5 Tips on Writing Animals

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For the following, I would definitely reference Watership Down, Fire-Bringer (the deer one), and The Sight for how to characterize animals.  For sentient animals or magically enhanced ones, try the Ratha books and Tamora Pierce’s Immortals quartet. For those looking for good reference for sentient animal civilizations, look no further than the masterfully done Iorek Byrnison in His Dark Materials or the beautifully rendered world of Meredith Ann Pierce’s Firebringer trilogy.

1.  Animals should act like animals. I see this one disregarded a lot, so this goes at the top of the list.  Most of the time, if animals are written, they may as well be people in tiny furry suits.  (Cats, I’ve noticed, are the only ones who sometimes act like cats, but I suspect that has to do with the gleeful appeal of writing a made-to-order bastard character.)  Whether the animal is magical in nature or sentient, dogs never roll in anything obnoxious or lick themselves, horses never kick or bolt, and birds of prey never crap on you or gouge you by accident with massive, horrible talons.  The animals are always attentive to the human’s needs, and never do anything odious or animalistic, despite being what they are.  I’ve never seen a big badass wolf, defender of the Hero, cache food, bury bones, or roll in something dead.  No, they just lurk majestically in the shadows.  All night and day.  Animal characters are somehow capable of human discourse and concerns, and even though most animal species depend on hearing or scent as their first priority senses, they always communicate in terms a human can understand.  (Seriously, wolves can hear caribou tendons snapping a mile away, but they can’t hear an ambush until it’s five feet from the hero’s campsite?  Please.)  Also, the fight-or-flight response is never considered, even when the animal is just a joe-blow animal, not something like, say, a warhorse trained to charge or a dog trained to attack.  (Even when a human not trained to such things would run.)  When writing an animal, examine its nature and why it appeals to you as an author.  Look for things that can be part of the animal’s “culture” or background that will allow it to still be an animal and something magical/sentient in nature.  Remember that the character is an animal first and an individual second, and that as something tied to instinct and nature, it would be both a slave to and more aware of it, and all the pros and cons of that should be considered.
2. Animals prioritize differently from people. Not only is this a problem with pet owners in real-life, but fantasy authors take this to a ridiculous extreme.  Most animals operate very much in a “here and now” mindset; there is not exactly a past to ruminate on or a future to consider.  Anticipation and experience dictate animal behavior, but their brains simply don’t process information the same way ours do.  This isn’t an argument for human superiority: it’s simply pointing out that animals literally do not think the same way we do. But a lot of animals in fantasy are written this way: a tiger companion to the elf maiden thinks “Oh no, a storm is coming; what if it floods?  We’re all going to starve!” when a real life tiger would be like “Welp, it’s raining.  Still hungry.”  Animal nature is quite refreshing by it’s inherent nature: animals are kind of A to B thinkers.  Human thinking, if they could give us a definition, would be terribly convoluted to them.  Not only that, but animals are usually concerned with food, shelter, and if they have those things, a mate.  That’s one of the biggest things about Inheritance that bothers me (yes, there is an actual chart in my head, and yes, Saphira’s behavior is close to the top): We never see any of her priorities.  She doesn’t want eggs instead of glory, she doesn’t want to sleep instead of fight, she’s never more interested in something she wants to do than in Eragon’s quest.  It’s taken so far that Eragon’s ideas, philosophies, and plans of attack are hardly questioned and never straight-up disregarded by Saphira, regardless of how stupid they’d seem to her POV.  I mean, if a human guy is happy and secure with his life, and some knight/hero/hot elf chick rode up and said, “Hey, would you like to leave everything familiar behind and come with me, all by yourself, and fight with only your teeth and nails against impossible odds for something that personally means nothing to you and will gain you nothing at all!?”, we wouldn’t be at all surprised when the guy replies, “Uh, no.”  But if an animal is just along for the ride, it’s perfectly accepted that they apparently answered “Why, yes.” The reality is that an animal would be even harder to convince.  This goes double for any kind of domestic sentient or magical species, whose major concerns like food and shelter are really, really already taken care of.
3.  Be aware of entirely human concepts and how they would relate to the animal character. War is a big one, but I’m also gonna point out stuff like honor and morality do not register with animals.  Sentience might be an awareness of such things, but that doesn’t automatically mean the creature will care.  The tried-and-true method of gaining an animal companion seems to be saving its life.  While I can see something like Androcles’s lion, i.e. “Hey, you helped me out, I guess I won’t eat you this once” actually working, something like a freaking life debt, not so much.  Any white-hat hero trying to convince a cat to join him with “It’s the right thing to do!” well-deserves the derisive bout of feline laughter he’s about to get.  Personally, I think a wolf would laugh just as hard, especially if he’s got a perfectly healthy pack that likes him.  Dogs might not take nearly as much convincing, but that’s probably more due to the blind loyalty thing.  I mean, a magical creature with regular animal intelligence would actually be a lot more convenient than a sentient one.  Sentient horses on the battlefield who hear that the other side have longbowmen armed with horse-killing bodkins may just defect.  A cat may well discover that lying is a fantastically beautiful thing that they should indulge in with every human seventeen times a day (if a dog discovered this, it’d probably be about ten times worse: everyone trusts dogs!)  Conversely, animals are almost impossible to fool, so lying to them would be difficult (a red-handed thief talking to a guard dog, anyone?)  Modesty is another big one: animals have the smallest inkling of shame, and something like nakedness or sex would hardly bother them.  Animal characters are far too often given human priorities, and as a result, they give human reactions, even to things that they probably never would have encountered on their own.  “I say, that dress!  Scandalous!”
