the visual cortex) to the emotion-processing part (the amygdala). Known as the ventral stream, this pathway generates a fast visceral response at the sight of an animal, alerting us to its possible presence before we are consciously aware of it. We remain hypersensitive to living things, just like our Ice Age ancestors.

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While we rarely get a chance to test our animal-mindedness in everyday life, it becomes fully activated when our psyche is disrupted: in conditions of psychosis, neurosis, delusional thinking, phobia and obsession, or when we’re dreaming or hallucinating. The creatures that visit us during such times are, perhaps, indicative of the conflicted ways we think about animals, and our fraught deliberations over whether we are, in fact, one of them.

The mid-20th century American anthropologist Ernest Becker believed that our attitudes towards animals — indeed much of our behavior and thinking — are driven by the realization that we will one day die. The terror of ending up as compost drives us to raise families, cultivate values, subscribe to religions, and generally build things that will outlast us. Animals, which we are used to seeing as roadkill or meat on a plate, remind us of our own flesh-and-blood reality. Distinguishing ourselves from them is a step towards the symbolic immortality we crave.

Becker’s ideas help explain why we so resolutely cling to the notion of humans as a species apart, despite growing evidence that we have seriously underestimated the worlds and abilities of our fellow creatures. Most biologists now agree that all vertebrates and many non-vertebrates have some form of consciousness, and that animal emotions can be as complex as human ones. Our deliberate separation — the belief, which dates back to ancient Greece, that we are a superior species — has been a disaster for animals themselves. It has allowed us to kill them with impunity, and to keep their suffering at arm’s length. And it has enabled us to avoid the cognitive dissonance of having to face up to the truth that we are what we eat: meat on the bone.

The conceit that humans are exceptional is easy enough to maintain with full awareness. But when we are asleep, cognitively compromised, high on stimulants or otherwise distracted, our fellow other animals become our equals. What are they doing there? It is hard to know for sure. At the very least, they should remind us that our relationship has been longer, and more intimate, than most of us are prepared to acknowledge.

***

Animate: How Animals Shape the Human Mind is published by Picador on 19 March.

Encounters such as these, in which a dying person is “brought home” by someone who loved them earlier in their life, are one of the many fantastical experiences commonly reported by people close to death. For several decades, psychologists and neuroscientists have been studying “near-death experiences”, to understand what causes them and what they might mean. Some of the most remarkable reports have come from patients who clinically died before being resuscitated — and saw things that changed their lives.

Researchers say that 10-20% of those who have returned from the brink of death have clear memories of what they went through. The same stories come up over and again. They have left their body and are looking down from above. They’re in an infinite void, or approaching a border from which there is no return. They feel a deep sense of harmony with something much bigger than themselves. Scenes from their past are played out in front of them and they see how their actions affected others. They’re passing through a tunnel towards a bright light. They’re in a beautiful garden with people who have died before them.

These visions are quite different from everyday dreams or drug-induced hallucinations, which tend to be fractured, disordered and difficult to interpret. They almost always have a narrative arc, a distinct reality and a clear purpose or moral intent. They are often exquisitely detailed. Bruce Greyson, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, has collected hundreds of graphic accounts that he describes as “quite real and quite profound in their impact”. The following example, recounted in his 2021 book After, is from a 23-year-old woman who almost died during a bad reaction to an anaesthetic during childbirth: “This was a beautiful green meadow with beautiful flowers, beautiful colours … colours that I’d never seen before … I realised I was seeing the inner light of all the growing things, just utter glory in colour.”

Another of his patients, a firefighter at an air force base, recalled being in some kind of tunnel after being severely injured in an explosion: “There was a light in the distance and I saw the spiralling strings of blue-green light coming and going like the aurora borealis. The light was drawing me to it. I moved exceptionally fast down the tunnel and it took no time at all to reach it … The light was emanating from a being … He was beautiful to look at, and projected the feelings of unconditional love.”

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Most people who report near-death experiences describe them as pleasant or even transcendent. Recently, Sam Parnia and his colleagues at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine interviewed survivors of cardiac arrest. Many recalled a pervasive sense of peace. “It was so calm and serene with an incredible amount of tranquility,” one of them told the researchers. Another described feeling “nothing but love, goodness, truth, and all things to do with love. There was no room for fear or evil … I was so happy to be there.”

