When creating my fursona, I thought I'd just research some animals and their behavior and see which one most resembled my personality. I had narrowed my search to canids, which included Wolf, Coyote, Fox, wild and domestic Dog.

We're familiar with Dogs. General information is available on Foxes. The Wolf, considered noble, have had extensive research, but a love-hate relationship. We re-introduced them to Yellowstone at the same time Alaskans were shooting them from helicopter.

Coyotes?

Google gave me Army weapons manual-style instructions on how to deploy poisoned bait traps. Slim fact-sheets on how to hunt them by tracking the parents back to the den, to kill the pups by gassing the burrows.

Use of chemical weapons on Humans is a war crime. As is genocide. Especially of people who are living on their native land.

This is the kind of monsters we are.

There was one 'lone wolf' biologist lamenting little is known about Coyotes, because they're considered vermin, so not worth studying... though he did note that a cursory study showed they had family units.

In a bit of irony (though it would have to do better to rise up to become justice) it was noted, and has been noted multiple times since, efforts to "cull" Coyote populations just make them breed more often and larger litters - resulting in a net population gain.

(Star Trek and Dr. Who called this one 40 years ago - going in guns blazing - instead of studying the problem scientifically - never works.)

It was one of many threads that had me being - for a time - one of the "I'm a Furry because Humans are depraved and disgusting." Furries.

Part of why the Runewolf is what he is - a dim vision black as a shadow, and based on spiritual, not scientific, ideas - that no longer fit who I am... but that's another story.

Simply put, maybe Coyotes fit me as a "spirit animal" or fursona, but I gave up on them due to lack of information.

So it was for several years.

Slowly I came to realize that the morality of the individual matters more than the race. In Star Trek terms, not all Klingons are warriors, and not all Ferengi are asshole capitalists. In a DnD terms, Humans, Elves and Dwarves are not all good-alignment, Orcs, Gnolls and Kobolds are not all evil-alignment.

The concentration camp guards were Human. The victims they killed were Human. The soldiers who liberated them were Human. The doctors who nursed the starving survivors were Human. The judge and jury at the war crimes tribunal were Human.

The same species.

Last night, looking up invasive and urbanized species for... reasons haveing nothing to do with fursonas... I found this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coyote

Now this probably doesn't look like anything meaningful to you, but compared to what little was there before?

If I were starting into Furry today, who knows what species I'd have picked, if I had information at my fingertips on all of them? And nothing to shock my Eternal Summer of a youthful mind? Shrugs

...and maybe we Humans are just a little less monsterous than we were before.