Furry Confusion

"Is... is this a job for human rights activists or for PETA?"

"The classic Disney cartoon universe has traditionally hosted two types of animals. The first type includes human-like animals such as Goofy and Mickey Mouse who wear clothes, pay taxes, and speak in some kind of coherent human language. The other type more closely resembles actual animals — Pluto, for example, runs around naked, eats whatever he happens to find laying on the floor, and sniffs the crotches of random strangers, just like your average real-world dog (Goofy, on the other hand, only pulls that shit in fanfic)."

— Cracked, "5 Horrifying Details Hidden in Classic Children's Cartoons"

In many cartoon, comic, and other less-realistic settings, the characters are anthropomorphic animals. The audience tends to accept this without question. Even if there are non-anthropomorphic animals in the setting as well, they're usually different species than the main characters.

The problem comes when non-anthropomorphic specimens of the same species of animals the main characters are based upon are shown existing in the setting alongside them. There's no acknowledgement of this outside of possibly a quick gag.

In some works, anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic animals are considered distinct categories in-universe; that is not this trope. The Furry Lens trope can explain this trope occurring in the work by having the anthropomorphic animals in the work turn out to be contextually human and the non-anthropomorphic animals are contextually their respective species of animal.

One way to avoid this trope is if certain species are anthropomorphized, their species' original niche is replaced with a Fantastic Fauna Counterpart. Very often crosses over with Carnivore Confusion, Denial of Animality, and occasionally with What Measure Is a Non-Cute? and No Cartoon Fish; examples more fitting for those tropes belong on those pages. Adults Are More Anthropomorphic and Humanoid Female Animal can sometimes overlap with this trope. World of Mammals is a variant in which all the anthropomorphic animals are mammals. See also Anthropomorphic Shift, Feather Fingers, and Let's Meet the Meat. See Animal Gender-Bender and Ass in a Lion Skin for a whole new level of confusion. Very often happens because Most Writers Are Human and Furries Are Easier to Draw.

Not to Be Confused with Viewer Species Confusion, confused furries, or confusion among them.

No Real Life Examples, Please! A monkey isn't a Funny Animal or a less anthropomorphic human. Real life doesn't even have funny animals to begin with.

---

Example subpages:

• Anime & Manga
• Comic Books
• Disney & Pixar
• Video Games
• Webcomics
• Western Animation
  • Arthur (also includes the original books)

Other examples:

Advertising

• Early McDonaldland featured a meat version of this, with several characters being living Hamburgers (such as Officer Big Mac), but many of the plots revolving around villains like the Hamburglar trying to steal regular Hamburgers for the express purpose of eating them. The Hamburger characters were quietly retired in later iterations.
• Chips Ahoy: Modern ads featuring the new mascot, Chip, an anthropomorphic cookie, have shown him next to non-anthropomorphic cookies and bathing with a non-anthropomorphic Hershey.
• James Coney Island, a fast food chain specializing in hotdogs, had a logo consisting of an anthropomorphic hotdog cheerfully holding up a regular hot dog.

Collectibles

• Minotaurs are especially prone to weirdness (see also Non-Mammal Mammaries and the World of Warcraft examples below). The Kystonia line of collectible figures has two characters named Moplos and Mos. Moplos is a Minotaur-like creature. Mos is his "pack animal" who looks eerily like a non-anthro bovine. Now, the literature assures us that they are very different species — but they look darn near identical except for the fact that one of them walks like a man and the other is on all fours.
• Enjoy a new level of Furry Confusion with this collection of all-animal Nativity sets. The very sight of Moose-Jesus is a good indication of why Brian Jaques ignores this issue entirely.
  • This has to have something to do with Christian Furries, who probably warrant a mention on this page anyway.
• Here is one to mull over — iconic cute mascot Hello Kitty has a pet cat named Charmmy Kitty. It doesn't help that if it weren't for her tufts of fur and non-anthro body, she would look exactly like her owner.
  • Sanrio execs, preparing for the big Hello Kitty exhibition in Los Angeles, cat-egorically stated that Hello Kitty is ''not a cat''. As you can see from the comments and tweets, fans aren't buying it. That said, they later clarified she's not a human either.