It is tempting to think that these upbeat assessments tell us something about death itself — that there is no reason to dread it, that some part of us survives it. But near-death experiences are reported exclusively by people who survived. They may describe the process of dying, but not what comes afterwards. Moreover, not all of them are tranquil. Greyson and a fellow researcher, Nancy Evans Bush, have recorded dozens of reports of negative experiences which they say contain many of the same phenomena as positive experiences but differ greatly in “emotional tone”. Patients who float outside their body can find it terrifying. The oft-reported infinite void can trigger feelings of desperate isolation. A few people have had the sensation that they are plunging through the gates of hell. One woman who passed out during a traumatic childbirth found herself floating on water, a feeling she described as “pure hell. I had become a light out in the heavens, and I was screaming, but no sound was going forth. It was worse than any nightmare.”

The long history of these accounts upends much of what we believe about the relationship between the mind and the brain. In the prevailing orthodoxy of medicine, the mind should not be capable of heightened, lucid states when the brain is barely functioning or clinically dead. But when Parnia and his team at New York University monitored the electrical activity in the brains of cardiac arrest patients as they underwent CPR, they found surprising evidence of high-level cognitive functioning in many of the patients up to an hour after cardiac arrest — even though blood flow and oxygen levels diminished drastically within seconds of their heart stopping. The researchers think the brainwaves they recorded were “biomarkers of consciousness” — neural correlates of the near-death experiences reported by some of the surviving patients when they woke up. They suggest that instead of completely dying when oxygen levels fall off, the brain enters a state of disinhibition that allows “lucid understanding of new dimensions of reality — including people’s deeper consciousness”.

Whatever we encounter when we die, it is likely the same for all of us. The central elements of near-death experiences appear to be universal, though they are often filtered through the lens of culture or religion. For instance, the Tibetan delogs — people who have “returned from death” — have the sensation of looking down on their body, but they are more likely to see it as the corpse of a pig, a symbol of ignorance and delusion in Tibetan Buddhism. And their journey through the after-world is often populated with formidable or horrifying deities, as in this account of a Bhutanese delog from the mid-17th century in which she witnessed “an ox-headed acolyte of the Lord of Death beating some tied-up victims for having eaten meat”.

A grand theory of near-death experiences is almost certainly beyond us. They may be a mechanism to allow us to make sense of the life we have lived. They may hint at hitherto unrealised levels of consciousness. It’s hard to imagine them having an evolutionary purpose, unless their function is to rescue us from the brink of death. But one thing they tell us for sure: the mind is more than a function of the brain, and we still don’t know the full extent of what it is capable of.

We do know that such patients lose their fear of death. They become more loving, more tolerant, more interested in the suffering of others. They care less about material possessions and appreciate the everyday things more. They live more fully in the present. Greyson thinks everyone should live life as if they’ve had a near-death experience, since — as he says in his book — “they tell us that life is more about meaning and compassion than about wealth and control”.

My father died surrounded by people who loved him, but I rather hope they weren’t the last people he saw. I like to imagine he was greeted by friends and family who had gone before him, who ushered him through the tunnel of light, introduced him to the radiant figurehead and settled him into the beautiful garden. Who knows, maybe he’ll be waiting for me there.

The definitions that work best are deliberately imprecise. Love is “kind of like when you see a fog in the morning… before the sun comes out” (Charles Bukowski); or “a bright stain on the vision, blotting out reason” (Robert Graves); or “the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real” (Iris Murdoch). A friend of mine, after considering the question, produced his favourite cookery book, from which he had entertained countless friends and family. Love is a different thing to each of us, and everything to all of us. It leaves us enormously vulnerable: we know what it is for sure when we lose it.

In recent years, neuroscientists have tried to explain love in terms of the brain chemicals that accompany it, which have a powerful influence on our behaviour. Is that sufficient? Can this thing that “looks not with the eyes, but with the mind”, as Shakespeare had it, really be understood as a neurological condition?

