Xenofiction

A few works of Science Fiction and Fantasy (and, in some cases even realistic fiction) take the Point of View of normal animals, Intellectual Animals, Intelligent Gerbils, or Starfish Aliens. More than that, the creators of such stories take great pains to think through what it would actually be like to be a rabbit, a dolphin, or a giant betentacled being who smells colour.

A good rule of thumb for figuring out if something is in this genre or not: if you can replace the non-humans with (maybe superpowered) humans without too much trouble, it's probably not Xenofiction: Beast Fables and works about Funny Animals are, in general, not examples. Likewise in many a Mouse World, size is often the only major difference between humans and non-humans; however, there is Xenofiction featuring non-humans with great differences in size.

If it's taking place under the nose of humans, there may or may not have a Masquerade, and humans will probably either be bastards or eldritch abominations. It may make use of Humans Through Alien Eyes. A non-human character may be Intrigued by Humanity. Xenofiction usually explores Bizarre Alien Psychology. Compare Mature Animal Story.

This is also common in fanfics of Mon series where the mon is the POV character.

See Xenofictional Literature for an index of Xenofiction.

Contrast Most Writers Are Human. Compare to Narrative-Driven Nature Documentary for nature documentaries that anthropomorphise the animals.

Not to be confused with Xenafication, or the Xeno games, or Xenomorph fiction.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• A Centaur's Life, which portrays a modern world if it was inhabited by so-called fantasy creatures like Centaurs, Angels, etc. instead of humans. Despite being outwardly a Slice of Life story focusing on teenaged girls, it's an impressive example of world-building, particularly with how the author portrays social norms and just how things would be different for species like Centaurs when placed in a very contemporary situation.
• Beastars takes place in a World of Funny Animals. What makes it this trope is that the animal's biology and natural instincts are portrayed as very different from human ones, even though they're sentient. In particular, a major theme is how very hard it is to maintain a peaceful, semi-egalitarian society when half the citizens are hard-wired to want to eat the other half, and when the latter instinctively fear and distrust the former.
• Crimsons – The Scarlet Navigators of the Ocean is a Hot-Blooded shounen adventure manga about salmon. It's the one and only legendary sockeye romance!
• Gon does a pretty good job of making its eponymous dinosaur hero (who, regardless belongs to no known species and has an unrealistically humanoid body; he resembles a very small baby Godzilla) act pretty much like a dinosaur. None of the animal characters, Gon included, ever speak. Assumptions about how dinosaurs would act aside, Gon has a bizarre tendency to mimic other animals, often to hilariously destructive effect. Other times he prefers to just nonchalantly leave a trail of destruction across the land for no better reason than finding something tasty to eat.
• Ginga: Nagareboshi Gin/Silver Fang and its sequel Ginga Densetsu Weed start out as typical A Boy And His Dog shows... but they quickly become more about the lives (and deaths; lots of deaths) of non-anthropomorphic dogs.
• Land of the Lustrous: The characters are human in appearance, but their bodies consist of specific types of gemstone and much of the story consists of situations centered around their physical makeup. Creatures called Lunarians come from the moon to attack the Gems and harvest them for purposes unknown. A Gem's memory and personality are stored throughout their body, such that losing even small slivers of their body can cause memory loss. Losing entire limbs is a guarantee of it. They're differentiated by how hard or solid they are, which determines things like whether they're suited for battle.
• Simoun is a borderline example: the Daikuuriksns might appear human, both psychologically and physiologically, but are not any more. The story simply could not work with human characters.
• Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex has side plots that focus on the Tachikoma, who combine the shape and combat power of Spider Tanks with the behavior of Ridiculously Human Robots. Human nature and society is a mystery to them, so they usually keep to themselves when discussing the wonders of the strange world they exist in and the meaning of their own existence. The irony perhaps is, that the humans in their world have become so mechanical and withdrawn, that nobody notices that these robots have become far more human than themselves. But nobody wants to bother giving a reply to a machine that wants you to explain God to them.
• Massugu ni Ikou is a Slice of Life anime about a group of pet dogs. The protagonist is a mutt named Mametarou.
• Zig-Zagged by My Roommate is a Cat. The story is primarily about human characters, but Once an Episode, events will be re-shown from Haru the cat's point of view, showcasing her non-human thought process and perspective.
• You Are Umasou focuses on dinosaurs. The protagonist, a Tyrannosaurus rex or "Big Jaw" raised by herbivorous Maiasaura, struggles with the meat-eating side of himself while simultaneously raising a baby Ankylosaurus that he names Umasou (Japanese for "delicious"). Heart also kick boxes to make up for his stubby arms.
• Yuria 100 Shiki: Stories about androids tend to either ask Do Androids Dream?, or play up the androids' inhuman qualities. Yuria 100 Shiki is one of the few works that does both, portraying a protagonist who wants—sometimes desperately—to live like a human, but is repeatedly tripped up by everything from face blindness to an inability to count past a hundred.

Comic Books

• Animosity, being primarily about the sudden uplifting of every animal on Earth, takes care to describe how each species thinks and communicates pre and post uplifting. While mammals are the focus, insects and reptilians each get their spot to shine in different arcs, adopting different worldviews and even religions based on how they live.
• Aquaman Secret Files #1 includes a story about a curious fish who's never heard of Aquaman trying to find him. He learns that to dolphins he has a weird fungus on his head, to an octopus he's an ungainly creature with only four stiff limbs, a manta ray sees his hook hand "barb" as unnatural, to a whale he's small, while to a starfish he's huge, to a crab he's horrifically ugly, and to sharks he has one long tooth. Cue the little fish running into Aquaman to warn him about the terrible creature he's heard of, belatedly realizing that the "weird fish" he saw might help him find Aquaman.
• "Black Flash the Beaver", a short-lived prose story from the Anthology Comic The Beano, was told from the perspective of a beaver.
• Beasts of Burden is about dogs and cats living in a suburban town, combating evil forces.
• Dark Horse Comics: Age of Reptiles has realistic (as far as we know) dinosaur protagonists, and no thought balloons or dialogue.
• Tyrant was a very short-lived comic book that would have followed a Tyrannosaurus rex from birth through death, but only managed to go from birth to slightly later.
• We 3: The protagonists are a cat, dog, and rabbit. Though they are cyborgs, and capable of simple speech, their thought processes and behavior are very different from that of humans.

Fan Works

• Aeon Natum Engel has done this with the Migou, the local Starfish Aliens. Of course, being who he is, Earth Scorpion has made them as hard to understand as possible.
• Bait and Switch (STO):
  • Mildly in The Headhunt, which is told from the perspective of USS Bajor's homebrew alien security chief. Dul'krah refers to himself and the other department heads as clan elders, and to Captain Kanril as the "great elder" of Ship-Clan Bajor.
  • Part II of A Voice in the Wilderness closes on a section written from the perspective of a Borg cube. It's written entirely in C++-esque computer code.
• Cat Tales: Downplayed. Most of the action is from the point of view of human characters, but periodically, stories such as Something Borrowed and Splitzville will have segments told from the point of view of Whiskers and Nutmeg, Selina's two housecats.
• The Dragon Journals retells the story of How to Train Your Dragon from the dragons' point of view.
• Emperor Tales of the Frozen South gives Maori-inspired culture and Animal Religion to emperor penguins... starring characters from Sherlock, which results in noticeable Aerith and Bob.
• Enlightenments: This fic has more focus on humans than is typical for the genre. However, the whole thing is from the god Dormin's perspective, and they're definitely not human; they have radically inhuman senses and run into trouble explaining how they perceive things to humans as well as trouble understanding normal human experiences, such as why Wander gets angry when they first try directly intervening in his nightmares without asking permission. Their morality is also a little blue and orange, given they initially consider the very abnormal situation with the Queen of the Castle in the Mist to still be a mortal problem for the mortals to solve.
• A Feast in Azkaban: Large portions of the story are narrated from the perspective of Padfoot, werewolf Lupin, and the dementors.
• Game Theory (Lyrical Nanoha) has a point of view from Vesta, a six week old kitten and a hilariously Unreliable Narrator.
• Gift Of Me is narrated by Toothless. He describes helmets as 'metal skulls', identifies emotions partly by smelling them, and takes pride in understanding human concepts.
  ...He looks surprised. Why? I’d gotten his saddle and fin for him. It was nice of me.
• Humble Beginnings is RWBY fanfic about Zwei's life from his POV. Zwei is a dog and as a result he sees things differently from humans.
• Nightfall (2014): An integral aspect of the story, around half of which is written from the dragons' points of view.
• Prehistoric Park: Returned from Extinction: While mostly told from a human point of view, several segments are told through the eyes of the animals living in the park. There's even an entire side-story told solely from their point of view.
• Their Bond: Some parts are told from the POV of Zelda's pet wolfos-dog hybrid Goro. He never interacted with humans, or "two-leggers" as he calls them, until Zelda took him in after his mother died. Despite living amongst humans for months, he doesn't understand them well and sees things from a canine's POV. He's also more scent-oriented than humans. Goro doesn't tend to label most humans by name, instead using either labels or "alpha", "omega", and "beta"
• A Thing of Vikings has some scenes from the dragons' POV.

