I have been reading what may be the beginning of Furry Fiction. Well, unless you count the strange mythological creations of the Greek Myths that is.
I am referring to The Island of Doctor Moreau by H G Wells.
For those of you who have not read the book or seen any of the movie adaptions, allow me to describe the basic plot. a shipwrecked man encounters an island filled with creatures that are half man, half beast - the results of vivisection experiments by a crazy scientist who is turning animals into humans, and the result is something halfway between the two - Anthros.
of course, there have been tales of such anthroponmorphs for thousands of years, from the Minotaur of ancient Greek legends to the Werewolves of European legends, or the cryptozoid Bigfoot of America.
But like a lot of the Furry fiction that is popular on the internet, Wells's story is not just about animals that walk on two legs and talk. The Island of Dr Moreau was an allegorical tale that was really about the treatment of homosexuals in society. This has been confirmed by the family of HG Wells, who say that his story was mainly inspired by the trials of Oscar Wilde - a writer Wells admired and felt great sorrow for.
Of course, the point of Wells's tale is that it is cruel and un-natural to force a living being to go against it's nature. to cut and mutilate an animal so that it looks like a human, then condition and train it to behave like a human is cruel and morally questionable. By the same token, constraining a homosexual to look, dress, behave, and live the life of a "normal" upstanding English gentleman is equally cruel and morally questionable.
If you take a look at society today, you will see that we haven't really changed much. We still judge animals by human standards and expect them to behave as we train them to behave, and there are still families that send their sons and daughters to psychiatrists or "conditioning centres" to "cure" them of homosexuality.
fortunately, this sort of mindset is becoming less common, and slowly people are becoming more accepting.
However, the underlying issue has not really changed. Because what it really boils down to is a general rejection of alien ways of thinking. Even people who claim to love nature seem reluctant to accept the ways of nature and the "philosophies" of animals. They do not view and accept animals as creatures that think and behave in alien ways, but rather they think of animals as mentally retarded humans with fur.
Not everyone, of course. There are those few (such as the late Steve Irwin) who understand and respect the raw natural ways of animals, and accept them, loving them tooth and claw, rather than trying to see them as disneyfied cartoon characters.