This question is at the heart of Lucy Prebble’s play The Effect. It tells the story of two young people who enrol in a clinical trial for a new antidepressant. During the trial they fall for each other and then worry whether what they’re feeling is real or merely “chemical”, a side-effect of the drug. Things get even more confusing when one of them learns she’s on a placebo, which convinces her that she can’t possibly be feeling for her lover what he feels for her. If love is a drug, can a drug lead to love? Not while you’re still on it, she seems to be saying.

The Effect is fraught with existential angst about the nature of emotional health and how we interpret what we feel. We learn, for example, that the clinical psychiatrist who is running the trial suffers from long-term depression, a condition she has chosen never to be treated for: she believes that the drugs don’t work, and in line with a particular strand of philosophical thinking views the illness as a grand existential tragedy or the natural state of things. The central conundrum — is love authentic if it’s manipulated by chemicals? — is never fully answered, though the ending gives us pause when the protagonists walk off hand-in-hand and drug-free into their uncertain futures looking a lot more loving than they did at any time during their chemical romance.

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At a certain level, love is all about chemistry. Neuroscientists have found that different kinds of love are associated with different hormones and neurotransmitters. Sexual desire is driven by testosterone, whose main purpose seems to be to encourage us to have sex with as many partners as possible. Romantic love, that giddy, obsessive state designed to win us the affections of a particular partner, is the brain’s dopamine reward system on overdrive — a hit for every Whatsapp message returned, every infatuated thought of the beloved. Meanwhile, those warm feelings of security and connection characteristic of long-term attachment are marked by increased levels of vasopressin and oxytocin.

None of this really cuts it as an explanation. Reducing love to its neural correlates may tell us something about how the brain affects behaviour, but it doesn’t work as an answer to the important questions about what it all means. It doesn’t begin to account for the vastness of the enterprise.

We can learn a little more from a different area of science: psychology. Over the past four decades, the psychologist John Gottman and his team have studied thousands of couples at their “love lab” in Seattle to try to understand the ingredients of a successful partnership. They claim they can predict to over 90% accuracy whether two people will stay together simply by watching the way they communicate: how they manage conflict and how empathic they are towards each other. In the strongest relationships, positive behaviours towards the other person (humour, affection, empathy) outweigh negative behaviours (criticism, defensiveness, contempt) by at least five to one. Love is kind: we can agree on that at least.

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We can agree also that kindness, and therefore love, requires selflessness, a deliberate reaching beyond ourselves in recognition or consideration of another. Iris Murdoch called it unselfing, the capacity both to imagine the lives of others and to find them beautiful. It is quite different to the popular idea of love as some kind of union or fusion, the notion that two lovers must complete each other. This is upselfing rather than unselfing. Not only does it set impossibly high expectations, it also regards a relationship as a vehicle for satisfying our own needs. Such an approach is unlikely to lead to love. Better to start with the thought that the other person may want something very different from us, and then do our best to provide it.

For all our selfless efforts and good intentions, some love affairs may simply not be destined to turn into loving relationships. It can be very difficult to find someone with whom we are truly compatible. How can we raise the odds of picking a winner at the start?

Psychology can help us here too. Certain shared traits have been found to be indicative of strong relationships. For example, couples who stick together tend to share a similar level of general intelligence, and a similar level of attractiveness (as rated by others). Psychological studies have also demonstrated the importance of shared values. Values are a measure of your moral and cultural outlook, the way you see the world. Disagree too much in your attitudes towards things like fidelity (are you happy for your partner to sleep around?), idealism (liberal or conservative?) and family (how important to you are your relatives?) and you’re in for a rocky ride.

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A few years ago, I ran a dating website called 21Pictures where we paid close attention to these kinds of findings. The aim was to use insights from psychology to give people the best chance of meeting someone compatible. We designed the website to match people on their core values, rather than on their interests, habits, and other preferences that most dating sites rely on (these are far less significant to compatibility). We also encouraged users to make more intuitive choices by getting them to describe their lives in pictures, since pictures are better than words at conveying the kind of contextual information that potential partners find useful. We wanted to make online dating as much like real-world dating as possible. 21Pictures ran for just a couple of years and had only a few hundred active users, but we had some success: at least one couple who met on the site ended up getting married.