Films — Animation

• The 1978 Hungarian Stop Motion Short Film The Chair is about an apparently sentient chair that sets off into the urban wilderness to escape the dump.
• Disney:
  • Bambi, and the book it's based on, is about a deer's life. The film is slightly more anthropomorphic than the book and is far looser with its biological accuracy, but it's still a down-to-earth portrayal of an ordinary buck's life. The sequel gives more characterization but it's still a xenofiction work.
  • The book focuses more on xenofiction elements:
    • Bambi's mother gradually grows more distant and snappish to him as she is weaning him, abandons him temporarily during mating season, and probably would have permanently left or eventually drove him off like real does do to buck fawns had she not been killed. This would have been weird to see if kept in the film, and perhaps would have lowered the impact of her death scene.
    • Bambi and Faline fall deeply in love, but after they mate and mating season is over, Bambi begins to distance himself from her, though he still loves her in a "melancholic" way. This may be implied in the film, with how he is distantly watching from so far away while she gives birth.
    • None of the does know who fathered their fawns. Unlike the film, the Great Prince is never confirmed to actually be Bambi's father in the book, although they do come to have that sort of relationship.
    • Ronno and Karus are friendly to Bambi when he is young, but when he grows up enough to be a rival for does they grow hostile and try to drive him off whenever they see him.
    • There is more of a focus on Humans Are Cthulhu elements; the animals think humans are gods.
  • The Lion King: In the Epcot theme park short Circle of Life, Simba explains the importance of preserving the environment via the example his father gave him of humanity, the one species that forgot its place in the Circle of Life and is only now making an effort to undo/mitigate the damage it did to the world. Humanity is seen only in live-action documentary footage to boot.
• Happy Feet depicts the real life mating habits of Penguins with human songs in place of calls, making it an odd example of a Jukebox Musical Xenofiction piece. Alongside this, it heavily features Humans Are Cthulhu by showing them as aliens through the eyes of the local wildlife, and their endeavors to understand and communicate with this bizarre, powerful race.
• Ice Age depicts an assortment of Ice Age fauna who, though intelligent, are predominantly concerned with the yearly migration and matters of survival and find the local humans to be rather alien. The first film manages to play xenofiction rather straight while still being a family comedy, while all of its Denser and Wackier sequels largely let the xenofiction elements fall away.
• The Land Before Time: The original movie is a relatively realistic film about dinosaurs struggling to survive in a hostile world. The sequels stray from this, however, with their Lighter and Softer tone.
• One Stormy Night focuses on a goat and a wolf. Mei and Gabu are actually friends and Gabu, the wolf, must struggle with his basic urges to try and eat Mei while they try and escape the prejudices of their respective families/social groups.
• Pixar:
  • Piper tells the story of a baby sandpiper learning to forage food. There's no dialogue between any of the animals and visual anthropomorphization is limited to the birds' expressions. The art style is also photorealistic, instead of of Pixar's usual cartoony stylization.
  • Toy Story explores this trope as applied to sentient objects:
    • Most of the conflict revolves around issues that are specifically "toy problems," such as destructive children and animals that play too dangerously hard, being separated from or abandoned by a child, being broken, malfunctioning, or losing parts, being put into storage, getting thrown away, friends and Love Interests being separated from them in garage sales, etc... They all have a strong psychological need to be played with by a child, and suffer if that need is not met, and they get very attached to their owners, who all eventually get rid of them or get too old to play with them anymore. Failure to meet these needs causes at least two toys to become villains. It's a surprisingly hard life to be a living toy.
    • The first movie's villain is actually only "evil" in the toy's perspective. He is just a kid that is too destructive with his things, and didn't know his toys are alive. Which is really the toys' own fault when you think about it.
    • In Toy Story 4, Ducky and Bunny react to another damaged plush toy's exposed fluff much like a human would react to gore.
• Ringing Bell (Chirin no Suzu in Japan) is a revenge story about a sheep and a wolf. Both pretty much live like real animals despite being sapient, except for the sheep being the wolf's apprentice.
• Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron is about the relationship among horses, white settlers, and the Lakota people of the American West during the Nineteenth Century. The story is told from the point of view of the title horse, who is, aside from his frighteningly human eyebrows and sapience, a fairly natural depiction of a horse. He doesn't even talk except for the occasional narration.
• Vuk the Little Fox is about the exploits of foxes and other woodland creatures trying to survive and kill the humans' livestock. Humans are not shown to be evil, but they're still villainized because they oppose the protagonists and have more powerful weapons to kill them.

Films — Live-Action

• Au Hasard Balthazar is conveyed entirely from the perspective of a donkey.
• EO, a Spiritual Successor to Au Hasard Balthazar, is also conveyed entirely from the perspective of a donkey, in a Road Trip Plot where EO encounters and is mostly abused by humans.
• The Incredible Journey:
  • Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey, loosely based on The Incredible Journey, is about two dogs and a cat who need to find their way back home after getting lost in the wilderness. They can talk to each other but, unlike most talking animals in movies, they don't understand human speech—therefore, they're completely caught off-guard when their human family drop them off on a farm and have no idea if they'll ever return. It gives the whole film a bit of a Humans Are Cthulhu vibe; the three pets love their humans, but simply never have any idea what's going on.
  • The Incredible Journey is a 1963 family film about two dogs and a cat trying to get home. Unlike its remake Homeward Bound, the animals don't talk.
• The Legend of Lobo is a 1962 American animal-adventure film that follows the life and adventures of Lobo, a wolf born and raised in southwestern North America. The story is told as much from a wolf's point of view as from a human's. There is no dialogue in the film, with the only interpretation presented through the use of story-song composed and sung by the Sons of the Pioneers and the Sherman Brothers, and narration by Rex Allen.