Comic Strips

• Happens in-universe to Otto of Beetle Bailey, who feels sorry for a dog that walks on four legs and wears no clothes. Otherwise usually averted, because Otto is still "animal" enough to interact with other dogs on the same level, even though he's closer to anthropomorphism than they.
• The Far Side. Perhaps it would be best just to leave it at "Gary Larson is in love with lampshading this."
  • A chicken is serving her sick husband a bowl of soup, saying, "Just eat it. First of all, chicken soup is good for a cold, and second, it's nobody we know."
  • There's another strip where a cow is grilling beef, with other cows pointing and screaming: "You're sick, Jessie! Sick! Sick! Sick!"
  • An even creepier strip shows a cow eating a steak while the other cows watch, apparently as an experiment. Why they decided to do it is probably best left unknown.
    "Interesting, interesting... I'd say we taste a little like chicken."
  • Then there's the one where a young bull walks into his house in a leather outfit. Two of the on-looking cows are horrified, but a third explains, "Don't mind him. That's our calf Randy — he wears leather for the shock value."
  • Don't forget the one where the chicken was baking a cake, noticed that eggs were on the ingredients list, and then looks over at her unhatched children.
  • In a less creepy example, one dog is pedalling a bicycle which is being chased by another dog running on all fours.
    "Hey... Be cool, man, be cool."
• Subverted in the newspaper comic strip My Cage. While all the "people" in the strip are anthropomorphic animals of some variety, all the "animals" are, in fact, enormous microbes. The main character, Norm, even has a pet amoeba named Squishy. There's also one strip where one character is said to suffer from a condition that makes him think he is non-anthropomorphic.
• In Pearls Before Swine, a strip populated mainly with talking animals, the little guard duck (usually an over-the-top violent military type) attempts a rather tender relationship with a non-anthropomorphic female duck. This is quite explicitly mentioned in the strip, with the author making an appearance to explain things to the characters. (In the end, the non-anthropomorphic female duck flies away to migrate, but the little guard duck is incapable of flight. He is quite sad, for a duck who blasts sedans with RPGs on a semi-regular basis.)
  • Also, in a rather gruesome early strip, Pig is thrown out of a club for pigs due to his love for BLTs. And before that, there was the strip where a diner owner refused to bring Pig the ham sandwich he ordered because it might be one of his relatives. Pig proceeds to call a relative and ask about every member of his family. Upon finding out his aunt is missing, Pig orders a fruit salad.
  • Another example is the non-anthropomorphic sheep that joined the Pearls Before Swine crew early on, providing the proverbial lampshade.
• In this The Perry Bible Fellowship strip, a non-anthropomorphic rabbit in a World of Funny Animals gets treated as a streaker, complete with pixelating its genital era in the TV news.
• One of the running themes in the Pluggers commentary at The Comics Curmudgeon is the question of what, exactly, the interaction between anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic characters is like; since the characters in Pluggers are drawn as anthropomorphic animals, but the ideas used in the strip are submitted by readers (i.e. humans), the overlap can range from confusing (an anthropomorphic bear taking a normal dog for a walk) to disturbing (a chicken-woman storing her jewelry in an egg carton.) One strip in particular may require two or three readings to understand — its caption refers to the "dog", meaning an off-panel pet dog, even as the reader can see the family's husband, a dog-man.
• Since the cast of Rocky is portrayed as humanistic with animal heads, Furry Confusion occasionally happens. Tellingly, the Authors standard answer to the question "What breed is Rocky?" is a completely straight-faced "Aryan".
• Tom the Dancing Bug did a brief, 3 panel comic that made fun of trope. An anthro dog walks a normal dog. An anthro pig asks "I don't understand, aren't you both dogs?" The anthro dog replies "Well, isn't that a pork chop in your bag?"