One thing we pondered at 21Pictures but never had enough data to investigate was the extent to which people’s expectations for relationships or love are shaped by their background or culture. Evidence from anthropologists suggests there is an effect, though only up to a point. Culture seems to have an influence on the kind of person we prefer as a mate: for example, young people in China, India and predominantly Muslim countries prefer their partner to be chaste, in Western countries not so much. Likewise, the relentless idealisation of romantic love that permeates the West is less evident in Asian and other collectivist cultures, which emphasise family ties and community responsibility over individual gratification (at least publicly).

In general, however, anthropologists believe that the basic experience of love is universal, driven by innate biological mechanisms. One study from the Nineties found that romantic love was commonplace in 147 of the 166 cultures it looked at (the researchers said they failed to measure it in the other 19 due to “ethnographic oversight” rather than cultural norms). The expression of love can be thwarted temporarily by the dictates of totalitarian regimes (China under Mao) or religions (the Christian Church in Medieval times), or by the constraints of mental illness. But as a possibility, it seems to be indestructible.

This transcendent quality of love is heartening since it is perhaps the one enduring truth that everyone can agree on. Love is as universal as grief. The inevitability of it unites us all, even as we struggle to understand it.

I first learned about therianthropy while talking to Kathy Gerbasi, a social psychologist who specialises in relationships between humans and animals. She has an interest in furries, a fandom that dresses up as anthropomorphic animals. Gerbasi conducted a survey at a furry convention that included the following two questions: “Do you consider yourself to be less than 100% human?”, and “If you could be 0% human, would you be?” Furries feel an affinity with animals, but that’s generally as far as it goes. So, when a few of her respondents answered yes to both questions, she realised that she was dealing with people who were fundamentally atypical.

Since then, Gerbasi has held several discussion groups with therians, who she describes as “very sincere”. “They look like people,” she says. “They mostly behave like people… But if you really talk to them, they’ll tell you that deep inside they are not a person.” My friend the bear, who goes by the sobriquet BearX, lives an improbably normal life. He is married. He has two children. His career in engineering has afforded him a nice house and a comfortable middle-class life. As he says: “If you didn’t know something was up, you wouldn’t know anything was up.”

When psychologists investigate an unusual pattern of behaviour, they look for common attributes that may help explain it, such as age, gender, class or geography. So far, Gerbasi and the handful of other psychologists who have studied therians have failed to find any. While researching my new book, I talked to therians in their teens and in their seventies, of female, male and undetermined gender. The only thing that can be said about almost all therians is that they realise at a young age that they are different in body and spirit from those around them. They feel “off”, separated from humanity, and this estrangement defines the rest of their lives.

“I had an internal sense as a kid that I was supposed to be bigger, heavier,” says BearX. “Later, I worked out that bears fit everything that I felt. It led me to think that maybe I was supposed to have been born a bear and there was some kind of cataclysmic failure in the universe’s sorting system.” Caesar, a communications technician in his mid-thirties who identifies as a coyote, remembers feeling “very animal” as a child. “Maybe the best way to put it is that humans think with their emotions or on a higher level of cognition, but the way I responded to a situation was more instinctual, not calculating.”

As they grow up, therians move from having a general sense of feeling not quite human to a more concrete awareness of the kind of animal they are: their “theriotype”. The most common theriotypes are predator species such as wolves and large cats. As with furries, culture plays a role here: jaguars are more common in South America, and foxes in Japan, whose folklore contains many stories of people being possessed by a fox. Mythical or fantasy creatures are no less valid, though their owners are differentiated in the community as “otherkin”. While researching, I spoke to a couple of dragons.

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Finding your theriotype can be a struggle. Most therians make their decision only after a great deal of research and thought. The community encourages its members to be scientifically rigorous: outlandish claims that would give ammunition to sceptics, such as the idea that it’s possible to physically transform into an animal, are dismissed as “fluff”. On therian forums, moderators frequently rebuke contributors for promoting theories that would break the laws of physics, and they are quick to correct errors in morphological or behavioural descriptions of species, such as the suggestion that wolves have red eyes, or that all canines hunt in packs.