Literature

• Age of Fire takes place in a fairly Standard Fantasy Setting, but upends the conventions by focusing on the dragons. Since they are apex predators with much longer lives than humans, their instincts and worldview are very different, although some are civilized.
• Albert Smiths Culinary Capers is a 15-part series about a retired detective and his (so-called) emotional support animal Rex, a former police dog, going on a tour of Great Britain to try famous signature dishes in their original towns and running afoul of various criminals along the way. The chapters alternate between the two characters' perspectives. Rex is particularly disappointed in Albert's inability to sus out clues by using his nose as well as to discern what it is that Rex is trying to tell him when he's pointing out who the bad guys are. Because he usually solves the cases long before Albert, Rex considers himself intellectually superior to his human.
• Alien in a Small Town has a car-sized, radially symmetrical, silicon-based Starfish Alien who perceives the world chiefly through sonar as one of its two main characters, and is half told from his point of view.
• The Amity Incident is from this point of view initially, although it flips between the alien perspective and human in alternating chapters.
• The Animals of Farthing Wood book series (and its Animated Adaptation) by Colin Dann is told from the point of view of the main characters, all of whom are animals. However they still act as animals would. Carnivore Confusion is given explicit justification, and is a recurring source of drama.
• Animorphs:
  • Several books are told from alien points of view. Some are just from the perspective of Ax, the team's Token Non-Human, and often involve him trying to understand humanity; we also have the Chronicles, prequel books focused on other alien characters. The Hork-Bajir Chronicles and the quite trippy Ellimist Chronicles are especially notable, having no humans outside of the Framing Device. Meanwhile The Andalite Chronicles tells Elfangor's backstory, beginning when he rescued a pair of humans from Alien Abduction by The Greys, while Visser is a Villain Episode about Visser One's initial encounters with humanity.
  • Morphing has xenofictional elements built in; while in morph, The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body, so you have to fight to control the animal's instincts, which can be incredibly difficult (especially for hive insects, which trigger Loss of Identity pretty quickly). We also have books focusing on Tobias, who got Shapeshifter Mode Locked as a hawk in the first book.
• Anna Karenina: One scene is narrated from the perspective of a dog.
• At Winters End follows two non-human species as they emerge into a post-apocalyptic world after a mass extinction event, the wasp-like hjjk and tribes of baboon-like primates who see themselves as the true heirs of humanity.
• In the short story The Author of Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of Therolinguistics by Ursula K. Le Guin, Therolinguistics deals with studying and interpreting literature created by animals, such as ants, penguins and dolphins.
• Bazil Broketail: The series frequently shows Bazil's persective on things, along with other dragons at times. It even does this occasionally with normal animals, like a bear in the first book.
• Beak Of The Moon by Philip Temple is entirely from the perspective of keas, a species of parrot native to New Zealand.
• The Bees by Laline Paull is a fanciful depiction of life in a beehive, told through the compound eyes of a lowly sanitation worker who may be more than she seems. While the titular bees are physically anthropomorphized and have things such as tea sets built of wax, scent is the primary way in which they perceive the world, even "visualized" as clothing at points. Much of the book's plot revolves around the extremely strict Hive Caste System and the associated Blue-and-Orange Morality.
• Black Beauty did this with horses. Narrated by the title character, it described the process of breaking horses to saddle and carriage, while detailing the horrors and triumphs within his life. The author, in fact, wrote it as an extended Author Tract to inform the public of the ill-treatment of horses.
• The Book of Night with Moon: The protagonists are wizard cats, and the viewpoint adjusts to the specific reality of domestic cat social structures, what senses and what details a cat that can walk in air and is more interested in room corners or mice than architecture might take in, and the complexities that arise from a character that can sense energy and has nine lives. The book has a cat-English glossary, even, and a lot of single-word phrases in cat don't really translate easily to English. There's a rather touching moment as one character worries that:
  "You mean... even if you have more lives... you still might not come back. You mean you just die dead, like a bug or an ehhif?"
• The Book of the Named is written from the point of view of sapient prehistoric cats. Their adaptations and technology are very different than what a human might have done. The third book involves two levels of xenofiction; that of Thakur — a Named cat who can philosophize and is vaguely human — and of Newt, a feral Unnamed cat, who barely has a concept of herself, let alone anything else. She has Named blood, although her wild life and childhood trauma means she doesn't initially enjoy the benefits of it. As Thakur tries to befriend Newt, he finds his own thoughts slipping uncomfortably between sapience and instinct.
• The Book Of Chameleons by Jose Eduardo Agualusa is told from the point of view of a lizard. "A very articulate, and very friendly lizard..."
• The Books of the Raksura series by Martha Wells follows a clan of the titular Draconic Humanoid-like shapeshifters as they make their way in an alien world with Loads and Loads of Races, none of them human.
• The Bug Wars, by Robert Asprin does this with a reptilian race, including addressing the problem of racial colourblindness when facing a colour-sighted enemy.
• Bunnicula is about a paranoid pet cat who believes his owner's new rabbit is really a vampire.
• The Call of the Wild featured Buck, a dog who was thrown from the city into the Yukon.
• Cat House is a very strange example about cats that seems to have taken some clumsy inspiration from Tailchaser's Song while simultaneously trying to make this, of all genres, Hotter and Sexier. Just read this review.
• Cat Pack is a series of children's books from the POV of pet cats who are in a club together. They have to deal with confusing humans and dangerous guard dogs, all while surviving as outside cats.
• Chanur Novels: Almost all the viewpoint characters are aliens resembling anthropomorphic lions, with the plot being driven by their rescue/capture of the first human anyone has encountered. The story's all about them learning to understand not just the human but the several different alien psychologies she's invented.
• Charlotte's Web is from the POV of a pet pig living on a farm. Almost all the characters are either farm animals or wild animals that live on a farm.
• The Chet and Bernie mystery series is narrated by Chet, the dog belonging to Bernie, a private detective. Chet understand more English than a real dog (probably), but the author has gone to some lengths to describe things realistically from a dog's perspective, including senses (smell being major of course), intellect ("We've watched this movie more times than I can count, which in my case is Two."), and memory ("I saw I had been digging a hole," Chet remarks, when he had told us about starting it two paragraphs back. Then he got distracted).
• Chia The Wildcat is a 1970s book about a wildcat surviving in the wild and raising her young.
• The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness: The chapters from Wolf's point of view.
• C. J. Cherryh does this a lot. See Chanur Novels above for an outstanding case. Other examples include:
  • Cyteen: Large segments are from the POV of the rather alien "azi", humans whose psychology is artificially constructed.
  • Cuckoo's Egg is partly from an alien POV and partly from the POV of a human who has only ever lived among the aliens.
  • The Foreigner (1994) novels are borderline examples, since they largely follow the human interpreter to an alien race, but the focus is the alien psychology. Later books add an alien as a second viewpoint character.
• Hal Clement did this a lot too, often contrasted with human perspectives in the same story. Examples:
  • Iceworld is split between the human characters and aliens from a super-hot planet who visit Earth (the titular "ice world") for trade.
  • Mission of Gravity is partially from the perspective of the alien Intrepid Merchant captain Barlennan.
  • Needle is partly from the perspective of an alien detective, who is a sentient viral colony and forms a symbiotic relationship with a human teenager.
• Cluster, by Piers Anthony, features a few protagonists like this, including an aquatic species with three sexes that can only reproduce by bringing all three together, a species that moves by rolling on a large ball and communicates with vibrations and scent, another that communicates almost entirely by taste, and more.
• The Cold Moons by Aeron Clement takes place in the highlands of England, focusing on a group of badgers forced to embark on a exodus towards the promised land of Elysia where they can live safe from humans, who are in the process of culling the island's badger population due to fear of the badgers carrying bovine tuberculosis (which was actually a common practice in England at the time the book was written). The badgers are portrayed as sapient with a society overseen by a cadre of elders, but it wasn't as advanced as that of the moles in Duncton Wood.
• The Color of Distance and its sequel, Through Alien Eyes, alternate perspectives between the frog-like alien Tendu and Dr. Juna Saari, the scientist who finds herself stranded among them. Tendu speak like squid, by changing patterns on their skin; they have no murder or war, but they eat their own unintelligent spawn and all in all just have a very different worldview which Dr. Saari has to struggle to adjust to.
• The Crow Chronicles, by Clem Martini, does this for... well, guess. The story is presented as a flock elder telling the younger ones the history of their family.
• The Crucible of Time features a completely non-human civilization trying to survive in a part of the galaxy full of meteors ready to cause planetary extinction events. Detailed descriptions of their anatomy and appearance are difficult to find, as every character during the millennia-long course of the novel only drops tiny pieces of this info as they describe other characters. (They're insectile, females reproduce by budding, and females can become infertile en masse anytime there is environmental stress). After all, the story is being told to their own race as a kind of How We Got Here, so why bother with minor stuff, right?
• The novelisation of the Doctor Who episode "Dalek" is partly xenofiction, being written from the perspective of the titular Dalek itself, giving us an insight into the Bizarre Alien Psychology of the Daleks, and in particular the Dalek's struggle with the realisation that Rose's genetic material has poisoned it.
• Darkeye is a post-apocalyptic tale about canines who have been uplifted to human intelligence. They are very much still bound by their species' biology, particularly the need to eat meat in a world where the only animals around seem to be dogs and humans. There's also the bouda and the screamers to take into account, though we never actually get into their perspectives.
• In The Demon's Lexicon, Nick seems at first to be a poor attempt at depicting a seriously traumatized person, until you realize that he's actually a demon.
• Andrea I. Alton's Demon Of Undoing features a race of cat-like aliens, the Imkairans. When one of them meets a human, it is he who is presented as the alien - the Imkairans are baffled by his lack of interest in rank, and cannot understand why he does things his hair colour suggests he can't (the Imkairans have a caste system based on the colour of their head-crests).
• Dick King-Smith's fiction sometimes has elements of this. For instance, The Foxbusters notes that chickens don't celebrate anniversaries of events, because they don't remember that far back.
• The Dinosaur Lords: Some sections are written from perspective of the Allosaurus Shiraa, and it shows she's not human. Her perception is based on smells and sounds more than sights, she does more things because of instincts rather than conscious reasoning and she has a sense of morality that basically boils down to "eat, defend self and follow Mother unless Mother says otherwise". "Mother" is human man who was the first being she saw in her life.
• Discworld:
  • It's not a major theme, but occasionally crops up in Discworld, most prominently in the Witches books which deal with "Borrowing" (a sort of light possession) of animal minds. They are described in synaesthetic terms: herbivore minds are coiled silver springs, always cautious and ready to flee; predator minds are purple arrowheads of directed purpose; human minds are complicated silver clouds that are impossible to Borrow, but may narrow down to an arrowhead when, for example, a hunter focuses his attention on his kill; and bees are a literal Hive Mind also considered impossible to Borrow. Because The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body, any human who tries to fully possess an animal is drawn into that animal's different and limited perceptions and eventually loses their sense of self. Witches Abroad also deals with a wolf that was anthropomorphised by the villain to fulfil the role in Little Red Riding Hood, and had been driven insane by its predator mind being forced to think.
