There’s a common trope in home-grown transformation fiction. The victim, and it usually is a victim, experiences all the various aspects of their physical transformation, and then, between one breath and the next, their mind, to all intents and purposes is erased. It goes blank. There’s no intelligence left and no memory of their former existence.

As animal transformation is purely an exercise in fantasy at the time of writing, it’s a hard one to argue, but I’ve always been deeply unsatisfied with this progression. Yeah, changing into an animal would probably be extremely traumatic, and it could easily destroy the victim’s mind, but that doesn’t seem to be what’s happening in all these stories. Instead, there seems to be an assumption that an animal, as opposed to a human being, is essentially an unreasoning bundle of instincts with no personality or ability to think or remember.

I guess there’s a certain seduction in fantasizing about being a creature that is completely unruled by anything beyond spontaneous desire, but is it realistic to suppose the victim’s old intellect is just wiped and replaced with something that resembles a simple computer program? Eat, Sleep, Mate (or let’s be honest, with a lot of tf fiction, Mate, mate, Mate…)

I’m going to go with horses as an example, because I know horses. I’m not an expert by any means, but I’ve known some of them very well, and one individual in particular. Many of these qualities undoubtedly apply to other animals.

Horses have distinct and strong personalities and a range of ways to express themselves. They also have phenomenal memories: they learn much quicker than us, and they retain it for life. They have highly-developed problem-solving abilities, and most stable owners can tell tales of horses that quickly work out how to open supposedly horse-proof doors and gates that have foxed humans. They have minimal language-processing ability, and certainly can’t communicate in sentences, but they are able to recognize their own names and a number of commands – they would undoubtedly handle more, but the lack of language makes it hard for us to explain what we mean.

This doesn’t seem to ring true with the well-known conclusion to many tf-stories: “Then his mind went blank and later, police/family discover a confused and witless animal roaming free.”

I kind of feel that if you’re going to wipe a person’s mind when you change them, it’s a bit like knocking down a building and then repurposing the bricks. You haven’t changed one building into another: you’ve destroyed one and used its components to build a different one. There's no 'continuity of being'. If you’re going to obliterate everything that makes a person a person, you might just as well shoot them, stick 'em in a blender, and pour their remains into an animal-shaped mould...

I guess some people would say it's kind of pointless to discuss the 'realities' of shape shifting, but if the process simply destroys who you are, where's the fun in it? ;)