Fan Works

• In Turnabout Storm, Rarity gets quite puzzled when Phoenix tells her that the ponies in his world are not as nearly as talkative, intelligent and not-stinky as the ones in Equestria. Welp, there goes Rarity and her new trans-dimensional clients.
• In the same vein, Becoming Ponies inevitably has people turned ponies meeting actual horses. The incidents are... weird, to say the least.
• Also in the same vein, Anthropology has Lyra, a unicorn-turned-human meeting actual horses at a ranch when she first enters Earth. She understandably feels confused as to why the horses don't answer to her, seeing as she's lived all her life among talking horses.
• And then we get, in The Audience, a human has come to Equestria and various human items are too. Celestia has established a McDonald's. He is initially hesitant, knowing that in Equestria cows are people and chickens and pigs are pet animals (there is actually a cow working at the register!), but then Celestia reveals that the burgers are made of a meat substitute that passed through the portal. When he orders a milkshake, one of the ponies says that it's empty and then asks the cow to go to the milking machine. He is understandably Squicked out by this, as he isn't used to the idea of a sapient creature providing the milk. Also, there are "My Little Human" toys in the happy meals.
• In this crossover ficlet Nick and Judy have recently arrested one of Muggshot's guards for interrogation, but fail to realize it's a bulldog guard. Carmelita Montoya Fox tries to explain the difference between a dog like the guard dog and dog like Muggshot but they are unable to grasp that concept.
• This pops up as a minor plot point in the Sonic the Hedgehog fic Descent into Darkness. Gerald Robotnik is interested in the differences between dokan and normal animals. It's unknown if they're akin to humans and non-human apes or if they're examples of convergent evolution and are actually unrelated.
• In Speed and Purpose, most Mobians are Funny Animals, but there are also Civilized Animal Mobians called "Old Mobians". Unlike other Mobians, they can walk on all fours, fly, and still have paws, flippers, or wings. They also don't wear clothes. The two types of Mobian evolved differently thousands of years ago, but they're considered equal nevertheless.
• In Kemono Friends lore, animals are transformed into moe girl forms, but retain quite a bit of their normal behaviors. So of course, Man's Best Furenzu has the main character trying to help out Domestic Dog-Chan with her depression... and feeling conflicted when she holds out a leash to go for a walk, for instance.

Films — Animated

• In Rock-A-Doodle, Chanticleer the rooster and his friends all live on a farm. But when all the other animals go to the city to find Chanticleer so they can get him back and stop the evil owl, instead of humans, all the inhabitants of said city are also animals! And also consider the fact that Edmund (the boy who was apparently turned into a cat by the evil owl) and his parents are the supposed owners of Chanticleer's farm. On the surface this is easily explained by All Just a Dream, at least until the next scene where the live-action kid appears on the cartoon farm just to confuse the issue even more.
• In An American Tail we have Digit the Cockroach, a Four-Legged Insect that wears clothes and talks, in the same movie as a group of photo-realistic Creepy Cockroaches that sneak up on Fievel while he's exploring a storm drain.
• In Once Upon a Forest, when the three main characters get stuck in a storm drain we see a group of scary realistic rats scurry by before the tunnel gets flooded with water. One of the main characters is a cartoony wood mouse.
• In Tom Sawyer, all the characters are anthropomorphic animals. At one point, Becky Thatcher mentions that baby kittens are some of her favorite things. She is a cat herself, and it's never made clear whether the kittens she is referring to are the equivalents of human babies or if there are non-anthropomorphic cats in that universe.
• In Epic (2013) some of the animals (like Mub and Bufo) and plants (like the dandelions) can talk and interact like humans but others (like the mouse and birds) can only interact as animals of comparable size to humans would.
• The American cut of Rock and Rule opens by saying that all the inhabitants of the future-North America are mutated cats, dogs, and rats, but later features a normal cat hissing and clawing at the camera when startled.
• Tom and Jerry:
  • Tom and Jerry and the Wizard of Oz has Toto acting as a perfectly normal dog and farm animals acting like normal animals as well. This makes sense in the original film as only Oz has Talking Animals and Funny Animals... however the film features Tom and Jerry acting essentially like non-verbal humans. They are bipedal, are treated like farm hands, and apparently aren't pets. To make matters worse, Butch seems similarly anthropomorphic but lives in a dog-house and seems to be a pet.
  • Tom and Jerry: Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory: Droopy and Spike demonstrate that some dogs are able to work jobs, own homes, and go to prison, but Spike's son Tyke is briefly seen being walked on a leash.
• For most of its existence, Alvin and the Chipmunks took place in what was basically the real world, just with three (later six) chipmunks who talked, acted like, and were the same size as human children. Then came The Chipmunk Adventure. In addition to the Chipmunks and Chipettes, the film contains non-anthropomorphic dogs, horses, lizards and sharks, cobras and alligators with slightly human traits, and... penguins that live in igloos, sleep in carved wooden beds, and carry lockets with photographs of their families. ...What?
• Shrek the Third: In one scene, Puss in Boots tries to flirt with normal meowing female cats.