  • Discworld also covers dogs' different perception of the world, in which scent is the primary sense. Werewolves, with a human frame of context for comparison, describe scents in their wolf form in synaesthetic terms, with sounds and colours.
  • Pratchett also likes to go into dogs' unusual social worlds, especially the relationship to their human owners. One large part of this is the idea that dogs are somewhere halfway between wolves and humans, the latter of whom are, in equal measure, their owners, parents and gods. The enormous impact of the phrase "bad dog!" on a Discworld canine is explained as the result of a deep-seated knowledge that dogs were made by humans for a certain reason, and being told that they have failed at this purpose fills them with a sort of severe existential dread. Wuffles, the elderly dog of Havelock Vetinari, refers to his owner quite literally as "the god", which another dog remarks is considered old-fashioned. Of course, there are also quite a lot of Morporkians who think of the Patrician as some kind of all-present, omnipotent force...
  • Other times, this trope is purely Played for Laughs, as when the rabbit from Moving Pictures describes how his pre-Holy Wood vocabulary consisted of two verbs and one noun, or when Rogers the bulls (Feet of Clay) assumes that, because his forehead protrudes so far that his two eyes' field of vision don't overlap, he must be two bulls.
  • The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents deconstructs this concept, showing how the sentient Clan rats come to terms with how their acquired ability to reason and imagine conflicts with their rat instincts and habits.
• Doglands is a teen-aimed book about a lurcher (greyhound/wolfhound mix) named Furgul who is raised in an abusive racing greyhound compound. After escaping being culled as a puppy, Furgul must find his way back to his mother and save the greyhounds. Furgul predominantly doesn't understand humans and regards them as bizarre, especially due to upbringing with minimal human contact. The other dogs understand them more, but most of them still reject their human-given names and still confused by how odd and cruel humans can be.
• A Dog's Life is about a stray dog named Squirrel from birth to old age. She was born to a stray in a shed, was taken in by humans as a puppy but abandoned the very next day because she wasn't house-trained, and spent the rest of her adulthood either on her own or dealing with neglectful owners. Squirrel doesn't have much of an understanding of humans and prefers to keep away from them until she's taken in by a sweet elderly woman and renamed.
• The Dogs of the Drowned City trilogy stars a German Shepherd named Shep whose owners evacuate their city after a hurricane. He, and several other dogs, must survive on their own.
• Dragonlance: The first collection of short stories includes "Dagger-flight", a retelling of the first third of Dragons of Autumn Twilight from the perspective of a sentient knife. That can fly. And reproduce. And stalks the setting's protagonists without their realizing it.
• Duncton Wood by William Horwood tells a story of a colony of moles. In the book moles are portrayed as moving and behaving like moles, but they have a very advanced society, living in underground colonies and knowing how to write. Callanish by the same author is told from the point of view of a young Golden Eagle.
• Echoes Of Winter follows two wolves who have recently left their home packs to create their own packs. On their journey, the two meet a group of rival cougars.
• Edward Rutherfurd: Although his concentrate upon the multi-generational stories of human families and the places they live, they do include the occasional vignette featuring the tale and/or P.O.V. of other species, including a dog, a rat, a couple of fallow deer, and even an oak tree and its two offspring.
• Ender's Game: While the books are usually mostly from human perspectives, many of them have segments written from the perspectives of various aliens, as well as a sapient computer program named Jane. Each of those sections wouldn't really make sense if it was a human, even a super-powered one.
• Erin Hunter:
  • Bravelands centers around three African animals (a lion, a baboon, and an elephant), who have to save the African savannah from a mysterious murderer seeking to overthrow the code that bonds all animals. While Fearless the lion and Thorn the baboon have their stories connected together, Sky the elephant sticks mainly with her family and interacts briefly with them. It's also the first Erin Hunter series with a completely herbivorous protagonist and the first series with no humans.
  • The Seeker Bears series centers around four bear cubs of different species (polar bear, black bear, and grizzly bear) as they travel together. Only one of them, Lusa the black bear, has a grasp on humans (and even it's limited) because she was born in a zoo.
  • Survivor Dogs is about groups of dogs (and one wolf-dog) surviving on their own after all humans evacuate the area after an earthquake. They must learn to live without help from their "longpaws". Along the way, the characters face off against rival dogs, wolves, bears, strange dangerous humans, and the environment itself, all while trying to stay alive.
  • The Warrior Cats series is about feral cats living in a forest near a human city. The series follows several generations, including a grand exodus, and is all through the eyes of cats who see humans only as giant "Twolegs", and automobiles as "monsters". They face horrors such as badgers, dogs, foxes, humans, starvation, disease, and of course rival cat clans for which each kitten is trained to be a warrior in order to defend his clan.
• The Expanse adds the Protomolecule to the list of POV characters in Cibola Burn. Reflexively reaching out endlessly for its long-gone masters, no awareness of what it's doing, as remnants of the creatures and people it consumed relive their last moments for eternity.
• Felidae is a Film Noir series about a cat whose owner moves to a new town. There, Francis discovers a series of mysterious murders involving the local cats.
• Felix Salten enjoyed writing from the perspective of woodland beasts:
  • The two Bambi novels explore life as a deer and is a Trope Codifier. Bambi's father doesn't partake in raising him, humans are rarely seen and when they are they are a menace, he has to literally fight for a mate (his cousin Faline), his mother grows distant after he's weaned, etc...
  • Fifteen Rabbits takes the perspective of wild rabbits (decades before Watership Down, mind you).
• Fire Bringer featured (sometimes quasi-magical) herds of deer. They had lore and legends, and humans and their dogs were beasts who both hunted them and sometimes "brainwashed" them.
• The Firebringer Trilogy by Meredith Ann Pierce is about a society of unicorns, complete with detailed history, legends, religion, and prejudices, and who are struggling to regain their centuries-lost homeland. Also present are gryphons, pans (fauns), wyverns, and dragons, able to communicate with each other, although the books are told strictly through the unicorns' point of view. There are also horses (called daya) and humans ("two-foots") present in parts of the second book, though they (and the humans in particular) are seen as baffling and utterly alien to the main character.
• Firekeeper: Although the protagonist is human and many chapters focus on normal humans, Firekeeper doesn't think like a human, as she was raised among Intellectual Animals. You do get the distinct impression that if she was raised by any species except wolves, the series would be wildly altered, and she and Blind Seer have a very nonhuman view of pretty much everything.
• In A Fire Upon the Deep, half of the action takes place on a planet of sapient canines who are only conscious when they form a pack; this also allows them to carry out tasks impossible for a dog by manipulating tools as if each member of the pack was a limb. The plot is heavily influenced by the fact that pack-individuals cannot stay close to each other (lest they disintegrate into mindless animals) and personalities can change drastically when two or three of their constituents die at the same time and have to be replaced with new ones.
• Firstborn is from the viewpoint of a magpie who decides to live amongst wolves. While animals are sapient, can understand humans, and have names like "Artemis" and "Maggie", they're still portrayed more-or-less like actual animals.
• Flatland features two-dimensional characters, for which a sphere is an unimaginable concept.
• For Your Safety: Mimsey's Tale is written as a series of program logs of a robot designed as a companion for a child. It is clear that Mimsey is not self-aware and is merely acting out a set of IF/THEN statements.
  Fact: She is a Google-Sony Felicia v9 Companion
  Fact: Her designation/name is Mimsey.
  Fact: Her designated programming focus is Caroline Annabelle Lee.
  Fact: Caroline is her world.
• The Fox and the Hound is not, as you might guess from the Disney film, a Beast Fable about racism. It's about an average huntin' dog and his fox quarry as they try to survive in a changing world. The book makes a lot of the fact that they mostly perceive the world through their noses.
• Foxcraft is another example of the "middle-grade talking-animal fantasy" subgenre, this time starring foxes that can perform magic. Its author, Inbali Iserles, is in fact a member of the Erin Hunter team.
• Franz Kafka was very fond of this trope, and wrote multiple short stories from the point of view of animals. Notable examples are "The Burrow" and "Investigations of a Dog".
• Futures From Nature: One short story is in the form of a review of a mystery novel written by a robot, reviewed by another robot. The protagonist of the mystery and most of the characters are robots too.
• Glennkill is a detective story from the perspective of a herd of sheep. While they do understand human language and are partially familiar with some concepts of society (their shepherd used to read them cheap romance novels), their perspective is a non-human one with a strong emphasis on scents and sounds.
• Great Gusliar: More than half of Reason in Captivity is written by an octopus-like alien, who crash-landed on Earth and didn't expect to find life outside water. The rest is a viewpoint of two modern^note 1970s, to be precise men who went fishing, caught him and decided to become famous as discoverers of freshwater octopus. The part that scared the alien the most is when they checked if he's really an octopus by consulting a cookbook.
• The Guardian Herd is a young-adult fantasy series about pegasi.
• The Guardians of Ga'Hoole series would only make sense with owl characters. But it half-fits this trope: while the author goes into great deal about owl biology and incorporating aspects of that into their culture, there's still some stuff going on that's unambiguously human — forges, and a giant colony of owls of various species ruled by a monarchy. Plus the first half of the series is a pretty blatant Beast Fable about World War II.
• Gulliver's Travels: "Gulliver's Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms" crosses into this. Though the main character is human, the story is told more from the horses' ("Houyhnhnms'") perspective than from the human's.
• The Honor Harrington novels focus mainly on humans, however treecat characters are shown to be very different, being incapable of hiding how they feel or lying to one another, and having little concept of diplomacy. Some of the stories in the short story collections are told from treecat perspectives and go into great detail about treecat society, with a line of Young Adult books starting from an expansion of the novella A Beautiful Friendship that covers Stephanie Harrington and her treecat.
• Horses Of The Dawn is another fantasy-xenofiction series by Kathryn Lasky. This time, the protagonists are horses who escape from Spanish conquistadors and establish the first herd in the New World.
• Hunter's Moon (1989), also known as The Foxes of Firstdark, is told from the point of view of foxes and invents an entire mythology and a belief system they follow. From the reader's point of view, every animal speaks in a separate human language, foxes using English, badgers German, cats French, and so on. Animals of the same family speak in related tongues, such as dogs using a broken version of English.
• Isaac Asimov :
  • "The Gentle Vultures": This story takes place from the perspective of aliens observing Earth in anticipation of the Cold War becoming World War III.
  • The Gods Themselves: Written due to criticism that he never wrote about aliens or sex. As a result it's a book about aliens, sex, and alien sex. He was probably feeling sarcastic about this (Asimov's sillier replies to fan mail or publisher criticism actually very frequently resulted in novels or publishable short stories, he was a man that loved to go a long way for a short laugh) because he'd at that point already written a number of stories where the POV character is a robot and one especially memorable one about a sentient alien spaceship that was essentially a 1000-word circumcision joke.
  • "The Hazing": Most of the story occurs from the perspective of the alien sophomores, it changes between the sophomore Myron Tubal and freshman Albert Williams while the three alien sophomores try to pull the greatest hazing ever on the ten human freshmen.
  • "Homo Sol": The entire story is told from an alien viewpoint, mostly in Third Person narration following Tan Porus around as representatives of the galactic Federation of Planets establishes First Contact with the Solarians (humans from Earth's solar system).