A peculiar and often alarming characteristic of being a therian is the feeling that you have phantom body parts. Blayz, a wolf-dog hybrid, lives with the permanent sensation of a tail that wags or droops on command. “Going around corners, I will alter the movement of my frame to keep my tail from getting caught in doors or swiping cups off the table,” he says. Caesar, the coyote, is often convinced he has outsized ears that he can manipulate like antennae. I spoke with a snow leopard — an American woman in her early twenties — who has been saddled with the full range of phantom phenomena. “Even as a kid, I remember feeling like I had a tail and telling people it was invisible,” she explained. “It’s as much a part of me as my arms and legs, really. I also have constant phantom paws and a muzzle, which can make eating and drinking funny sometimes. I’m likely to miss my mouth if I’m not thinking about it.’

To feel body parts where none exist is not as biologically improbable as it sounds. Studies of people born with missing arms and legs have shown that limbs that have always been absent can still be represented in the sensory and motor regions of the brain. The psychologist Ronald Melzack, an expert on phantom pain, proposed that the brain continuously generates a pattern of impulses that indicate that the body is intact and “unequivocally one’s own”, even if it isn’t. This pattern, which Melzack called a “neurosignature”, is genetically determined and characteristic of each individual. It is not inconceivable that someone born with an atypical neurosignature might experience a body that is out of kilter with the one they possess. So far, no one has systematically examined the brains of therians to see if their neural patterns reflect what they feel.

Therians who are acclimatised to their animal side often find their phantom experiences reassuring, since they confirm an identity they have been trying hard to accept. But it can be a let-down when they recognise they don’t have the superpowers they thought they did. When Caesar realises yet again that he cannot direct his ears to hone in on a distant sound, he has the sobering thought that what he is trying to do is “in direct conflict with my own biology”. Kathy Gerbasi, in one of her studies, asked a therian who felt they had “wings” what it felt like when those wings were fully out; they told her it made them frustrated because they knew they couldn’t fly. Many therians avoid looking in mirrors because it reminds them that they are not what they think they are.

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Some psychologists believe that the distress suffered by therians is similar to the distress suffered by people whose sex at birth does not match the way they feel. The comparison is often made by therians themselves, a minority of whom are transgender as well as “trans-species”, as they sometimes put it. (Not all transgender people are comfortable with this analogy, fearing that it complicates the public discourse and undermines their movement’s drive for recognition.) The obvious difference is that while you can change your gender, you cannot do anything about your species.

For therians, “finding yourself” — that nebulous ideal promoted by the self-help industry — is obligatory. Although discovery may bring relief, it does not help with the bigger question: why am I this way? Science doesn’t provide many answers, so they can only speculate. Therianthropy may be a developmental response to early trauma or a childhood fixation on animals, or it may be a result of abnormal brain wiring. People of a spiritual inclination might think of it in terms of reincarnation or a “misplaced soul”.

In psychiatry, therianthropy is often erroneously considered to be synonymous with clinical lycanthropy — a condition related to schizophrenia, where delusions and hallucinations convince a patient that they have transformed into an animal. In her book Unthinkable, Helen Thomson describes meeting a lycanthrope who periodically believes he has turned into a tiger; her interview with him was cut short when he suddenly started growling and threatening to attack her, a relapse his doctors blamed on his failure to take his anti-psychotic medication.

But therians are not delusional or psychotic. Their animalistic feelings are a perpetual feature of their lives and are not alleviated by medication. They are aware, often to their profound disappointment, that they can never transform into animals. The medical profession’s impulse to diagnose them as lycanthropes has less to do with clinical evidence than the age-old tendency to pathologise behaviours and conditions that challenge social norms. The most we can say about the medical status of therians is that they are neurological outliers — hardly a signal of illness.

In 2019 Helen Clegg, a psychologist at the University of Buckingham, led the first comprehensive investigation into the well-being and mental health of therians. She recruited 112 across a broad range of ages, genders, ethnicities and species. Among them were wolves, foxes, dragons, birds, a snake, a shark and a couple of dinosaurs. Clegg’s team found that a disproportionate number of them had been diagnosed with autism (7.69%, compared with 1.5% in the general US population), though it is not clear how the two conditions could be linked. They also found that, compared with a control group, many therians struggle with relationships and social skills. This could be due to cognitive factors, or it could be because social taboos around therianthropy make it difficult to talk about. When you are forced to hide your true nature, communicating with others can be a challenge.