Films — Live-Action

• In Stuart Little, the eponymous character is an anthropomorphic mouse adopted as a son by humans; as a result he has a pet cat. However, the cat also speaks. It is implied that all cats and mice have intelligence in this world, but are generally treated as we treat animals anyway... Stuart being given "special treatment" creates a bit of a social scandal in both the human and animal worlds. Note that this is completely different from the original novel. In the book, Mrs. Little gives birth to a mouse-like, mouse-sized child. Don't think about that one too hard.
• In Howard the Duck, the eponymous character flips out when he is served a breakfast that includes fried eggs. Howard's behavior is justified because he was accidentally abducted from a world populated with anthropomorphic ducks like himself, so the eggs "always remind him of his birthday", despite being chicken eggs.
• In Sonic the Hedgehog (2020), according to Sonic, Longclaw eats mice, implying that regular mice somehow exist on Sonic's planet of anthropomorphic animals. Or at least we hope they're regular mice.
• Labyrinth: Sir Didymus, some sort of dog-knight, is astride a normal-looking dog.

Literature

• The Katurran Odyssey takes place in a world populated entirely by Intellectual Animals. There is some pretty spectacular Carnivore Confusion to be found here, but for the most part everyone else is treated equally... except for in the city of Od Ashud. If you aren't a Golden Monkey, expect to be added to the Empress' zoo.
• In Time Waits For No Mouse and its sequels this was averted by making insects the equivalent of animals for the talking rodent main characters. Grasshoppers are apparently their equivalent of cattle.
• The sci-fi novel I, Weapon, manages a form of Furry Confusion without actually involving Furries (although some have fur). The series is written in a far future where humans were nearly wiped out by invading aliens with the surviving members having largely speciated into various specialized forms to survive on far planets. One of the groups of humans was bred by the overlords for muscle, lack of brains, and large earlobes (the aliens thought earlobes were fascinating and bred for it as a decorative traits). At the time when the human races begin re-establishing contact, they decide that the kindest thing to do for the meat race is to continue breeding and using them as food. One of the scary aspects of the book is that it's implied that, outside of the huge earlobes, the meat race are the ones who look most like what we think of as humans.
• The minotaurs in the Dragonlance universe ride horses (specially bred to carry them, since they're bigger than people). They also keep livestock, though they don't keep cattle, they've instead bred sheep to cattle size as a substitute. They are explicitly aware of this trope. Calling a Minotaur a "cow" is roughly the equivalent of the n-word, as they are very conscious of their resemblance to said animal and don't take kindly to being reminded of it.
• Some Richard Scarry books actually have the inhabitants of Busytown (all anthropomorphic animals) coexist with non-anthropomorphic animals. For example, one book actually showed a pig farmer raising non-anthro pigs!
• The Polish books about Koziołek Matołek. Matołek the goat, and later his family, seems to be the only anthropomorphic animal around (though all animals are sapient, as usual in children's literature). The humans he meets react variously; some treat him as an ordinary person, some call for the butcher immediately upon spotting him, and then there are those who initially treat him as a human but try to make him into a stew once he displeases them.
