Pets in an Anthropomorphic World: What Happens When the Cat Is a Person
By Eric Flegal
Part of the Anthropomorphic Writing Series
Here is a question that sounds simple until you actually think about it: in a world where wolves and lions and foxes are people, what does someone keep as a pet?
It is one of those questions that reveals, almost immediately, how deeply your worldbuilding assumptions run. Most of us have been conditioned to think of “pet” as shorthand for cat or dog — and for good reason. Cats and dogs have been human companions for thousands of years, shaped by millennia of co-evolution and deliberate selective breeding into the ideal domestic companions. They are the default. They are what the word means.
Except in my world, they are the people at the party.
That single fact — the logical, unavoidable consequence of a biology-first approach to anthropomorphic worldbuilding — reshapes the entire landscape of companionship in my world. And working through what that means, and why, turns out to reveal something genuinely interesting not just about my world, but about what pets actually are and why we need them at all.
The Absence of a Crisis
The first question people ask when they encounter this topic is a philosophical one: does owning a pet feel strange to Boris Volorsky? Does a Leonite feel some kind of inner conflict looking at a rabbit in a cage, knowing that in some biological sense, he and that rabbit are both animals?
The answer is no. And the reason is the same reason it doesn’t feel strange to us.
Human beings share significant DNA with primates, wolves, and even flowering plants. From a purely materialist perspective, we are animals — mammals, to be precise, subject to the same biological laws as every other creature on earth. And yet no psychologically healthy person experiences an existential crisis while walking a dog or feeding a goldfish. The reason is not ignorance of biology. It is something deeper than biology.
In the Christian framework that underlies my world, the explanation is this: God made everything from the same building blocks. Animals came from the earth. Adam was made from dust. The shared elements are not a surprise — they are a feature of a creation that reflects the same Maker throughout. And yet within that shared material foundation, God did something specific and unrepeatable: He gave His Image to Man. The Imago Dei is not a biological category. It is a spiritual one. It is the distinction that makes a person a person — regardless of what their coat looks like.
This is the foundation of everything in my world, and it is equally the foundation of why pet ownership carries no identity crisis for the characters who live there. Boris Volorsky is a person — fully human on the inside, made in the Image of God, possessed of free will and an immortal soul. The gerbil in his son’s room is not. That distinction is not subtle, and it is not threatened by the fact that both of them have fur. The Imago Dei is what it is, and it does not blur simply because two creatures share some biological real estate.
Boris sees his sons’ pets the way we see ours. Because he is us, wearing a different coat.
The Leonite and the Rabbit
There is a more pointed version of this question, and it is worth addressing directly: what about a Leonite who owns a rabbit?
In nature, lions eat rabbits. The predator-prey dynamic is real, biological, and not something my world pretends away. In the “It’s Not Racism. It’s Lunch.” post, I addressed this honestly — the fear a prey animal has of a predator is not irrational prejudice, it is accurate threat assessment. Biology is real.
And yet a Leonite who owns a pet rabbit feels no urge to eat him. Not unless he is genuinely, desperately starving — a circumstance extreme enough that the same could be said of a human being in equivalent conditions.
The reason is free will — the same free will that allows any carnivore in my world to sit down to a meal with a species they could, theoretically, regard as prey, and simply have dinner. Human beings eat rabbits. We also keep them as pets, name them, grieve them when they die, and let our children drag them around in small harnesses. We do not experience these two facts as contradictory, because free will and the Imago Dei allow us to govern our instincts rather than be governed by them.
Leonites are exactly the same. The instinct may exist somewhere in the biological background, as it exists in us, but a person who has been formed by love and community and the grace of God does not live at the mercy of his instincts. He governs them. He redirects them. And a Leonite man who has chosen to bring a small animal into his home and care for it has made a choice — a genuinely free one — that the instinct has no authority over.
That is what the Imago Dei actually means in practice. Not the absence of biological nature, but the freedom to be more than it.
What Actually Fills the Space
So if not cats and dogs — what?
The answer, it turns out, is everything that has always been in the background of human pet-keeping, suddenly moved to the front of the stage.
Rats, gerbils, hamsters, and ferrets are among the most common companions in my world — small, social, manageable, and possessed of a personality that rewards the people who take the time to know them. Rabbits are popular, as are guinea pigs and other small mammals that have always existed on the periphery of our own pet culture. Snakes and other reptiles find devoted owners, as they do here.
Birds are enormously popular — parrots, cockatiels, crows, and countless others. There is something about the bird as companion that translates across worlds: they are vocal, they are intelligent, they are capable of genuine relationship with their owners in ways that still manage to surprise people. In a world without dogs to fill the role of “that one animal that seems to actually understand you,” birds step naturally into the conversation.
Fish, in all their variety, remain what they have always been: a particular kind of quiet, beautiful company for people who want life in a room without the weight of a fully demanding relationship.
And then there is the pot-bellied pig — probably the closest thing my world has to what dogs are for us. Social, emotionally intelligent, trainable, affectionate, and possessed of a personality large enough to fill a room, pot-bellied pigs occupy something like the dog-shaped space in my world’s companionship landscape. They are not dogs. But for people who have only ever known a world without dogs, they don’t need to be. They are exactly what they are, and what they are is enough.