Their study also noted that many of the therians displayed “schizotypal” personality traits, such as a tendency to have unusual perceptual experiences. But these therians mostly found their experiences enriching rather than distressing. Clegg suggests that this is because they have found a way to integrate their fantastical thoughts into a coherent narrative that allows them to make sense of the way they feel. The therians in Clegg’s study scored just as highly as non-therians on several standard measures of psychological well-being, including personal growth, purpose in life and self-acceptance. The researchers concluded: “The findings suggest that therians are functioning well.”

Azi, a Mexican wolf living in Tennessee, experiences altered states of consciousness around 30 times a day. Therian friends of his told me that his experience is more extreme than anyone they know — for much of the time, he is more wolf than human. When we initially corresponded, he was apprehensive, fearing negative publicity; when we finally spoke via video call, he was open, eloquent and precise. His perceptual changes arrive suddenly and can pass just as quickly. When they happen, he says, “the human part of me is turned off. Mentally, I’m gone. The wolf mindset is running this body… It’s very dissociative.” He often finds himself growling, snarling, down on all fours, walking on his toes or, if the opportunity presents itself, chasing deer. It can be physically exhausting. Towards the end of our video call, my cat Cecil jumped up onto my laptop and started nuzzling the screen. Azi looked away and appeared to disengage for a moment. When I asked him about this, he admitted that as a wolf, few things are more inflammatory than being stared at by a cat. He has to contend with provocations like this whenever he goes out in public — a loud noise, a fleeing animal, a bothersome human. He must always be on his guard to stop himself shifting to wolf.

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The reality of therianthropy can be hard to live with. Elizabeth Fein, a clinical psychologist who has worked closely with Kathy Gerbasi, observed that acceptance of therianthropy often brings sadness or a sense of estrangement. “It’s like, ‘I’m always going to be different, I’m always going to be kind of separate from humanity. I’m never going to have the right body.’” The scale of the challenge that therians I interviewed face in trying to reconcile their human bodies with their animal minds may be partly a function of the culture in which they live. In the West, for much of the past two millennia, we have considered ourselves distinct from the rest of the animal kingdom, elevated by cognition, intelligence, language, morality and culture. The Christian God granted humans “dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth”, and philosophers from Aristotle to Kant have emphasised our superiority over nature.

But over the tens of thousands of years of human existence, the line separating us and other has not always been so well-defined. Many cultures recognise animals as ancestors. A popular Tibetan creation myth maintains that people are descended from a meditating monkey, while in Turkic mythology people originated from a she-wolf named Asena. Meanwhile, stories about people who “shape-shift” between human and animal form have persisted throughout recorded history.

A world in which animals were treated as human and humans were treated as animals would be a lot easier for therians to live in. Their experience and their psychology are so different to most people’s that they often feel profoundly isolated. “Our lives would be immeasurably improved if people accepted it, if it wasn’t considered strange,” BearX told me. Thankfully, therians have each other. The community’s origins lie in the Nineties message boards of an online werewolf fan group called alt.horror.werewolves, and it has since evolved into a vibrant network of discussion forums and advice boards, with thousands of active participants.

Therians do disagree — about the causes of therianthropy, the distinction between therians and otherkin, and whether it is appropriate to discuss the sexual feelings some therians have towards animals. Nevertheless, Caesar the coyote told me that his introduction to the community was “unquestionably one of the happiest moments of my life: finding out that you’re not alone”. Blayz, who spent years trying to figure out his strange canine sensations, came close to dismissing them as “the delusions of a madman, nothing more than a side-effect of mental illness”. When he discovered that he wasn’t the only one who felt this way, it was revelatory. “So many of my own experiences and conclusions were echoed by this group of real people out there in the world.”

“Therians are really weird,” one of the coyotes says to me in a moment of exasperation. But in certain cultures, and in certain eras, they have been regarded as less weird — and among other therians, their behaviour is absolutely normal. Most therians want to be accepted by the wider world. In the meantime, it’s reassuring for them to always be accepted by their own. Life looks different when you’re part of a pack — whether you’re a bear, a coyote, a leopard, a dinosaur or a dragon.

This is an edited extract from Fans: A Journey Into the Psychology of Belonging, out 11th May.