• A few of the species in the Redwall series flip-flop on their level of sapience. Eels appear to be monsters in Taggerung, but in Mossflower an deal is made with a talking eel to free him in exchange for their lives. In the third book, Basil Stag Hare jokes that the magicians be allowed in Redwall "as long as they don't pull rabbits out of hats", which makes one wonder how that trick would work when there are no humans in the series and hares are among the larger species in the setting◊. Reptiles also vary in terms of intelligence, especially snakes. Asmodeus Poisonteeth from the first book was an intelligent, articulate villain, but later snake characters, like the giant water snake Deepcoiler, have only animalistic intelligence.
• Little Critter:
  • In Just Go to Bed, Little Critter pretends to be a rabbit. It could be justified in that he might have been pretending to be another person who just happened to be a rabbit.
  • In Just Pick Us, Please!, Little Critter and his friends help the local animal shelter to host a pet fair, which includes a hodgepodge of anthropomorphic animals all adopting various pet animals, including on one page an anthropomorphic rabbit holding what very much appears to be a non-anthro rabbit.
  • It's Easter, Little Critter! also features Little Critter and Little Sister getting a pet rabbit named Egg for Easter, despite the aforementioned presence of anthropomorphic rabbits in other titles.
  • In some books, Little Critter has a pet,cat, but there’s also his teacher, who’s an anthropomorphic cat.
  • One book has Little Critter and his class going on a hike. One of his classmates is an anthropomorphic frog, but they encounter a regular frog as well in the woods.
• A 1995 Look and Find book for Sonic the Hedgehog mixes normal looking animals, Civilized Animals, and Funny Animals on the same page. So you'll have an anthropomorphic cat woman just to the right of running cats, normal porcupines on the same page as Sonic, and Sally amongst chipmunks and squirrels.
• Maisy:
  • Maisy and her friends are all anthropomorphic, but in the book Maisy's Morning on the Farm, Maisy visits/feeds a number of farm animals, milks a cow and then uses it for her breakfast cereal, as well as giving some to the farm cat.
  • In the book Maisy Gets a Pet, Maisy, who is an anthropomorphic mouse, adopts a pet kitten.
• In Daughter of Smoke and Bone, one of the Loads and Loads of Races of chimerae are sheep-people who live by herding aries, sheeplike animals. All sentient races and most dumb animals in Eretz are hybrids of Earth species, but sentients will most often be humanoid and/or part-human.
• Furry Confusion is an actual plot point in The Book of the Named. The main characters are sapient prehistoric felines who call themselves the Named specifically to distinguish themselves from near-identical felines called the Unnamed that act animalistically. The two groups are, in fact, the same species, but it's assumed that any Unnamed cubs will always be unintelligent... at the start of the series, anyway. Interactions between Named, Unnamed, hybrids, and strangers with a different sort of intelligence drive the story as a whole.
• The Teddy Ruxpin book "All About Bears" discussed about the different kinds of bears. At the end of the story, Grubby wonders if Illiops are also bears, and Teddy says "Well, you can call me an Illiop, or you can call me a bear. I really don’t care, as long as you call me your friend".

