Liminal Fur & Divine Scales

Someone finally had a good take on the subject and re-centered the topic on the ways in which police dogs and military animals are used to harm marginalized communities and individuals, and how people need to be considerate of not glorifying that even if that is their kintype. All-in-all, a good take that centered real-world actions and the ways they can affect others; not nebulous, internal emotions or identity. Which, unfortunately, many people took as the batsignal to unleash the flood of (paraphrased) 'if you have this kintype, you are automatically an evil, evil person!', completely circumventing the post's discussion points and circling right back to where all of the police dog discourse seemingly started.

I really liked how LJ alterhumans used to post some/all of their answers to surveys they did, so here's mine for a Therian Questionnaire survey I did on BlueSky. The survey was... well, it's going to suffer horribly from sampling bias, participation bias, and small sample sizes, because I've only seen it advertised on BlueSky, the data isn't anonymized, and you have to message the survey creator to get a link to fill out. 

There was also an issue of many of the multiple choice questions being leading questions and loaded questions, in my opinion, with locked in yes/no answers and no option for write-ins. "Is being a therian inherently sexual" is a question that's going to change depending on if you're asking it to people about their personal therianthropy, about general therianthropy, or about outsider perspectives on therianthropy. It's also going to change wildly depending on if the person in question even experiences romantic/sexual attraction at all-- aces/aros exist and make up a sizable portion of the community. Non-ace/aro kinksters also make up a sizable portion of the community, and fictherians who have identities from porn games and similar also exist. For some folks, their nonhumanity is inherently tied into their sexuality or being sexual just by the nature of the beast (ha ha).

The second question, "Does being a therian inherently mean that you’re attracted to real life animals?" is also just earnestly in poor taste, in my opinion. Same pitfalls as the previous question, where it relies on the idea that all therians experience attraction, but it also doesn't specify what type of attraction. Someone outside the zoophile discourse could very, very easily read this and not realize it meant romantic/sexual attraction. In fact... actually, looking at it twice, now I'm wondering if I misunderstood the question and it just means to ask if therians are drawn to and interested in animals more generally! The answer is "no" from me either way, but that might not be the case for everyone who answers it. 

And the last multiple question, "Does being a therian inherently mean that you identify as an animal?" is very... squints. It's a very subtle double-barrel question, which sucks. It's functionally asking both if therians identify as nonhumans (they do!) and if therians specifically identify as nonhuman animals (they don't!). See Ponty the were-Pontiac as an example. If you say "no," while meaning the latter rather than the former, it can be flipped by the presenter to then say, "a-ha! see, therians don't REALLY identify as animals, they're just humans who LIKE animals or some such!" 

So the data will probably be fundamentally unusable. But the write-ins were nice enough pumpkins full of meat for me and it's not my survey, so it's ergo not my problem.