From Werewolf Trials to Dog Masks: The Therian Question
Medieval Europeans probably burned too many people. But at least they had a framework for saying “this has gone too far.” We’ve dismantled that framework without building a replacement.
In 1573, a man named Gilles Garnier was arrested near the French town of Dole and accused of killing four children. Under torture, he confessed to spreading an ointment on his skin that transformed him into a wolf, then hunting and eating the children. He was burned at the stake.
The charges sound absurd now, but authorities at the time took werewolfery seriously enough to execute hundreds of people across Europe between 1520 and 1630. Courts called physicians to testify about whether Satan could alter bodily humors to cause transformation. Grand judges wrote treatises on demonic possession. In 1598 alone, one zealous prosecutor in eastern France handed down 17 death sentences for werewolf-related charges.
The last gasps of this panic came in 1692, when an 80-year-old man in Livonia named Thiess told a court he was a werewolf who entered Hell three times yearly to battle witches and ensure good harvests. He wasn’t executed. He was laughed at, convicted of practicing folk magic, and banished. By then, educated Europeans had stopped believing humans could transform into animals.
Fast forward to 2026. Teenagers in Buenos Aires gather in public parks wearing animal masks, running on all fours, and claiming to identify as dogs and foxes. The response isn’t (thankfully) execution or even psychiatric intervention. It’s bemused news coverage and some confused parents asking psychologists whether they should worry.
When Animal Identity Was Military Technology
The medieval panic over lycanthropy obscures a longer history of cultures treating animal transformation not as delusion but as valuable capability.
Norse berserkers were elite warriors who wore bear skins and reportedly fought in trance states. The Old Norse term “berserkr” translates roughly to “bear shirt.” Historical accounts describe them entering battle frenzies where they howled, bit their shields, and seemed impervious to pain. Whether they literally believed they became bears or understood it as psychological preparation for combat remains debated, but the practice was institutionalized enough that berserkers served as royal bodyguards and shock troops.
Shamanic traditions across Siberia, the Americas, and Africa treated animal transformation as spiritual technology. Practitioners wore animal skins, adopted animal movements, and claimed to channel animal spirits for healing, prophecy, or communication with the dead. These weren’t fringe practices. They were central religious technologies in functioning societies.
The difference between a medieval werewolf burned at the stake and a respected shaman wearing a wolf skin wasn’t the behavior. It was whether the surrounding culture had a script that made the behavior legible and useful.
The Psychiatric View
Modern medicine has a term for people who believe they’re transforming into animals. Clinical lycanthropy, documented in psychiatric literature since the 1850s, describes patients who experience delusional beliefs about animal transformation. It’s rare enough that fewer than 50 cases were reported between 1852 and 2020.
The condition typically appears alongside schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or psychotic depression. Patients report seeing their teeth lengthen in mirrors, feeling their bodies reshape, or experiencing overwhelming urges to walk on all fours and eat raw meat. Treatment usually involves antipsychotics, and symptoms often resolve.
But here’s what’s interesting. Researchers studying clinical lycanthropy note that cultural context matters enormously. The disorder appears in regions where wolves carry symbolic weight, either as representations of evil or as noble predators. How you perceive wolves affects whether you might develop the delusion. And in the handful of documented cases, many patients retained some awareness that they were human even while experiencing the transformation belief.
This suggests something more complicated than simple pathology. The brain’s sense of bodily self is surprisingly flexible. Under the right neurological conditions or with the right cultural scaffolding, the line between human and animal identity becomes negotiable.
The Accountability Gap
So why did 16th-century France execute Gilles Garnier while 21st-century Argentina shrugs at teenagers in dog masks?
We like to think it’s because we’ve become more enlightened. The better explanation might be that we’ve lost the ability to take claims about the self seriously at all.
Medieval Europeans believed human nature was real and fixed, which made claims of transformation either miraculous or demonic. Either way, they mattered. Modern therapeutic culture treats identity as essentially liquid and self-determined. If identity is whatever you say it is, then no identity claim can be alarming. A teenager who says she’s a dog is doing exactly what we’ve taught her to do: exploring, expressing, finding herself.
The problem is that this framework makes it nearly impossible to distinguish between healthy experimentation and something going wrong. The psychologist quoted in the original article said it only becomes concerning “when it turns into a deeply rooted belief.” But we’ve spent two decades telling young people that deeply held beliefs about identity are sacred and unchallengeable. At what point does “I identify as a dog” cross from exploration to fixation? And who’s authorized to make that call without being accused of invalidating someone’s lived experience?
Medieval Europeans probably burned too many people. But at least they had a framework for saying “this has gone too far.” We’ve dismantled that framework without building a replacement. So we get teenagers in dog masks gathering in public parks, and the most sophisticated thing we can say is that it’s probably fine unless it becomes not fine, and we’ll know it when we see it, maybe.