One small linguistic footnote belongs here. While dogs as animals do not exist in my world, the word “dog” very much does — as Lupenite slang. Applied to an adult male Lupenite, it walks a razor’s edge: it can mean he is remarkably handsome and magnetic, or that he is, frankly, a complete jerk. Context determines everything, as it always does with the best slang. “Bitch,” similarly, exists as the feminine equivalent — equally double-edged, equally dependent on tone and circumstance. The animal disappeared from this world entirely. The word survived, repurposed — as languages always manage to do — to describe something new.
Ancient Bonds in New Forms
Here is something that genuinely fascinates me about this topic: when a species becomes a person, the ancient relationships that species had with other animals do not simply disappear. They shift. They express themselves differently. But the biological memory of those bonds persists in ways that are sometimes surprising.
Consider the Lupenite and the crow.
In nature, ravens and crows have a genuinely documented mutualistic relationship with wolves. They follow packs to scavenge kills, alert wolves to prey, and over thousands of years developed what researchers describe as a working partnership — a cross-species bond rooted in mutual benefit that eventually became something that looks, in the wild, almost like friendship. This is real biology. It happened. It is still happening.
In my world, wolves are people. But the ancient pull remains. Lupenites are disproportionately drawn to corvids as pets — crows in particular. Boris Volorsky probably could not tell you exactly why he finds crows so interesting and companionable. Something in their intelligence, their directness, their stubborn personality appeals to him in a way he would not be able to fully articulate. He does not know, consciously, that he is re-enacting a partnership tens of thousands of years old. He just knows he likes the crow.
That is anthropomorphism at its most honest: the animal nature does not announce itself. It simply shows up, quietly, in the background of a person’s preferences and instincts, doing its work without commentary.
The Leonite-rodent dynamic operates on a different but equally fascinating principle. It is not ancient biology in the same way — it is, instead, the extension of something I wrote about in the Vulpen post: the Organic Plushie Effect.
The same overwhelming rush of cuteness and protectiveness that a nine-foot Leonite feels when he first meets a Vulpen — that involuntary, inescapable sense that this small thing is extraordinarily dear and must be looked after — does not stop at the Vulpen. It extends all the way down. A tiny hamster, a round-faced rat, a creature that fits in the palm of his hand — these trigger that same protective drive in a Leonite more powerfully than in almost any other species. The predatory instinct, where it might theoretically exist, doesn’t get a word in. It is simply overrun by the cuteness, which for a Leonite operates at full biological force.
The result is that Leonites are, somewhat to everyone’s amusement, frequently devoted rodent owners — men who can bend steel making small beds for hamsters and speaking to their rats in the same low, warm tone they use with their youngest children.
This is love, expressed in lion.
What the Zoo Tells Us
There is one more dimension to this topic that I think is worth sitting with, because it reveals something profound about the world at a structural level.
In our world, a zoo contains animals from across the biological spectrum — including the big cats, the wolves, the bears, the apex predators that share a lineage with our own evolutionary history. It is, among other things, a reminder that we are one species among many, and that our fellow travelers on this planet include creatures of enormous power and majesty.
In my world, the zoo contains no Leonite equivalents. No non-person lions, tigers, wolves, bears, or any other mammalian carnivore. Because there are none. The entire lineage became people. There is no non-human version of a Lupenite wandering the Siberian steppe, no wild Leonite on the African savanna, no feral Vulpen denning under a suburban fence. Every mammalian carnivore that would otherwise occupy those ecological roles is a person — living in cities, building civilizations, raising families, arguing about politics.
The zoo, in my world, is filled with the herbivores — elephants, zebras, giraffes, the full array of non-person mammals — along with reptiles, which exist as animals because they do not meet the criteria for bearing the Imago Dei in this world.
This absence is easy to gloss over, but I think it deserves a moment of genuine reflection. It means that when a child in my world visits the zoo, they will never look through a glass partition at something that looks like a smaller, wilder version of their neighbor. The division between person and animal is not gradual or ambiguous in my world. It is clean. The carnivore lineage is entirely on the people side of the line. Everything else is on the animal side.
That is not an accident. It is the design. And it is one of the quieter ways my world communicates what it believes about creation — that when God gave His Image to a creature, He did not do it halfway.
For the Worldbuilders
If you are building an anthropomorphic world and you have not yet asked the pet question, ask it now — because the answer will tell you a great deal about whether your world is truly built or merely sketched.
Think through what happens when the animals we’d normally reach for as companions become people. What fills the space? What ancient bonds persist in new forms? Which species find unexpected affinities with which creatures, and why? The answers, if you follow the biology honestly, will be surprising, specific, and far more interesting than anything generic.
The absence of cats and dogs from my world’s pet culture is not a loss. It is a window — into the logic of the world, into the nature of the characters, and into what companionship actually is when you strip away the assumptions we have inherited from ten thousand years of living with wolves we taught to fetch.
What remains, when you look honestly, is something simple: the need to care for something. To be responsible for a small life. To come home and be greeted. To have something in the room that is alive and present and, in its own way, glad you are there.
That need is human. Completely, undeniably human.
And in my world, every species that bears the Imago Dei feels it.
— Eric Flegal
