This is a story about why my fursona is a giraffe. One of the many things I love about the fandom are the many stories everyone has about why they chose their fursona, and what it means to them. Giraffes were among my favorite animals before these events took place, but what I describe here elevated giraffes to a special place in my heart. I've pasted the text below, in case the link doesn't work:

Gentle Soul

I had a friend with the unlikely name of Brutus. He was like a mentor and career counselor to me. He also happened to be an 18 foot tall giraffe. And he changed my life.
I had just moved to California, trying to escape the influence of my parents who had very specific ideas of what I should do with my life. A recent college graduate, I moved to Davis to follow my girlfriend who was studying at the University of California. Alas, as often happens, the girlfriend and I went our separate ways a month after I arrived and I found myself alone in a strange town, 3000 miles from anything I knew or was familiar with.
I decided that since I now had spare time and didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, I could start by doing things I found enjoyable. I had been thinking of working with animals since I was a child, and wild animals seemed even more interesting after studying ecology during my undergraduate years. Volunteering at the local zoo seemed like the perfect fit.
I signed up to be a volunteer at the Sacramento Zoo, and after a brief interview process to make sure I knew I was in for hard dirty work cleaning up after the animals, I was ready to start. On my very first day I was told to clean the giraffe barn. This basically meant sweeping and removing all the droppings that had accumulated during the night. I envisioned busily sweeping while I wandered in and out of the legs of the animals, but I soon learned that would be very dangerous. Giraffes can kick with great ferocity, and have been known to kill lions with one blow when defending their calves.
So, my newcomer’s naivete quickly gave way to reality. As the keeper who was training me explained about brooms, trash cans and the other essentials of my work, a giraffe, safely locked out of the barn, silently peered in at me from the space above the closed barn doors.
“Don’t worry about Brutus”, the keeper said breezily. “He was hand raised, so he’s not afraid of people. He likes to watch when there’s someone in his barn.” The keeper finished up some last minute pointers and went on to another animal enclosure, and I set about my work.
Giraffe droppings are shaped more or less like large coffee beans, and are
relatively easy to sweep, so the work was not that hard. As I worked, I felt a fly buzzing about my head, so I absently swatted it away. I kept sweeping, and the fly kept landing on my head. My distracted swatting had by now become irritation, so I stopped sweeping to see where the pesky little insect was. I turned around and found myself staring, nearly eyeball to eyeball, with Brutus’s head.
That was startling enough, but what no one realizes is just how big the head of a giraffe actually is. We are used to seeing giraffes from 20-30 feet away, behind various fences, with their heads 10-15 ft in the air. Suddenly, a massive 4 foot giraffe head was staring at me from 6 inches away, hovering over me like some sort of guardian angel. I froze, staring back, but never felt threatened. There was no one else around–I was by myself. The giraffe was completely silent, as is their way in the wild. He sniffed at me, investigating. The “fly” I had been swatting at was his tongue, checking out my hair.
Then I saw his eye, staring at me, intently. The eye itself was huge, the size of a baseball, and was the most beautiful deep brown color, like freshly melted chocolate. I stared back, and seemed to fall into that eye. Time seemed to stop as we regarded each other, and then he silently swung his head up and away like a brown and yellow wrecking ball, and moved out into his yard, away from the door. The moment passed. I have no idea what he was thinking, but I know that I had fallen in love. I felt electrified.
I walked around the rest of the day somewhat dreamily. I couldn’t stop thinking about that eye. “I’ve just been kissed by a giraffe!”– the phrase kept rattling around my head. I decided that day that I wanted to work in a field where I could have that kind of close encounter with animals, and that is what ultimately sent me on my path towards veterinary medicine.
My volunteer job led to a paying job teaching classes and giving tours throughout the zoo. One of the things I loved to do was to take my tour groups up to Brutus’s barn. I’d cut off acacia branches from some nearby bushes and hand them out to everybody. Without fail, whenever I brought a group of visitors to the back door to his barn, Brutus would come over, lean out, and take the acacia with his 18 inch long purple tongue. I loved watching the amazement on both children and adult faces as they, too, stared at his massive head, and looked into those enormous gentle eyes, from inches away. It was a thrill to watch other people fall in love with Brutus as well.
Brutus lived a good long life at the Sacramento Zoo, but inevitably, he got old, developed medical problems, and passed on. His death was written up in the Sacramento newspaper, and the article described how the staff at the zoo still couldn’t talk about him without crying. I still think about Brutus myself. I feel fortunate to have met such a magnificent animal, such a gentle soul, who not only helped me find myself, but changed the lives of many others who met him as well.

c mark willett