4. Take into account how uncomfortable the human world is for animals. I don’t mean kill shelters or animal abuse, although that would definitely be an interesting perspective to examine from a animal character’s POV or with a sentient animal character.  What I mean is that human comforts are not necessarily animal comforts.  That Febreeze or perfume you just sprayed?  Your dog smells it a thousand times more than you do. That loud music?  Your cat hears it, even if you are wearing headphones.  Taking sentience into account, whose to say that saddle is comfortable for the horse?  And forget the bit, blinkers, and yoke. Even a fire can stink abominably, let alone that in nature, it’s a terrifying power that most animals fear.  Much of human technology may well baffle even a sentient creature whose never encountered it before.  (Have you ever seen your dog watch you pick up some dropped change, and wonder what the hell they make of our priorities?)  And what about slaughterhouses?  If a sentient creature is okay with the death of a non-sentient being, don’t be too surprised if they don’t care about human deaths either: remember kill or be killed?  All animals need some kind of specific accommodation for their care, and if they can talk, why wouldn’t they speak up if their litter box is dirty or their coat is matted?  Animals in a modern setting would also be heavily desensitized to natural settings if they’ve grown up in a city and felt, touched, and tasted every second of traffic every day vibrating through their paws/hooves.  Oh, and for all the piercing-and-clothing-on-animals folk out there: forget it.  Aesthetics is not an animal priority, especially since the aforementioned would chafe fur and feel quite constricting; don’t even get me started on animals who would consent to tattoos or ritual scarring without a damn good reason.  “Uh, you want me to do what?  Don’t they do that to cows?” Sentient animals are more than welcome to develop an
opinion about humans and their world, but if they’ve lived apart from it, there’s no way they can begin to comprehend what we are.  Next badass wild wolf companion I see better be scared shitless by a horse and carriage or musket fire.
5. Animals have their own social structures and norms.  One could almost go a step further and say that animals have a “universal language”, considering that most communication is nonverbal, and even species with polar opposites in communication (dog tail wagging is not the same as cat tail wagging) can still manage to understand each other.  A wolf or dog, whose gregarious nature is quite similar to our own, might not have as big a problem adjusting to humanity, whereas something severely secretive or independent, like a snow leopard or a tiger, might.  The huge gap in human and animal nature can make for some great First Contact or Fish
Out of Water conflict, especially if you take into account that an animal would be coming from a culture that probably doesn’t lie or murder, but also can’t see what the big deal about stealing is.  Look no further than a dog raised with cats versus a dog that’s never seen one before.  The norms are completely displaced with the never-seen-a-cat dog: it can’t process them, and sparks are bound to fly.  The same would go for a sentient animal; it would just be raised to the level of culture shock (see Rule #4).  All of that combined with stupid priorities on the part of their human companion, and it’s not hard to see why many magical animal characters come across as unrealistic.  Don’t expect your reader to swallow that a tiger would act like a dog for a person, when they are a tiger, and should behave and prioritize like one; otherwise why tell us it’s a tiger?  The wolf thing has also got to be addressed real quick, since most people seem to be under the impression that wolves act just like dogs; when anyone whose ever owned a full-wolf or hybrid will tell you that they make lousy guard dogs but are still aggressive, shy, and prone to less predictable temperaments than either wolves or dogs.  (What all that translates to is that they need a far more severe structure to be happy then, say, a Lab would.)  Wolf pack structure is also the most rigid of all canines, so please don’t tell me a sentient wolf used to pack mentality would be happy to indulge laziness, whining, or sloppiness from anyone; or who would label bullying as dishonorable; all of these things are the proverbial bread-and-butter of a pack.  Examine your animal’s way of communicating and allow it to reflect their culture; you can use world-building questions to expand upon it.
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seionara's avatar
*coughcough* sapience.

Sentient means able to feel, something which is true for many, many creatures on earth; sapient's definition is closer to "being able to reason" ( somewhat connected to being part of homo sapiens and all). Though it does have stronger ties with wisdom rather than reasoning it's definitely the better word to use.

EDIT: Aside form that little thing which is admittedly as much one of my pet peeves as Saphira's behaviour and lack of agency seems to be for you these are definitely useful things to keep in mind, though I'd argue that once you get to a certain level of sapience it doesn't just depend on the animal being an animal but also on how that animal was brought up and socialized (especially if people are/were aware of it's intelligence and raised it in a very human way/in a way that would make human traditions more than just something it can understand like one would understand a foreign custom but something it would understand like we do our own cultural norms) and if we're to get into civilizations of sentient whathaveyous...well, let's just say that it definitely changes the nature of the issue quite a bit in my opinion.