Why do some people live with an animal self?

Four questions sit under that sentence. This site keeps each one separate, grades every major claim, and says "unknown" where the studies stop.

What the field can actually say

Persona has a real empirical literature: large convenience samples, an ideal-self pattern, and a social motive that beats a sexual motive as a correlate of identifying as furry. Identity does not have a settled mechanism. Most identity etiologies on this site are graded E3 to E5. Clinical lycanthropy, the delusional belief that one has transformed, is a third phenomenon, documented in psychiatric case series and kept separate on purpose.

No category is the answer. The honest product is a map of graded hypotheses, plus the conflicts between them.

How a grade works

E1 E2 E3 E4 E5

• E1. Replicated, controlled empirical work.
• E2. Single studies, small samples, case series, convention samples. The label stays on the number.
• E3. A testable theory from researchers. Not yet established.
• E4. Interpretive scholarship: history, ethnography, philosophy, theology. Not a cause.
• E5. What a community believes and reports. Primary data about experience and doctrine. Not evidence of cause.

The reading guide, the prohibitions, and the theme tokens are on the method page. A short version for clinics is the clinician brief.