Children who identify as animals and walk on all fours should be shown “empathy”, according to guidance funded by the Home Office.
The Children’s Society, a child abuse prevention charity, produced a guide to assess the risk of online exploitation among children who identify as transgender or non-binary, as well as “subcultures” including “furries” and “therians”.
“Furries” are described as people interested in media featuring walking and talking animals. The charity said that nearly one in eight furries also self-identify as transgender and non-binary, more than 20 times higher than those not identifying as furries.
A number of people known as therians were said to actually experience being an animal. The guide defined “therian or therianthropy” as “a person who experiences being and identifies as a non-human animal on an integral, personal level”.
Some also practice “quadrobics”, defined as “a type of physical activity that involves moving on all fours, mimicking the gait and movements of quadrupedal animals”.
The guidance comes as the prime minister appointed Ashley Dalton as health minister to replace Andrew Gwynne after he was sacked over racist and sexist comments.
Dalton faced criticism last year after MailOnline reported that she believed people should be able to self-identify as llamas if they wished. When asked on X whether someone should be taken seriously if they decided they were a llama, she reportedly replied: “Yes. And treat you with dignity and respect.”
The post appears to have been deleted.
The guidance was produced under the Children’s Society’s prevention programme, commissioned and funded by the Home Office. Public servants were warned that it “is absolutely vital that you use the right pronouns”, but the guidance admitted “there are so many pronouns that we cannot capture a full reflection of them in this document”.
It stated: “Commonly used gender neutral pronouns are: ze/hir and xe/xem. But this list is not exhaustive.”
Other terminology to watch out for online included “baby gay”, referring to someone who has recently come out; “skoliosexual”, someone attracted to non-binary people; and “genderqueer” and “two spirited”, terms for people with masculine and feminine traits.
The guidance said: “No professional or adult needs to feel the pressure to ‘get it right’. Instead, they should remember that each young person’s experience is unique, and that we will never truly be able to know how it feels to be them. We should simply be open to learning, listening and showing empathy.”
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Professionals were also educated on “incel culture”, short for involuntarily celibate, which the guidance described as “people (mostly men) who define themselves as unable to have a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one”.
It said: “This subculture is a part of the ‘manosphere’ that is associated with extreme misogyny, transphobia, homophobia, biphobia, rape culture and expressions and acts of violence … influenced by social media personalities such as Andrew Tate. Those from the LGBTQ+ community can experience extreme hatred and violence from individuals that participate in this subculture.”
The guide was issued to the North Yorkshire Safeguarding Children Partnership in September 2024. However, the public bodies involved distanced themselves from the guidance.
North Yorkshire council, the lead partner, said there had been “some confusion” and the guidance was simply “shared on our website for partners to access”. It was removed from the website when the council was contacted.
The council said the Children’s Society’s claim that the guide was being “piloted for use” by the partnership was “misleading” and insisted “it will not be used by the partnership”.
The Children’s Society also receives funding from the Department for Education and the National Lottery for other programmes to tackle child exploitation.
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Nick Cook, director at the Children’s Society, said the guidance “underscores that effective safeguarding requires a clear understanding of the real-world and online environments where harm can happen”.
He said: “If a professional doesn’t understand the context, they might miss signs of grooming or coercion. This guide closes that gap. As a resource still under development, it may inform future guidance for professionals. Crucially, we cannot hope to protect young people online or develop their online and digital safety without genuinely listening to and understanding their experiences.”
Last week it emerged that delegates attending a “furries” convention in Glasgow had been issued with a code of conduct warning people who identify as one species not to discriminate against those who identify as other species.
The Home Office said: “The Children’s Society do award-winning work protecting young people from abuse and exploitation, which is why successive governments have supported and funded their work in that area.
“However, it is not for the Home Office to scrutinise the content of every document they produce, let alone a piece of draft guidance being piloted in one local council, and we can confirm that the department had no involvement with that particular item.”
