We accept all genres of writing and all mediums of visual art created by individuals who identify with or as an animal in any capacity. Submissions need not be explicitly concerned with furry&alterhuman content alone, though such works are encouraged.

ANIMAL accepts:

Poetry: Up to five pages in a 12-point font, single spaced. If submitting multiple poems, the start of each poem should appear on a new page. Submit one file per submission with all poems in the same document.

Fiction: Short stories and flash fiction, with a maximum of 5,000 words. One story per submission.

Nonfiction: Creative nonfiction and essays, personal or academic. Maximum of 5,000 words, one piece per submission. We ask that academic essays be accompanied by a bibliography.

Visual art: Photography, collage, painting, digital illustration, and any medium/s that are able to be scanned or photographed to be submitted as a JPEG or similar format, such as a PNG or TIF file. Up to five pieces may be included in one submission.

Comics: Comics may be in black and white or colour and should be submitted as PDFs. Due to the form’s complexity, we accept a broad range of image-text approaches at a maximum of three pages per submission.

Articles, reviews, recommendations, and adjacent material: ANIMAL will publish short features of up to 1,000 words on a rolling basis, independent of any themed issue. Such features might be media reviews, a curated reading list, or a recipe. Email [email protected] with “feature” in the subject line to ensure we see your piece.

We do not accept AI-generated or AI-assisted works.

We ask that all poetry and prose submissions be formatted single spaced with a 12-point font. Authors intentionally using creative fonts and formats are encouraged to make a note of it in their submission. All submissions should be emailed to [email protected] as an attached file. Please indicate the category of your submission in the subject line. A cover letter is not required, but please provide a short third-person bio to accompany your work, including a name to attribute the piece to. We post on our Instagram and Tumblr when a new piece has been published; if you would like us to tag you in the description, please let us know.

ANIMAL does not accept work that has been previously curated, in print or online. Works may be previously self-published on social media, but may not have been published in books, magazines, or similar collections open to the public. If your piece is accepted, we ask that ANIMAL have first serial rights and non-exclusive digital rights. This means that we are granted the rights to be the first publication to publish your piece and that we may display your piece on our website indefinitely. Copyright will remain with you.

After we publish, you are free to submit your work to other publications, though we ask that ANIMAL be credited in subsequent reprints.

In the interest of accessibility, ANIMAL is free to submit to and read. Although we would love to compensate our contributors for their work, our small crew works fully on a volunteer basis and cannot currently pay for submissions. This is a passion project for us, and our hope is that as interest in the magazine grows we will be able to adopt a model that would allow us to compensate our artists and writers while still hosting free submissions.

FIRST CETACEAN!!! Figuring out how to make mask that maintains visibility while simultaneously still looking like a dolphin was complicated oh my gods- I am quite pleased with how it did turn out tho. If I do make others in the future, I do think I’m gonna try and find a different method of making the surface beyond using slightly smother fabric to cover it and putting five hundred layers of primer on it ;-;

When I first stumbled upon therianthropy back in 2006, I quickly realized that there wasn't a place for me in the communities whose essays and information I was excitedly reading. It had been so freeing and exhilarating to know that I wasn't alone in how I am, but all the therian forums were for adults, and I was a teenager. I probably could have joined the "adult" forums and talked to grown-up animals instead of just lurking, but I didn't feel comfortable talking to strange adults (this was back when we actually taught kids to not disclose personal info online!), and the people on therian forums didn't feel like my peers anyway. So many of their conversations just sounded like dry philosophy, or referenced "adult" things I didn't relate to. I resigned myself to just reading what people wrote, and being a lonely teenager with nobody to talk to.

My first time really talking to other nonhumans, not just lurking, was on the forum for a digital pet website called Chicken Smoothie. It was barely even a browser game at the time, just a cozy little forum with a pet adoption feature, and the users were a few hundred teens and preteens chatting and making art. But, in probably late 2008 or early 2009, someone started an otherkin thread and I finally found my peers. We spent hours a day swapping information we'd read, figuring out what people were, and just having fun. There was no gatekeeping or unfriendly grilling or essay-writing, and no sanctimonious adults to tell us we weren't being "serious" enough about nonhumanity. We were serious, but in the way kids are serious, before society makes them afraid to be authentic and silly. Conversations about spirituality and phantom shifts were interspersed with people roleplaying and making animal sounds, and we enjoyed both just as much. It was a space for all of us to act openly nonhuman around other people for the first time, and we did it like teenagers. We chatted through text and made art for each other because that's all the Internet really was at the time, but if had been possible (and socially acceptable) to take and share photos and videos of us acting like ourselves we would absolutely have been doing that, too. I can't even begin to imagine how much fun we'd have had with access to modern social media, when just talking to each other about who we were was already so fulfilling.

I don't know how many of the people I was friends with still call themselves therians, otherkin, or vampires. It's likely some of them were just roleplaying and left those things in the past. But I'm still here over 15 years later, so I know I was far from the only one genuinely expressing who I was. It doesn't matter to me whether those people I was a nonhuman kid with "grew out of it" or not, because that sense of joy and community was real. There wasn't a space for nonhuman teens online, so we carved one out ourselves.

Modern teens don't have to search so hard to find their community. When I look at the therian and otherkin tags on tumblr today, and when I see videos of teens on tiktok wearing homemade masks and running in the grass, what I see is a bunch of young people doing the exact same things I was doing on a forum in 2009. The infrastructure of the internet has made it hard to find and share accurate information the way we used to so there's a lot more misinformation, but the joy of teenagers learning they're not alone is still the same. There are so many high schoolers out there talking about shifts and posting silly animal sounds the same way I did, and that makes me really happy.

[Cover Pages]

AN INTRO TO THERIANTHROPY ZINE BY ORB 29 . 09 . 2025 theorb.itch.io

[Page 1]

THERIANS: Man and Beast

THERIANTHROPES (aka therians) are a subculture of people who on some level identify as nonhuman animals. For example, a wold therian is a person. Who identifies as a wolf on some level.

Being a therian is generally considered to be something intrinsic and involuntary; we don’t choose to be therians or what animals we are.

Therians exist in all walks of life, come from all backgrounds and are all ages. There’s many explanations someone may give for what makes them a therian…

[Page 2]

‘I was an animal in a past life’ 

‘I grew up around animals so I feel like one’ 

‘I’m an animal soul trapped in a human body;

‘My neurodivergence makes me feel more animal than human’ 

‘I just am what I am’ :)

[Page 3]

Not all therians are mammals like cats & dogs; they can be any genus and species, living or extinct.

They could also be a mythical creature (sometimes called theriomythic) or an animal species from pop culture (fictherian).

[Page 4]

SHIFTS are experiences that make someone feel more aware of their animal side. For example…

PHANTOM SHIFTS feeling supernumery body parts, e.g. wings

MENTAL SHIFTS change in mindset to be more animal

DREAM SHIFT Becoming your theriotype in a dream

AND MORE!

[Pages 5-6]

A heavily abridged HISTORY LESSON

1993 Usenet group alt.horror.werewolves begins discussing animal identities

1994 First inperson therian meetup (aka the first ‘Howl’)

2003 The theta-delta symbol was make to represent therianthropes

2007 ‘A field guide to otherkin’, written by a therian, about therians was published

2009 The term ‘animalhearted’ was created for those who were not quite therians, but did feel a strong connection to a type of animal

2017 ‘Therianthropy day’ was created to celebrate therians. It happens yearly on the 1st November full moon. 

2020 The first ‘othercon’ – a convention for alterhumans and therians takes place