  • "The Imaginary": This story inverts Absent Aliens, as humans from Earth are regulated to a passing mention that establishes this story as a sequel to "Homo Sol". Instead, the story continues from Tan Porus's experiments with the Beta Draconis IV squids.
• Halic The Story Of A Gray Seal by Ewan Clarkson follows the life of gray seals living at the coast of Wales from the point of view of a male gray seal named Halic. The book was very fact based about the life of seals and it didn't have much of a plot: It followed Halic's life from his birth to his death.
• Highsong: A science-fiction novelette that features a sapient dolphin's POV as she fights a Horde of Alien Locusts.
• House of Tribes stars a yellow-necked mouse named Pedlar who, like all mice eventually do, leaves his home to visit the far-off House, where he meets various warring tribes.
• I Am a Cat, which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin and one of the most well-known examples in Japanese literature.
• The Incredible Journey: During the chapters where the animals are alone, anyway; when humans show up, the perspective tends to shift to them.
• The Inheritance Cycle:
  • A couple chapters in the third book takes place from the perspective of Saphira, a sapient dragon. Attempts are made to convey an alien mindset, such as Saphira giving descriptive metaphoric names to man-made objects, but the main effect is that Saphira comes across as a self-absorbed sociopath who spends most of her time telling herself how beautiful and awe-inspiring she is.
  • Brisingr has a chapter narrated from the perspective of the dragon Glaedr.
• The Iron Teeth: The protagonist is Blacknail the goblin, who has a different way of thinking about things than humans.
• Most works of Hungarian author István Fekete (Vuk the Little Fox being an animated adaptation). He is especially notable for writing from the point of view of normal animals with little to no anthropomorphism.
• Jennie (also known as Abandoned) is about a boy who gets turned into a cat, and who meets a cat who teaches him about his new body and how cats perceive the world.
• Jean Craighead George has written (at least) two trilogies, one beginning with Julie of the Wolves and the other with My Side of the Mountain, the third books of which, Julies Wolf Pack and Frightfuls Mountain are respectively told entirely from the points of view of a several wolves and a peregrine falcon. It is also worth noting is that the original Julie of the Wolves, while not told from the perspective of wolves, does feature them as the primary members of the cast.
• The Jungle Book: Most jungle creatures don't think ahead, except those like Akela who need to. They also don't talk, except when they feel like it. In comparison, humans are seen as complicated, chatty monkeys. It scares Bagheera witless when Mowgli, in "Letting in the Jungle", asks Hathi to help him to wipe out the village (just the town itself, not kill the people), kind of like how most people would get if they were told to wipe out a city, and Bagheera knows more than most what humans are like.
• Ka Dar Oakley In The Ruin Of Ymr is an unusually literary and dreamlike example of this trope. The titular crow learns to speak with humans, discovers the concept of a name, which he introduces to the rest of crowkind, and becomes immortal after a trip to a magical underworld. The titular "Ka" and "Ymr" are the "realms" of crows and humanity, and Dar Oakley finds himself thinking more like a human when he is around them for longer.
• Kavik The Wolf Dog is told primarily from the POV of the title dog, though his human companions do get their own perspectives. He was abandoned, then adopted by a pack of wolves. It goes to great lengths to explain canine behavior and the pecking order of a wolf pack. Kavik was first trapped as a puppy, which so traumatized him that he did not live up to his name (meaning "wolverine") when the local dog pack attacks him. Then he gets marooned again, and has to cross miles of hostile terrain, toughening up and losing his fear. After he got home, the local dog pack tries to pick on him again. Mistake.
• The Kine saga is about a weasel named Kine who decides to fight back against a vicious mink who has invaded his land. Though it's about two rival species, it's treated more like two animals fighting for a similar niche than an actual war.
• American author Jim Kjelgaard wrote many stories in this form, with an animal protagonist and written from the animal's point of view. Most of them were domestic animals - dogs of various breeds, and once a cat - set loose in the wild by accident and forced to fend for themselves.
• Kona's Song by Louise Searl is told from the point of view of wolves. They have their own culture based on wolf behaviour and lifestyle - for example, since wolves mate for life, they believe that a mated pair become one soul. If one dies, the other may die of a broken heart, since half his or her soul is gone. They also have great respect for their prey and are very confused when they see a human kill something without then eating it. They are horrified to learn that humans kill just for fun.
  • The same author has a similar book told from the point of view of lions, The Way of Kings (2021), and a collection of short stories, The Dream Eaters and Other Stories, the majority of which are from a non-human perspective.
• The Last Dogs series is about a Labrador Retriever named Max who notices all the humans are "vanishing". He and a group of other dogs attempt to find their families again.
• "Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death" is a short story by James Tiptree Jr. about a giant spider-like creature trying to resist its baser instincts.
• Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future: Features the POV of various species of future humans, some of them just like us, some radically different, some not even sapient. It includes numerous POVs, from "normal" modern humans to non-sapient human descendants to sapient future humans with vastly different mindsets from ours.
• Metamorphoses (also known as The Golden Ass), written in the 2nd century AD, is narrated by a man who was changed into a donkey. His experiences cover the whole spectrum of an animal's life.
• Midnights Sun is about an odd wolf named Athaba who is exiled from his pack for being too imaginative. In order to survive, he makes an unlikely allegiance with a human hunter.
• Mike Resnick's works include aliens that actually act alien, with often incomprehensible motives, in otherwise human-centric stories.
• Monkey Wars by Richard Kurti is the tale of a war between rhesus and langur monkeys in Kolkata, India. Being monkeys, they are closer to humans than many examples of this trope, but their stronger sense of smell and ability to climb and run along narrow objects factor into the story.
• Mother of Demons, by Eric Flint, has non-humans who are solidly in the Starfish Aliens scale and get representation as viewpoint characters.
• Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH is a borderline case, as the eponymous rats think and act like humans due to their experiment-enhanced intelligence. Nicodemus's account of his life before the laboratory, however, shows they didn't always think that way, and Jeremy (a crow) and Mrs. Frisby (a field mouse) are normal animals with only the vaguest comprehension of human or rat technology.
• Pagoo, by Holling Clancy Holling, is the life story of a Pagurus (two-fisted hermit crab) as it grows from planktonic larva to vulnerable juvenile to hardy adult.
• Peanut The Orange Tabby is about the life of an orange tabby born in a hoarder's apartment.
• Peep The Mouse is story by Vitaliy Bianki about a non-sapient mouse.
• Perry Rhodan dips into this from time to time. While the series' main protagonists are undeniably human, it's not unusual to have a more or less alien viewpoint character for up to an entire issue or even two every so often; the backstory of a new alien member of the supporting cast prior to joining the ongoing plot is a popular subject for this.
• The Plague Dogs revolves around two dogs who escape an animal research lab.
• A Practical Guide to Evil has about one chapter per book told from the perspective of various nonhuman characters who hang around Catherine, such as goblins gleefully raining chaos upon their delightfully crazy Boss's enemies, or a Mighty drow who has followed the First Under the Night into the bizarre Burning Lands of the topside. Beheld I is a good example.
• Professor Mmaa's Lecture: Most of the book has the termite society as protagonists. They're somewhat alien, what with their different biology, lack of sight and Organic Technology, but since the book is mostly meant as a satire, their culture is still highly anthropomorphized the better to embody human flaws.
• Quest for Fire is a mild example as the protagonists are technically human but they are neanderthals who see anatomically modern humans as strange and alien, initially mistaking them for some kind of Lizard Folk due to their scrawny build and Body Paint that resembles scales.
• The Quintaglio Ascension features genetically modified sapient tyrannosaurs who are very different from humans; the opening chapter of the first book describes the trouble the main character has looking up at the stars. The Quintaglios can't openly lie to each other, a lost limb will grow back and they can't stand too close to each other otherwise they will become territorial and fight.
• Raptor Red is a book about a year in the life of an average female Utahraptor. She may or may not be sapient, but she definitely doesn't look at the world as humans do; her thought processes are a movie reel of images, smells, sounds and tastes, and her kind communicates through birdlike gestures and calls. There's also a few chapters from the viewpoints of other creatures, including a small insect-eating mammal, at least two Acrocanthosaurs, and a pterosaur.
• The Rudest Alien on Earth: Oluu is an alien, and her point of view reflects this. For example, when she first sees a dog, her narration describes it as "a smaller four-legger, with a fifth appendage that swayed back and forth on the end opposite the foreparts."
• Run Wild is a book series about red foxes who are run out of their forest by hunters.
• Salar The Salmon is a 1930s book about a salmon as it migrates to its spawning river.
• In-universe example: An eco-activist character in Sewer, Gas & Electric had been trying to write a novel from the perspective of cetaceans, to be titled "No Opposable Thumbs". Subverted in that he never got very far in the writing, due to a chronic inability to restrain his use of adjectives.
• The Sight is told from the perspective of a wolf pack, as is its sequel Fell.
• The Silver Brumby series by Elyne Mitchell is told mostly from the point of view of the wild horses (however this technique is abandoned later on in the series). These horses are portrayed as not only being sapient, but with brains almost equal to humans. They can even understand the human language.
• Silverwing trilogy and its super-prequel Darkwing are told from the POVs of bats. True to form, sound and the use of sonar are extremely important, and color is rarely mentioned.
• Olaf Stapledon's Sirius was one of the first works to combine this with Uplifted Animal, imagining what it might be like to be inside the head of a dog that had deliberately been given intelligence comparable to that of a human.
• Socks, by Beverly Cleary, tells the story of a simple housecat with no real comprehension of what humans are saying. Conflict arises when the young couple who adopted the kitten have a baby: Socks can't understand why the woman's lap is "shrinking", or why they are using the "special" high voice that previously was just for him.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: Throughout the series, several passages are written from the perspective of the Stark children's direwolves.
• Sounding, by Hank Searls, features a sperm whale as one of the major point-of-view characters (the other is human) but the whale thinks and acts like a whale.
• Stanisław Lem liked the topic and always included some plot lines that are based on significant differences between humans and aliens (if there were aliens).
  • This was the stated goal of Solaris. The point of view is human, but the main character of the story is a very alien kind of intelligence: a planetwide, living ocean.
  • The Cyberiad and Fables for Robots are set in a wacky anachronistic Feudal Future populated by robots and are told from robots' point of view.
  • His early novel Eden, is an exception; the differences prove insignificant to an extent.
  • Another example by Lem is The Mask — an insectoid killer robot in a human female shell.
  • Yet another example would be his short story from 1959 Inwazja z Aldebarana [Invasion from Aldebaran], more congenial to some humorous stories that were to be written by Kir Bulychev.
• Star Carrier: Three out of four books intersperse two human points-of-view with a POV of alien antagonists. Ian Douglas heavily explores what the world looks like to them, for example with the Slan, a heavily collectivist species that sees by echolocation, or the H'rulka, Living Gasbag colony organisms 200 meters long that view a Boarding Party of Navy SEALS^note old acronym updated to "Sea, Air, Land, Space" as bizarre parasites. When the Slan capture a female human, their ship commander scans her using his echolocation and tries to figure out human internal structure, as the echolocation can see into objects. Some organs are properly identifies, while others are completely off (the Slan determines that the brain is somewhere in the stomach area, for example). It then tries to figure out how the human captive echolocates. Since the Slan have two appendages whose ends emit sound to be reflected back into their ears, they determine that the closest analogy would be the two bumps on the prisoner's body (i.e. breasts). Later, when communicating with Captain Trevor Grey, the Slan commander assumes that Grey is blind/deaf because he lacks the echolocating organs.
