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If you aren’t an alterhuman, please fill out the survey still if you have the time!

I’m trying to give a voice to others in my community and promote acceptance of alterhumanity. Filling out the survey helps me a lot!

Just a warning, this survey will ask about discrimination. If you do not want to answer any of the questions, please do not take the survey. The discrimination section is an extremely important part of the survey. All responses will be anonymous!

Gosh I think about my hearthome a lot, and it usually goes into consideration if I am questioning a ‘type.

This probably isn’t the case for everyone, but my hearthome is (while generally being VERY large) where I’ve always lived as a person; The northern mountains and prairie grasslands of North America.

I’m not sure what draws me so closely to the temperate deciduous forests of North America, but they are home to me. I know the trees in whatever place I live quite intimately because their life cycle is just as important as mine and I depend on it.

But the grasslands and prairies are largely influenced by where I grew up as a child. Riding horses on trails as a little kid in the North Dakota wilderness I felt I wanted to live there forever. I hated seeing traffic lights and gas billowing out of concrete pillars every day.

This is where I will always live.

Like, often the points they make come from a place of disgust at the thought of someone imitating nonhuman behaviours ("so you eat from a bowl and shit outside?") and its interesting to me how these behaviours are painted like they're... unbecoming. Like you should be above acting like an animal. It feels, to me, like they're subconsciously attached to the notion of animals being of "lesser intelligence" or lower ranked than humans, therefore being influenced by them is an embarrassment.

Some people, generally younger folk who wanna be edgy when they can't wrap their head around something from what I've seen, see an alterhuman or furry or whatever and threaten to hunt them or skin them or any other kind of act of animal cruelty they can think of. That speaks for itself, obviously, but also like... I've seen anecdotes a good few times of therians who've made genuine expressions of their nonhumanity in conversations, only for it to be interpreted as self deprecation. Most people can't seem to take the image of an animalistic person seriously in itself. You can see this in normie reactions to therianthropy and you can see it tenfold in their reactions to furry.

I believe that we're not gonna see progress in how alterhumans are treated till we make progress in accepting the wider marginalised groups that overlap with our own movement. But even so, its glaringly obvious how people can't even comprehend the thought of relating to animals as more than a curiosity or spectacle. They're seen as simple. They don't have language we see as complex, they don't do maths, art, philosophy, inventing to the same extent as people. They eat, shit, kill and fuck. They're purely biological. They have no inner world. Therefore, they're below humans.

Except... humans do all that stuff too. And most animals do the same things humans are so proud of themselves for, just in their own way. The only real difference is that animals don't go to great lengths to fill whatever void each human seems to have inside that pushes them to keep searching for a reason to live. Animals are better in tune with themselves, I think. Humans can't fathom that its okay to be internally fulfilled by simple things. They especially can't fathom how animals piss and shit and fuck without shame. It kind of speaks to a severe disconnection from nature, which we're unavoidably a part and product of. Many of us live in a culture where we're taught on some level to be ashamed of our basic needs. Its becoming increasingly hard to view ourselves as products of a mushy bloody biological world when our society values only the civil and the intellectual.

Hateful people will use this divide we've created as fuel to hurt others. You don't need me to explain to you how all throughout history bastards have done horrible things to innocent people for horrible reasons and all the while perpetuated an idea of their victims being apparently uncivilised. Treating the Other as subhuman, forcing them down to the same level we see animals as being at, is unfortunately nothing new. I believe part of the reason humans struggle to accept therianthropy is that therianthropy, in a way, elevates animals to beside humanity, and that's difficult to comprehend. It kind of forces you to question the hierarchy of living creatures you've built inside your head. Actively choosing to accept animalistic qualities into yourself 1. communicates implicitly to those around you that there's something about animals to respect and admire beyond usefulness/amusement, and 2. is inherently a pull towards the sensory, biological and "gross", which we don't make a whole lot of room for in our current world. We're taught to suppress the instinctual, and we're also pushing nature itself away more and more. Wanting to take joy in your own body and wanting to experience fur, scales, claws, meat, noise, the flesh and bones and mannerisms of an animal is deeply sensory. When someone is confronted with desires and self-perceptions like nonhumanity and the beliefs about the world it challenges... its easier to conclude that therians are pushing themselves down, rather than lifting animals, and the urges humans can't accept, up.

It's sad if you ask me. So many cultures around the world, now and in the past, live in tandem with animals and plants and soil and sea. We can live equal to the nature around us, because we are nature. Fuck, alterhumanity isnt even a newfangled thing. Folks have been emulating animal characteristics for all sorts of reasons for all of time. Animals are more than tools or commodities or things spawned in to make the landscape more interesting. I can't speak for any community beyond my own but all over the world folks have been chill with nature in all sorts of ways and actually respected the existence of the things around them instead of harvesting everything for personal gain.

My new painting "Tora"

Oil on canvas

80x100 cm