Live-Action TV

• Discussed in Even Stevens:
  Louis "Is it fair that Pluto has to wear a leash and sleep in a doghouse while Goofy, who is also a dog, gets to drive around in a car and play golf with Mickey?"
• In a Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch, two pantomime horses get into a pastiche of chase scenes — which at one moment has the pantomime horses riding on horseback.
• The various Muppet productions have had some fun lampshading and subverting this issue. To wit:
  • On The Muppet Show, Gonzo, an anthropomorphic... birdlike... something eventually revealed to be chicken hawk, and was thus dubbed the set's resident expert on chickens, seemed to be in a relationship with Camilla, a non-anthropomorphic chicken who only speaks through clucks.
  • And there have been both talking puppet chickens ("I'm a chicken; this sketch is a turkey!") and ordinary chickens on the show. If he wanted to dance with a chicken... well... but then, getting a puppet chicken that could actually dance would've ruined the comedy of watching Gonzo urge a real chicken to "please do something!" would have been compromised.
  • Phyllis George's episode has a segment where the Swedish Chef plays with inanimate honeydew melons, despite one of the Muppet Show cast members being a sentient honeydew melon (however, this can be excused seeing that Bunsen isn't in the episode).
  • In one segment, Rowlf, a Muppet dog, sang "What a Wonderful World" to a non-Muppet dog. This could be excused out of sheer adorable.
    • Likewise, Link Hogthrob sang "Sonny Boy" to a real-life piglet.
  • Foo-Foo is Miss Piggy's pet dog who not only acts like a real dog, but alternates between being played by both a Muppet dog and a real dog. Rowlf, on the other hand, is a Muppet dog with human intelligence.
  • In The Muppets Take Manhattan, Kermit (with temporary amnesia) goes into hysterics at the thought of a Frog wanting to marry a Pig, complete with ridiculous puns. Did amnesia turn him off the idea of Interspecies Romance? And in one episode of the show, an android Kermit replica — long story — flirts with Piggy thusly: "A frog and a pig! We could be married and have bouncing baby figs!"
    • Manhattan also features a scene with Rowlf operating a kennel with a mixture of Muppet and non-Muppet dogs.
  • A Muppet Family Christmas ends with Kermit giving Miss Piggy a gift of a mink — a live, anthropomorphic mink who proclaims herself Piggy's biggest fan. Creepy...
  • Played with in this Sesame Street sketch. Kermit's reaction when the frog is brought out says it all.
  • Two web shorts involve the skateboarding dog. The Muppets, including Rowlf, seem completely unable to distinguish between a real dog and a muppet dog, talking about him as if he were capable of anything a muppet dog could do.
  • The Muppets even go one step further; Both The Muppet Show and Muppets Tonight had episodes that involved ventriloquist dummies. As Boppity (a muppet from The Great Santa Claus Switch) once said, "I can hardly believe it — a stick of wood that talks!"
• Topo Gigio is a mouse and he has a pet cat, and the cat is even smaller than him (and no, he's not a giant mouse as he is often seen speaking with humans).
• Shows where the characters are portrayed as people in costumes may get a bit more slack with this trope. Nonetheless, there are a few episodes of Zoobilee Zoo that are thought provoking:
  • In one episode, Lookout Bear adopts a non-anthropomorphic dog played by a real dog. The image of a guy in a bear costume playing with a real dog was pretty jarring. (And we'd give anything within reason to know what the dog was thinking.)
  • In another episode, a witch arrives to bully the residents of Zoobilee Zoo by making them — and these were her exact words — "act like animals!" (Bravo is the only one who replies, "I already act like a fox.")
  • Finally, there was an episode where the characters travel back to Zoobilee Zoo's distant past and meet a human caveman. (Really, the only way all of this could make sense is if the show takes place at an Anthro-Con that never ends.)
• Parodied in an episode of Out of Jimmy's Head, when Jimmy visits "Animal-Lovin'" Kevin's house and his cartoon friends stare in confusion at their real-life counterparts within Kevin's menagerie. Even Pickles is confused by an actual pickle in a jar.
• Donkey Hodie:
  • Clyde is a living cloud, yet the other clouds we see in the sky aren't sentient.
  • There are some scenes where the animal characters on the show will often refer to their feet as their toes when they don't have any. For instance, in "Mountain Climb Time", Donkey and Panda mention their toes hurting. However, some episodes avert this trope, such as "Hoof Dancing Is Hard" and "Cheesy Con".
  • In "Art Show Today", Harriett Elizabeth Cow claims that she made her piece of art, "The Cow Jumped Over The Prune", out of a plastic milk bottle. Milk comes from cows, so the thought that Harriett might have drank that milk is a little bit unnerving.
  • In "The Lavender Lights", Donkey claims she's giving Duck Duck and Bob Dog donkey rides...while she's standing on her two feet rather than standing on all four hooves.
  • In most episodes, penguins communicate by using the word "squibbit", while in others, the penguin characters are shown to be capable of speaking perfect English, like Penguin Referee and Fashion Penguin. This is made even more confusing by the episode "Good Dog School", where Penguin Referee says "squibbit" to try and distract Bob Dog.
  • In "The Cow And Potato Bug Opera", there's a character named Mr. Anybuggy who only speaks in buzzing noises, and Donkey says that the audience needs to understand his speech. Later, Donkey is shown communicating with Mr. Anybuggy and understanding his thoughts.
  • In "A Donkey Hodie Halloween", one of the pumpkins shown has a dog face on it, which Donkey calls cute. This hints that Someplace Else might have non-anthropomorphic dogs in it. Towards the end of the same special, we see statues of non-anthro donkeys with wings.
• Don't Hug Me I'm Scared: In the first episode, there appears a humanoid briefcase who himself carries a normal briefcase. Yellow Guy calls him "one of those guys with one of himself."
• The French-Canadian kid show Cornemuse, featuring live anthropomorphic characters, is especially prone to this. In one episode the veterinarian Cornemuse (an anthropomorphic dog played by Danielle Proulx) is seen taking care of a real dog.