• Star Trek: In the post-motion picture novel Ex Machina, several chapters are narrated from an alien point of view, including (obviously) Spock, a fifty year old teenager from highly regimented Lawful Neutral society, and a bipedal fish-woman with six mouths who communicates through poetry. One of the major themes is how alien human society seems to them, and how difficult they find understanding and interacting with humans.
• Stephen Baxter:
  • Evolution is a partial example, covering an extremely vast tract of time from before the extinction of the dinosaurs right up to the events after humanity's extinction. Consequently, there are a good number of human and proto-human characters, but there are also chapters written from the point of view of dinosaurs, tree-dwelling squirrel-like primates, a huge array of apes, and a sapient machine after humanity's extinction, with an interest in archaeology.
  • Manifold: Space features sections told from the perspective of a sapient lunar flower suffering from Merlin Sickness.
  • Manifold: Time: A major subplot of involves squid, modified to be more intelligent, used as a space exploration force. This is told from the squids' perspective.
  • Longtusk and its sequels, by Stephen Baxter, is a series of books with mammoths as protagonists. There are humans present, but not as POV characters. The third book goes into some weird territory though Mammoths on Mars, anyone?
• Margaret Bechard's middle-grade novel Star Hatchling concerns a pair of alien siblings from a primitive tribal society discovering a crashed human girl. They believe her to be male because she lacks a head crest and think she regenerated her head when her space helmet comes off (their planet's atmosphere is breathable, but not ideal, for humans). The concept of friendship is foreign to them.
• The One and Only Ivan is from the perspective of a gorilla. As a great ape who lived in a human home when he was small, watches TV regularly, and is constantly observed on all sides by humans on the outside of his little enclosure in The Mall, he definitely has some understanding of humans, but still finds them strange in various ways and struggles to comprehend them and their priorities.
• Stephen King: The perspective of a dog appears in several novels, and other animals narrate other segments.
  • Cujo has the eponymous St. Bernard.
  • The Dark Tower has a passage from the POV of Oy the billybumbler (raccoon dog) after his master Jake's death.
  • Gerald's Game has a stray dog.
  • The Eyes of The Dragon has Frisky the husky.
  • The Stand has Kojak the dog.
  • The Talisman has a sequence narrated from Wolf's POV while in his feral form.
  • Under the Dome has Horace the corgi, and starts with the POV of a groundhog up until it gets cut in half by the Dome.
• Stielauge Der Urkrebs tells the story of a trilobite from the arthropod's own point of view.
• Stray by A.N. Wilson is from the POV of an old stray tabby as he tells his often-unfortunate life to his grandson. Pufftail has been abused, mistreated, and abandoned during his life.
• The Summer King Chronicles is a story about a young griffon who is at the age of maturity. Like others his age, he undergoes an initiation hunt. There he meets a female wolf who changes his world. Unlike with many depictions, the series depicts griffons as being more like actual animals than superpowered mythical beings.
• Super Minion is told from the perspective of an escaped Bioweapon Beast in a super hero setting. While he has a program called human.exe that gives him a human's reasoning ability, and he slowly learns about human society over the course of the story, his perspective is still very inhuman.
• Tailchaser's Song is told from the point of view of feral cats. It stars an almost-grown kitten named Tailchaser, his kitten sidekick Pouncequick, and an older female with a traumatic past named Roofshadow as they go on a journey to find out why cats are disappearing all over the region. Tailchaser's Song's inspired by Watership Down and presents the cats with similarly complex systems of Conlang and Animal Religion. It does a pretty good job of conveying the alien viewpoint, including sense of smell and view of humans.
• Tales of the Jokka, by M.C.A. Hogarth, follows a three-gendered alien race that has two chances to change sex in puberty, and is prone to complete Identity Amnesia after severe trauma. Identity issues that are extremely rare or nigh-nonexistent in humans are commonplace to them, to say nothing of how complicated relationships get with them.^note Because childbirth usually inflicts the mind death on the mother, homoromantic relationships are the norm, with females typically treated as little better than breeding stock. However, there are many exceptions in the stories, most often involving one of the sterile neuters who aren't supposed to have any sex drive.
• Tarka The Otter tells the realistic tale of an otter growing up in the rivers of North Devon.
• A Tiger Of Malgudi, by R. K. Narayan, is unsurprisingly from a tiger's point of view. Narayan's treatment is realistic, except that the tiger can understand what humans say, though he can't talk.
• Thor, by Wayne Smith, is primarily told from the perspective of the book's namesake, a German Shepherd who is forced to contend with the arrival of a monstrous threat to his family in the form of Uncle Ted, a family relative who, unbeknownst to anyone but Thor, is in actuality a werewolf. Thor sees the world and acts much like how one would expect a dog to; he is fascinated by new smells, gets excited over the prospect of play or going to the beach, and loves chasing small animals around. He also exhibits several traits unique to him being a German Shepherd, that of a keen intelligence by dog standards, an intense desire to please and be loved by his family, and an unshakable loyalty coupled with a fierce protective instinct towards his family, whom he views as his 'Pack'.
• Timothy Zahn:
  • The Conquerors Trilogy offers a change of narrator from human to rather very alien, with suitably different mannerisms, traditions, and mimics. The third book, Conquerors' Legacy, adds Artificial Intelligences to the mix.
  • His Dragonback series features one human and one alien protagonist, alternating the narration chapter by chapter for six books.
• Tomorrows Sphinx is told from the perspective of intelligent cheetahs in the distant future. The humans trying to monitor and/or capture them seem much like aliens, though there is one instance when we're outright told that a dart has been used. Kichebo, the protagonist, starts having an easier time of it when she comes into psychic contact with a long-dead ancestor who was companion to King Tut.
• In Three Bags Full, by Leonnie Swann, a flock of sheep attempt to solve the mystery of their shepherd's murder.
• Trickster by Tom Moorhouse is told from the perspective of rats, and often mentions how important scents are to them.
• Uplift sometimes gets into this. The uplifted dolphins in Startide Rising in particular.
• Varjak Paw and its sequel, written by S.F. Said, are good examples of this. The cats are sapient and able to communicate with each other (and dogs), but otherwise are very feline cats. Also, the Way, the secret cat martial art, just wouldn't work with humans, even super-powered ones.
• War Horse: The narrator is Joey, the horse, who is sold away from his farm to become a cavalry horse during World War I. Averted in the theatrical adaptation and the Steven Spielberg film, though.
• War Queen: The titular character is the queen of a colony of what are essentially giant alien ants, and many of the chapters are from the perspective of some of the other members of her colony. They communicate as much through scent, sight, and touch as they do through sound and find communication with humans weirdly stripped for lacking the other two senses. They don't have writing, but their oral histories come in the form of a song that is periodically sung in a chorus consisting of every member of the colony, ensuring the whole history is remembered as long as the entire colony is not wiped out. Each individual "ant" doesn't think of themselves as an individual—even the queen. She's merely the part of the colony whose job it is to make decisions, similar to the way the brain is the part of a human that thinks. The other "ants" are sapient and have personalities, but they are completely devoted to their roles and don't have any desire to strike off on their own, and don't have individual names, instead referring to themselves in the format "Hive Name-Role". Their minds are collectively blown when they realize that a single human can perform any role, can change roles, and make decisions like a queen, but then sometimes still subordinates themself to others.
  • The Hive Queen makes decisions for the colony, and also reproduces to sustain the colony.
  • Thinkers ask questions and advise the Queen.
  • Junior queens lay eggs, and may eventually become the Hive Queen themselves.
  • Soldiers fight.
  • Spitters fight at range.
  • Scouts gather information and are one of the few roles that can stand being cut off from the hive for any length of time.
  • Menials dig, build, carry things, raise livestock, and grow food.
  • Healers heal, and help raise young.
  • Diggers build tunnels and mine ore.
• War With No Name is a case of this involving Uplifted Animals given a full Anthropomorphic Transformation. The first book begins with the protagonist Sebastian as a normal cat, and the way the story is conveyed early on reflects the somewhat vague understanding he has of his environment. Over the course of the first chapter, Sebastian slowly becomes more and more cognizant of the things happening around him. It comes to a head when the actual spoken dialogue of the humans is finally shown to the reader, firmly establishing that Sebastian has achieved enough sapience to understand them.
• Watership Down, a tale about badass wild rabbits. They can only count to four and most of them can't grasp concepts like "things which float can be ridden across water to safety", but are identical to humans emotionally. Often the go-to example for explaining the genre. Even the dialogue is noted as being translated from the way rabbits would actually communicate for the benefit of the reader.
• W. Bruce Cameron:
  • A Dog's Purpose stars a dog, who was originally born a stray, as it goes through several reincarnations trying to find and complete its purpose in life. It doesn't understand humans except for a few very select words and there are also many things it just can't comprehend about humans (or other non-dog animals). The protagonist is more smell-based than visual-based.
  • A Dog's Purpose's Spiritual Successor, A Dog's Way Home, is much the same. It's from the POV of a dog named Bella who gets lost and must find her way back to her humans.
• West of Eden has several sections that focus on the Yilané. They're sapient mosasaurs, and their mindset and language is rather different from that of the human characters.
• The Whalesong Trilogy is primarily told from the POV of an albino humpback whale (there are some chapters from the POV of a major human character though)
• White Fang features the title wolf-dog, who started independently but grew to know humans.
• The Wild Road is mostly about cats (plus a fox and a magpie) and the ancient magic their kind wields. Namely, the energy of their ancestors created a series of magical "highways" across the world that certain animals can travel on to get quickly from place to place. When the cats use them, they become gigantic wildcats who never grow tired. When they die, their ghosts also walk the highways in the afterlife.
• Wings of Fire by Tui Sutherland (one of the Erin Hunter's) is about a world of dragons at war with each other. They have advanced cultures and can do things like read and write, but they're still dragons nevertheless. Humans only appear as "scavengers" and are deemed an endangered species of animal.
• The Wolves of Time trilogy starts with wolves in Europe trying to reclaim their territory from "Mennen" during World War II.
• Woodstock Saga, by Michael Tod, is about a community of red squirrels in Dorset and their war against the invading grey squirrels. Also involves the development of a crude writing system, twisty-sticks used as psionic cannons, and sufficiently advanced dolphins.
• Worm:
  • Worm has an Interlude told from the point of view of Brutus, one of Bitch's dogs.
  • Later on there's a chapter devoted to Scion. The first half of a later chapter is devoted to his so-called other half, Eden, and her perspective of the Crapsack World they had wanted to create.
  • Ward, sequel to Worm, has an Interlude from the perspective of the powers themselves... or rather, the extradimensional "shards" of Scion that grant powers to humans.
• The Year Of The Dinosaur by Edwin H. Colbert, follows the life of a Brontosaurus.
• Zones of Thought: The books of this trilogy tend to feature at least two major plotlines simultaneously, one of which is full of spacefaring humans, the other of which focuses primarily on a non-spacefaring alien civilization and its technological development. Vernor Vinge goes to great lengths to illustrate both their similarities to humans as well as their their staggeringly alien differences.
• Z-Verse series by R.H. Stevens takes place entirely from the perspective of various alien characters with nary a human in sight. They're usually pretty cozy mysteries even if they have dark premises. Example:
  • Escape from Angra-Mainyu: An alien ambassador recovers data from a falling space station and encounters evil experiments.

