Post actualizado el día octubre 26, 2026 by DeiviSanzPlay
Last weekend I went to Puerta del Sol because TikTok had been showing me for three days straight a call for four therians to meet up. Four. I went to see what the hell was going on. And what I found says more about us than about them.
Because therians in Spain are not a plague, nor a sect, nor the end of Western civilization. They’re teenagers, and some adults, who feel a deep connection with an animal and build part of their identity around that. That’s it. Everything else is noise we’ve added on top.
What a therian actually is (and why quadrobics has nothing to do with being one)
A therian is someone who identifies on a psychological or spiritual level with a non-human animal. Not literally. Nobody thinks they’re a wolf with a tax return. The term comes from the online community that started in the 90s and grew on forums and Tumblr before TikTok existed.
What most kids do on the street is quadrobics: a sport where you run on all fours, jump and do acrobatics imitating animal movement. It’s physical exercise. It has nothing to do with identity.
TikTok mixes both things in the same video and that’s why everything looks weirder than it really is. A kid wearing felt ears doing a quadruped sprint is not claiming to be a fox. He’s doing sport with a costume, like the guy who plays padel with a sweatband. But the algorithm puts a creepy soundtrack on it and boom, panic.
The therian community itself has been repeating for years that quadrobics is not therianthropy. But nobody reads the caption when the video is 15 seconds long.
In Puerta del Sol there were more people laughing than kids with masks
That’s the detail that stuck with me. I counted. There were more adults with phones pointed at the ground than kids with ears. There was a guy next to me who said, literally, «they need a couple of slaps to learn.» His 12-year-old son was next to him, looking at his phone, not saying a word.
And I thought: but these kids aren’t hurting anyone. They’re jumping around on a Saturday afternoon. The real therian controversy in Spain isn’t about them. It’s about a generation of adults who can’t stand seeing something they don’t understand without filming it to humiliate it.
The spectacle is ours. The ears are theirs.
The political trap: when «therians, transspecies, ideology» became a combo that sells
It got worse when politics got involved. «Therians, transspecies, ideology» is already a combo that sells in certain media. The same rhetorical machinery used against the trans community is now being applied to this: that we’re going to hell as a society, that it’s the degeneration of the West, that the youth are lost.
The 15-year-olds who just want to jump with their friends suddenly find themselves at the centre of a political debate they never asked for. They didn’t invent the culture war. They were just on the street.
And no, identifying with a wolf is not the same as being a trans person. Anyone with half a brain understands that. But when a fight is already underway, nuances disappear. The therian debate gets flattened into a single headline and the actual kids vanish from the story.
What psychology actually says about the therian phenomenon
A psychologist who appeared in several videos about the topic explained it clearly: teenagers have always grouped into tribes to be weird together. First it was rockers. Then emos. Then the role-playing geeks. Then the scene kids. Now this.
The search for identity in adolescence has always worked this way. You need a group that’s yours, that isn’t your parents, that has its own codes. The therian identity is just the latest version of that same mechanism, with a different aesthetic and a much more aggressive algorithm behind it.
The only real difference is that now TikTok amplifies every tribe to a global scale in 48 hours and we adults go into «this is new and scary» mode. It’s not new. It’s the same adolescence as always, wearing felt ears this time.
What’s happening in other countries (and why Spain is lagging behind)
While here we fight on Twitter, in other countries they’re being more practical. In Mexico there’s already talk of a Therian Law in Nuevo León to prevent school bullying against young people who identify with this community. That’s the key: they’ve reached the conclusion that if a law is needed, it’s because the bullying is serious.
In Barcelona there were altercations and four arrests, but the therians barely showed up. People went looking for a fight because someone told them there were «weirdos» there. Read that again. Adults mobilised to beat up kids because a TikTok said they’d be there.
In the UK and the US, schools have been dealing with this for years with protocols against harassment, not with moral panic. That’s the practical difference. We’re not discovering anything. We’re just arriving late and screaming louder.
Why the therians aren’t the problem (and we adults are)
Therians in Spain are teenagers, and some adults, who feel a connection with an animal and build part of their identity around that. They’re not crazy. They don’t believe they’re literally animals. They don’t hurt anyone.
What does hurt is the spectacle we create around them. Filming them to laugh at them. Turning them into a political weapon. Going to look for them to fight. Using them as ammunition in a culture war that has nothing to do with a 14-year-old with painted ears.
What I’ve seen on the street is that those making the most noise aren’t the ones putting on the ears. They’re the ones coming to film them and laugh. And that says more about us than about them.
We’ve turned a teenage dynamic into an adult battlefield. And that really is crazy.
Quick guide to not being that adult
- Don’t film minors without permission. It’s not content. It’s harassment, and in Spain it can be reported.
- Don’t confuse therianthropy with quadrobics. One is identity, the other is a sport. They can overlap, but they’re not the same thing.
- Don’t feed the political frame. Every time you share a video mocking them, you’re giving ammunition to those who want to use kids as a wedge issue.
- If you’re a parent and your kid is into this, ask before judging. It’s probably a phase. Almost all of them are. And the phase passes faster if you don’t turn it into a family war.
If after reading this you still think these kids need a slap to learn, the problem isn’t them. It never was.
