As a kid I had a sick bit of an obsession with wolves and dogs, particularly because we lived in my Grandmother's house and she has a deep hatred for all things not Super-Christian and human, so I always played with the neighbor's dogs. It was like my forbidden fruit. Then in about second grade I started to watch this early Saturday morning cartoon called Tama and Friends that was on the WB (Now CW). It featured cats and a dog running around and getting into adventures and some mischief. I always kinda just watch blankly until they had an episode where main character (Tama)'s owner fell ill and when he went to sleep a new cat would appear and play with all of the other animals. When he would wake up, the cat disappeared, and this happened over and over and then the kid recapped to his mother that he thought he heard Tama talk.
This brings me to the fourth grade. I'm a total pokemon nerd, watching the show, playing all of the games, I even had plushies of some of the pokemon, like charazard, venusaur, snorlax, those. And I was playing the trading card game and everything. At recess me and my friends would run around, a few would be trainers, others would be pokemon, (I was always GROWLITH or ARCANINE, no surprise there.) and it was all very fun. Later on in that year my teacher assigned a project on different kinds of animals. Everyone got to choose a top three and you were assigned one of them. I got wolves
. I made a little clay model and wrote a three page paper on them, which got me into looking up pictures of wolves a lot. Just before the end of the fifth grade I found a photomorphic picture of two people morphed into anthro wolves sharing a bed, for lack of ability to be explicit. It was my first introduction to anthros and the fact that I was hitting puberty at the age of 9 meant raging hormones in me and a want to know more. I found the source of the photomorpher, and needless to say, more anthros in mature ways, but I was kind of limited, and didn't know there was more to this kind of art than the sexual aspect.
Jump forward to the sixth grade and my infatuation with the animorphs books. I must have read every single volume of those books and they never seemed to get old or dull. I was enveloped in them and it had me almost jealous of the people in the story. I wanted to become a wolf so badly it almost made me sick when they turned into wolves.
Now to the summer between 6th and 7th grade. I was in summer camp and I was a hardcore DDR player. There were some other hardcore players in the grade above me so I fell in a crowd with them, specifically this one anime obsessed girl. We talked mostly of anime and stuff, telling eachother which were our favorites and at the time I had all of the Wolf's Rain DVDs in my DVD case. She went nuts, having been a fanatic herself. A few months later, school starts, and bam, we're a couple. It's great, except for the fact that all of my friends were now in 8th grade, they were graduating, I was in 7th and had no friends in my own grade.
Well we dated for a while and she also had a wolf obsession, and started showing me some really cool art. I had a party at my house later on that year and she asked me if I was a furry, since I seemed to exhibit a lot of the qualities one would. I replied that I didn't know what a furry was, so she gave me the basic layout, sure enough, I adopted the word into my identity.
And there's my story, sowwy for the length.