Live-Action TV

• Saturday Night Live: Dwayne Johnson's Dumb Muscle portrayal of Superman plays the trope for laughs. As in most Superman adaptations, Superman uses his cover identity as journalist Clark Kent to blend in with humans, but his Daily Planet co-workers immediately find him out because, among other reasons, he keeps haplessly writing his articles from a Superman-centric perspective, e.g. "A man in New York was shot to death yesterday because bullets do not bounce off of human bodies."
• Walking with Beasts ends with an episode set in Paleolithic Europe where the main characters are woolly mammoths, and modern humans and neanderthals are just another predator.

Music

• Sonata Arctica: "In My Eyes You're a Giant", the bonus track on The Days of Grays, describes the relationship between a young wolf and his owner, told from the perspective of the wolf. A number of other songs are also told from the perspective of wolves, such as "It Won't Fade" on Unia and "The Cage" on Winterheart's Guild.

Tabletop Games

• Bunnies & Burrows, being based on Watership Down, is a roleplaying game in which the players have to take the roles of rabbits with all their limitations and strengths. In fact, since bunnies are not exactly the strongest animals out there, the game forces the player to confront enemies and obstacles with problem-solving solutions and wit. Humans appear as monsters in the game, completely alien to the players. It was very innovative in its time, since it was the first RPG that let the player play as non-humanoid creatures.
• Dawg: The Role-Playing Game, by Kenzer & Co., is a Defictionalization of an RPG written by B.A. Felton from Knights of the Dinner Table.
• Chronicles of Darkness: While the Old World of Darkness has elements of this, Chronicles steps it up a notch by making all supernatural templates something very definitely distinct from human that just happen to want or need to wear a human skin occasionally, going so far as to give each supernatural template a Karma Meter with wildly variant and mutually-exclusive requirements and mechanically punishing them for any attempt to play a human that just happens to have a bunch of funky superpowers, usually to the point that if you keep it up you go mad, become a ravening evil something-or-other, and turn into an NPC antagonist.
  • Mage: The Awakening, where the players are biologically fully human, ironically enough has the most of this, as your baseline powers cause you to see the world in a dramatically different way and something like half of your potential abilities automatically ding the karma meter or in themselves have the potential to drive you or the entire local world severely, literally insane. By comparison, the splats with the LEAST xenofictional elements are the ones where you're playing an actual beast that craves human blood and/or flesh.
  • Werewolf: The Apocalypse also has heavy elements of this, as a good number of werewolves in the game are Lupus (wolf-born). While each tribe has a certain amount of Lupus in it, the Red Talons are almost exclusively Lupus, with no human members; as such, their tribe book is written from the perspective of a wolf who regards strictly human constructs with uncertainty (and a heaping pile of scorn).
• Pugmire is about the players roleplaying as uplifted dogs in a world where Mankind has disappeared as they go looking for artifacts of the past to try and glimpse how the world was, while at the same time trying to follow the Code of Man (which, among many things, says one must be a Good Dog). The uplifted dogs see mankind as Old Gods and the uplifted cats see mankind as old servants of THEM who went extinct for some reason. There's also lots of prejudice between cats and dogs, as one would expect.
• Three Raccoons in a Trench Coat, as the name suggests, is about the players playing intelligent but otherwise-ordinary raccoons. The raccoons stumble upon humans doing something, and try to figure out if there's something they can get out of it and how (which, again as the name suggests, may involve clumsisly disguising themselves as a human wearing a trenchcoat).
• World Tree (RPG) is superficially about Funny Animals, but each of the "Prime" races has its own specific instincts, drives and feelings that make them distinct from humans and strongly impact how their societies, or lack thereof, work, even ignoring their magic and other powers.

Theatre

• Cats: Implied. Not only is there not a single human character in the cast, it's strongly hinted that many of the play's weirder moments are the result of the story being told from the exaggerated perspective of stray cats living in a large city; the Jellicles' bizarre names are their "true" names (which humans are incapable of knowing), the "criminal mastermind" Macavity is just a particularly bold and territorial stray who often steals food from human dwellings, Skimbleshanks is just a stray who previously took refuge on a railway train and convinced himself that he was responsible for making it run, "The Awefull Battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles" is just an exaggerated retelling of a fight between two clans of stray dogs, etc.

Toys

• BIONICLE: Though humanlike in some ways, the principal cast are first and foremost biomechanical beings originally built to maintain the planet-hopping Humongous Mecha Mata Nui—who they see as a patron deity in all but name, and needs them to work lest he fall weak—and some attention is paid to their differing psychology and cultural values, with strong emphasis on the 'three virtues' of Unity, Duty, and Destiny, which are implied to have been programmed directives.
  • They are meant to essentially be maintenance nanotech analogous to blood cells, it's only due to the actions of one of their creators gone rogue that they're even sapient.
  • Being built, they don't reproduce biologically and thus have no desire for it, altogether lacking any cultural notion of romance, in addition to being sexless and with largely superficial notions of gender.
  • Being largely mechanical, they're fully capable of rebuilding and repairing themselves, if the individual possesses the knowledge. The franchise even starts off with our Toa heroes doing just that.
  • Even the youngest among them are on the order of thousands of years old, and the oldest are over 100,000. This even extends to the organic beings we meet later on.
  • Moreover, LEGO was very firm in rejecting attempts to insert humans into the narrative during talks for a theatrical film based the franchise.