Music

• K-9 Corp's Dog Talk uses the aforementioned Goofy confusion in a seriously squicky way.
• Rathergood tends to use anthro cats as performers in their music videos. So in "When I Had a Cold" the anthro cat performer sings that he "snotted and snotted all over my cat", which is illustrated as an ordinary, non-anthro kitten.
• The video for Goldfrapp's Strict Machine has men with dog heads pasted over their heads. At the end of the video, they are shown walking normal dogs.

Podcasts

• Quest in Show has a scene where Tristan Lambert (a sheep-like Beast Man) investigates a wool farm, which is naturally filled with normal sheep. Tristan’s player explicitly compares the dynamic to that of humans and monkeys.

Tabletop Games

• Ironclaw and sister game Jadeclaw try to sidestep the issue by invoking Reptiles Are Abhorrent. The setting is full of anthropomorphic animal races. So what do the noble horse knights ride? Giant lizards. What are those animals people eat like chickens? Uh... winged lizards.
• Averted in World Tree (RPG), due to the conspicuous absence of any "real" animals matching the Prime races.
• The leonin Ajani Goldmane of Magic: The Gathering is vexed in Alara Unbroken when he visits Bant and sees the leotau the knights use as their steeds. They look a lot like his own race, but they're non-sentient.
• Addressed in the rules for Toon: The Cartoon RPG; the game makes a distinction between "real" animals and Toons who happen to be Funny Animals.
• In Hc Svnt Dracones both genetically engineered Half Human Hybrids called "Vectors" and normal animals exist in the post-humanity solar system. And Vectors with the "Lateral" mutation can pose as normal animals.

Toys

• Monster High:
  • Torelai Stripe, a werecat, has a normal cat as a pet.
  • A plant example. Venus McFlytrap's pet is a plant that isn't humanoid, but is clearly not a normal plant either.
  • Rochelle Roux, a humanoid gargoyle, also has a more typical gargoyle as a pet.
• Sylvanian Families is a franchise consisting of Funny Animals. They go to school, get jobs as doctors, drive old-fashioned motorcycles and... run farms. As well, they can go show-jumping, drive horse-driven carts, and dress up as other animals. They also have teddy bears.
• My Little Pony ponies are anthropomorphic but not to Funny Animal levels. In G1 some ponies had non-talking animals as pets, such as Peachy with her cat Twinkles. Despite this the various non-pony "Pony Friends", including Kingley the lion, could all talk and were equals to the ponies. Even stranger is whatever was going on with the (baby) dragons, such as Spike - they were portrayed as being able to talk, but were usually either treated as servants of princesses or even pets to ponies.

