Articles

Physical Shifting

Physical shifting is shape shifting, or the act of changing one’s form (like the werewolves of mythology, who usually change form from human to wolf). In the therian community physical shifting is often viewed with scepticism, but also interest and optimism that it may in fact be possible. Currently, no credible evidence of physical shifting has ever been presented in or out of the therianthrope community.

Sometimes people come into the community hopeful they can be turned into an animal, and that some method exists among therians that allows them to physically shift. This isn’t true, and the request is sometimes even met with hostility. In fact, many people in the community who believe in or are interested in the idea of physical shifting are barred from discussing the subject simply because it is so controversial. While the general argument is that physical shifting is impossible, this article is not meant to state or prove that either way, but to share a few reasons why if you’re interested in trying to physically shift, or think therianthropy will give you that ability, you are biting off more than you can chew. This article is food for thought.

Step back a minute, and take a bit of a sceptical eye.

Physical shifting requires the body to accomplish a lot, usually in a very short period of time. Most people argue this would be too stressful to survive through. Others might argue that if we can’t force ourselves to grow taller, than physical shifting is a large jump. There are many arguments both for and against the idea.

For the sake of this article, pretend you wanted to physically change wholly or partly into a canine of some sort.

The first thing to look at is mitosis. Mitosis is the process of cell division that allows plants and animals to grow and repair. Without mitosis your cuts would not heal and you would never grow. When a cell divides it makes a copy of its chromosomes (which contain your DNA) and breaks into two. Through mitosis a cell will only ever make an exact copy of itself, barring an error in which the following cells will continue to repeat the error ever more, leading to, for example, cancer.[1]

So if parent Cell A divides into Cell B and C those two new cells will have the same chromosomes of the original cell A. Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes.[1] Chromosomes contain the instructions (DNA) that tell a cell what its function is and how to grow. Basically, your chromosomes contain a set of instructions labelled ‘Human’. Unlike humans, canines have 39 pairs of chromosomes with different instructions than ours.[2] Considering you can’t change your genes after you’re born, and that cell division only makes copies, it would hardly be possible for a person to turn into a dog, at least in today’s world with today’s knowledge. Mitosis is also pretty slow, otherwise our cuts would heal within seconds. So on top of giving your body a set of new instructions to work with, you’d also have to tell your cells to hurry up and start dividing, because that instant shift isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

There are other reasons physical shifting should be viewed with several grains of salt. Let’s look at a few of the changes the body would need to go through to make it from human to canine. One of the most obvious differences is that humans are bipeds and canines are not. Our skeletons are drastically different. Even our skulls are placed differently, which you’ll notice immediately if you try walking on all fours. A change from human to dog would require a remodelling of the bone structure, changing the pivot of some joints and, as humans only have 206 bones, calling on mitosis to form some 115 more bones for which there are no instructions saying ‘Build Me!’.[1, 3] Finally, after all this restructuring, your body would need to reorganize its other systems to accommodate the new structure.

The majority of human and canine senses also differ from each other. Eye sight in particular. Dogs are red-green colour blind, so a human (unless shape shifting is selective on what changes) would need to lose a number of cones, which are responsible for our spectacular full colour vision. There are red-green colour blind humans, but they were born colour blind, and cannot switch it on and off. The fovea pit is also not a feature of the canine eye, so the shifter in question would lose the ability to focus at long distances.[4] The eye would also need to grow many more rods than a human eye possesses, which gives canines superior night vision.[4] Canines of the wolf variety also have a sense of smell 14 times greater than a human’s and can hear comfortably to 25 kHz, while the human upper limit is only 20 kHz.[4]

Those are just some of the reasons physical shifting is viewed with scepticism and and why claims of transformation should be approached with caution. While a nice romantic notion, it is highly unlikely any human (including therians) in today’s world could modify their body so dramatically in a transformation. It might also be important to consider what you would do if your human brain changed into a fully canine brain during a physical shift. How would you change back? Oh dear. Maybe one day physical shifting will be possible. Just not today.

Citation

  1. Malcolm Coe., ed. Oxford Illustrated Encyclopaedia: Volume 2: The Natural World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
  2. “Understanding General Canine Genetics.” Spear-Bar Kennels. 16 February 2009 [http://spear-barkennels.com/Genetics.php]
  3. “Dog Facts.” ThinkQuest. 16 February 2009 [http://library.thinkquest.org/CR0211900/facts/dog_facts.htm]
  4. Robert H. Busch. The Wolf Almanac. Guilford: The Lyons Press, 2007.


Written by Aethyriek.