Therianthropes - beast-men or men-beasts - are a staple of literature. They exist nearly everywhere, and almost as far back as we have written records. Gilgamesh's friend Enkidu was a beast-man; Esau aka Edom in the first book of the Western Canon, Genesis, was a "hairy man", almost a beast-man.
In the Western tradition, beast-men tend to get narrowed down from the Greek satyr and the Roman faun, alternatively spirits of the wild, or "wild men", and spirits that haunt humanity, to the Northwestern werewolf. And he is amply covered in Sabine Baring-Gould's The Book of Werewolves, though without a requisite degree of skepticism.
The prospect of humanity actually creating beast-men and man-beasts, is also a staple of modern Speculative Fiction: Dr Moreau's Island, by H.G. Wells is the original novel that covered it, while Cordwainer Smith's Underpeople carried on the tradition, and David Brin's Uplift stories are a more current addition to the stable.
Lately, however, therianthropes have become a victim of the Hollywood machine, and have been quite systematically abused, their bones chewed up and spat out by a voracious therianthrope-eating public with very little idea of how non-domesticated animals actually live.
This site aims to bring that under scrutiny, and perhaps to even change the viewing and reading habits of the general public.