Web Animation

• Chikn Nuggit: Cofi the sheep is anthropomorphic like the other characters, but her debut episode also featured regular (albeit pink) sheep that stand on four legs.
• DSBT InsaniT: In 'Store Story', Bear talks to a bunch of teddy bears in a toy store, but stops mid-sentence when he realizes none of them can talk.
  • In the same episode, Snake talks with an ordinary boa constrictor that can only hiss.
  • Balloon gets an ordinary "decoy" balloon as a prize at the end of 'VRcade'.
  • Liz is a semi-anthropromorphic lizard is in charge of...a reptile house, which would logically include lizards.
• Happy Tree Friends: The main cast consists of anthropomorphic animals who live in a world where they interact with real animals, and even keep pets, such as cats, gerbils, dogs, and an elephant on one occasion. When asked about it on a forum, writer Warren Graff compared the situation to humans and monkeys, explaining that Happy Tree Friends are the next evolution of animals, and that all Cuddles the bunny sees when he sees a non-anthropomorphic bunny is, well, a bunny.
• Inanimate Insanity has plenty of nonanimal ones, especially later in the second season.
  • MePhone4 is shown using a inanimate MePhone to answer calls sometimes.
  • Paintbrush used an inanimate paintbrush to paint in Alternate Reality Show.

Web Original

• The Annoying Orange once talked to a sentient iPhone, but has been shown to have a smaller, non-sentient iPhone of his own in later episodes.
• Darwin's Soldiers had this occur twice in the 3rd RP.
  • Cpl. Stern has this to say:
    Cpl. Stern: So, Vipers. I understand that you can sense motion and heat differently than humans can. Does it works like a real snake's senses?
  • Birds chirping outside the window wake up Shakila, and it's almost sure that said birds are non-anthro.
• On Gaia Online, there are normal animals such as the companion items and the fish in people's aquariums, talking animals who may or may not wear clothes such as the tailcoat-and-hat-wearing cat NPC Rufus, furry avatars created by modifying the human base with animal-related bits such as ears, tails, paws and fur, and the animal bases (which are shorter than humans, but still walk upright). It's rather interesting seeing four different levels of anthropomorphism on the same website, or on occasion in the same page of a forum thread.
  Rufus the Cat: I don't get along so well with other cats. They never have much to say...
• Jehtt's video "They Are Not Like Us" discusses Sonic Heroes's use of this trope by showing Team Chaotix arguing about the differences between anthropomorphic animals like themselves, and regular animals like the frogs of the jungle they're in. It is capped off by the appearance of a non-sapient crocodile that sends Vector straight into a Heroic BSoD.
• Protectors of the Plot Continuum: Human agents Laburnum and Foxglove go to the Real World for a holiday and bump into agents Naomi (human), Drake (anthro fox in human disguise), Stormsong, Skyfire, and Stormy and Sky's adopted kids Molly and Moses (all various anthro mustelids in human disguise). In a conversation, Drake wants to go to a zoo, but Sky argues against it on the basis that Molly would have a fit (she already had one after encountering a pet shop).
• Joueur du Grenier: In the World of Warcraft special, Fred's buddy is a dwarf with the ability to tame wild animals. He then attempts to use this ability on a Worgen (wolf-man), Tauren (bull-man) and Pandaren (panda-man). Note that these are all not only sentient creatures, they're all players.
• Parodied in a skit from the Sonic Shorts series of fan-made skits. Sonic and his friends, who are all staying at the Thorndyke residence, are fed different kinds of foods, all of which apply to the diets that their species have in real life. Knuckles is given non-anthro (but still talking) ants, and Tails is given a non-anthro, cooked rabbit. Cream, who is sitting next to Tails at the time, starts crying, and runs out of the room.
• Parodied in a Sonic fan video, where a non-anthro hedgehog approaches Sonic with another non-anthro hedgehog who was run over by a car. The living non-anthro says to Sonic, "Avenge him, Sonic! Avenge your brethren's death!"
• Plonqmas: In “A Plonqmas Tale — 1998” and “A Plonqmas Tale — 1999,” Funny Animal Plonq owns two non-anthropomorphic pet cats.
• ProZD: The cow card game in "when your opponent won't finish you off in a card game" includes both Cowboy Cow (a cow-headed humanoid who is also a cowboy) and Cowboy Cow's Cow (a regular-looking cow).
• In SMPLive, Cooper enjoys fishing... Despite being a fish himself.

---