Video Games

• Alien vs. Predator: The different videogames have shades of this. While the Predator remains humanoid, their culture is a form of space tribalism that most gamers would not directly relate to. The black Xenomorph creatures on the other hand have a definite life and social cycle revolving around impregnation, feeding, climbing on walls and ceilings and survival.
• Cattails is a Warriors-inspired game where you play as an abandoned cat who must survive in a cat colony. The cats have anthropomorphic traits like a marriage system and an understanding of herbs, but they're largely cats.
• Deadly Creatures is a video game starring a tarantula and a scorpion that act like a real tarantula and scorpion. Although the latter seems more bloodthirsty and headstrong.
• Destiny gives us the Books of Sorrow, a document written from the perspective of various alien characters that details the terrifying origins of the Hive.
• Dino Run has you play as a dinosaur trying to outrun extinction.
• Dog's Life: The protagonist is a foxhound named Jake who is on a cross-country mission to rescue his crush Daisy. In the game you can temporarily take control over other dogs as well. To complete the game, you must use Jake's nose to sniff out certain scents to progress.
• Ecco the Dolphin is about, well, a dolphin. As such, he approaches the coming Alien Invasion in a delphine manner, and on top of that has uniquely cetacean problems and way of perceiving the world — his sonar is far more important to him than his vision. The games also include the Asterite, a definitely strange creature that may or may not be from Earth.
• Golden Treasure: The Great Green lets players live and shape the life of a dragon, beginning in its egg. Humans, elves, and dwarves are presented as alien and incomprehensible "Tailless" that killed the player dragon's mother before it hatched. Players can choose whether to avoid them, cooperate with them, or exterminate them. Hunting mechanics are critical to survival. Draconic spirituality and vocabulary pervade the narration.
• NieR: Automata: Downplayed. There are no humans in the entirety of the game, and although its android protagonists are based on the template of human body and behavior, they are also fundamentally alien in their interaction with the world, seeing how both human-built androids and the alien-created machines are primarily software constructs steering expendable mobile platforms to physically interact with each other. This leads to all sort of predictable weirdness (often supported by the core game mechanics), from androids routinely opting for explosive self-destruction to defeat enemies (after backing up their data) to the easy and readily available memory manipulation and personality reprogramming (including hacking oneself).
• Octodad derives all of its challenge from trying to control an octopus disguised as a human father, using individual tentacles in unison to get around and interact with objects.
• Return to Mysterious Island: In parts of Return to Mysterious Island 2: Mina's Fate, you play as Mina's monkey companion Jep. He can't combine items or use sophisticated things such as fire, but can socialize with other monkeys and make use of simple natural materials or tools.
• Saurian is a Survival Sandbox indie game set in western North America at the end of the Cretaceous period, where players live out the full life cycle of one of several dinosaur species (all of which look and behave in a realistic and scientifically accurate manner). Gameplay largely revolves around the challenges of survival and reproduction in a complex virtual ecosystem, with precise game mechanics and player stats, abilities, and needs varying from species to species.
• Shelter is a short survival/adventure game played from the POV of a mother badger, struggling to feed her just-weaned offspring and shepherd them to safety across challenging terrain.
• Spore is a game where you design your own lifeform (via a limited amount of features, both cosmetic and useful) and try to evolve it. Many aspects are based on animal behaviour observed. However the evolution cycle of cell to sea creature to land creature to tribal creature to civilization to space.
• WolfQuest is an Edutainment Game that seeks to depict the lives of wild wolves in Yellowstone as scientifically accurate as possible. As such, they interact with each other and the wider Yellowstone ecosystem with real communications and behaviors with the main goal of finding a mate, establishing territory, and raising their pups. Any further anthropomorphization is up to the player.

Web Comics

• 21st Century Fox features a cast of Funny Animals, but between conserved physiological features and scale (from a mouse to a giraffe), they're not just humans in costume.
• Awful Hospital is set in one region of a bizarre, mutable multiverse where everything that can perceive or be perceived can exist in any number of self-aware forms simultaneously, and "reality" is a subjective measure of which elements of the Perception Range you're paying attention to at any given time. Humans, to those beings capable of noticing them at all, are seen as pitiably odd for being constrained to a single, ephemeral, matter-bound form and only existing in one layer of perception at a time.
• Deep Rise was created from the start with the intent of doing this, it deals with none-gendered/hermaphroditic troglodyte tentacle-monsters.
• Doe of Deadwood is the tale of a sickly doe who becomes indebted to a demon tree. The cast consists entirely of animals, as do the author's many other works, though the settings for each are unique.
• Freefall heavily features an uplifted Red Wolf, an alien whose species' hat is apparently that of the Lovable Rogue, and a robot Cloudcuckoolander. The supporting cast is dominated by robots, with only a smattering of humans.
• Homestuck becomes this around Act 5 with the introduction of the trolls. The transition can be very jarring, because the way their society and biology works is very different, and many assumptions that a reader might initially make are later disproved.
• Nature of Nature's Art is a collection of stories concerning sapient but still very animal-like characters, ranging from the fairly common to this trope (wolves) to the unusual (wolf spider.)
• Off-White's story revolves around a pack of wolves. Although some of the though patterns are human, the story also involves animal-centric characteristics such as pack dynamics and confusion over humans and their ilk.
• Wurr, in which all of the main characters are civilized mutant dogs.

Web Original

• Chernobyl Curs: An OCT where all of the characters are sapient dogs, to varying degrees. Since the story is told by multiple people through multiple characters, some show more human-like behavior than others.
• Dear Kitten is about a cat mentoring a young kitten. He teaches the kitten about life amongst humans, such as the monstrous "Vack Ooum".
• Dear Rabbit is a short animation set to the song "But I Know I'm A Wolf" by The Young Heretics. It has a simple plot of a minimally anthropomorphic wolf trying, and failing, to avoid its instincts to kill a rabbit.
• Dream Come True is a short animated film about a group of equine living on a farm.
• Hamster's Paradise is normally presented in a nature guide-style format, focusing on maps, species and biomes at intervals of 5-10 million years. An example of Xenofiction happens, however, when the Always Chaotic Evil harmsters arise, and very quickly eradicate themselves. The trope is much stronger with the Calliducyonidae, a family arising 45 million years after the harmsters, containing two genera of dog-like sophonts, the wolf-like southhounds and the fox-like northhounds, which are depicted from the stories they tell and their perspectives on life.
• Humans-B-Gone! is a web series focused on giant insects and arachnids living in a bizarre world of Organic Technology, where humans are considered pests. They call themselves macrovolutes and communicate via pheremones, much like their real-world counterparts. The series translates their scent-based communications into English and humanoid body language, but this is noted In-Universe as being a Translation Convention.
• My Pride is an animated web series about a lion pride. The art style takes obvious inspiration from The Lion King (1994), but the lore takes more inspiration from Warrior Cats (for which the creator was once a prominent fan animator); the lions have a strict culture and Animal Religion which ultimately results in them having the morals and social structure of real lions, for better or worse.
• Orion's Arm can be this at times, given that even the average Joe is a transhuman, godlike Artificial Intelligences are commonplace, and you have sapient animals, robots, plants and every manner of combination thereof, people who have experienced The Singularity several times, sapient clouds of nanomachines, Starfish Aliens with truly bizarre biologies and sometimes incomprehensible psychologies, sapient computer programs who live exclusively in virtual simulations, and even lifeforms based on magnetic monopoles or nuclear reactions as commonplace citizens of various states.
• Multiple stories in the Para Imperium: "Inside the Chinese Room" is presented as the internal log of a (non-sentient) AI. "Of the Collective" shows the multiple simultaneous perspectives of a group mind. And "A World Lost" shows parahumanity from the perspective of Starfish Aliens.
• Rooms Full of Me: A self aware virus searches for meaning in a hostile world.
• Serina started off as a speculative evolution exercise on canaries being itnroduced to another planet and the subsequent adaptive radiation. But by the Ultimocene section (circa 250 million years after the fact, and five-six real life years after the project's inception) has shifted into focusing primarily on sapient species and their narratives, thus becoming Redwall-esque xenofiction with fantasy elements.
• The SCP Foundation has these two documents. The first is written mostly by Starfish Aliens describing themselves to humans, and the second is written mostly by intelligent carp describing humans.
• The Things, a very strange re-telling of The Thing (1982), a classic John Carpenter horror movie from the perspective of a distinctly non-human character. Written by Peter Watts of Blindsight fame. Beware: Body Horror and more may await you.
• Wolf Song: The Movie has its entire plot being a couple dogs being incorporated into a wolf pack and transformed into wolves in order to to fight a {hellhound} invasion which had resulted in numerous deaths. Sure it has some significant fantasy elements such as elemental abilities, souls and the aforementioned hellhounds, but the characters still act almost like any wolves would, with a few exceptions, most notably during the fight scenes which are usually brutal and animalistic in nature, down to the typical finisher if the fight is to the death.

Western Animation

• Gargoyles is a relatively mild example, but its use of the trope is still definitely noticeable. For the most part, the titular winged reptilian humanoids are able to communicate and interact with ordinary humans with ease, but they have trouble grasping the human concepts of naming and individual parenthood. To elaborate:
  • Because they turn to stone during the day, Gargoyles think of themselves as part of nature, and they don't think to go by personalized names unless humans assign them names. They also consider it strange to assign names to places, since they have trouble recognizing human boundaries in the natural world. Hudson adopts his chosen name as a grudging joke, after he claims that naming people is just as foolish as naming the sky or naming a river (only for Elisa to tell him that New York's river is, in fact, named "The Hudson").
  • Gargoyles collectively raise eggs in rookeries, and all hatchlings are considered to be the collective children of the clan.^note  To underscore the point: Greg Weisman personally stated that Hudson is actually Broadway's father, and that Othello/Coldstone is Gabriel's father. Because of Gargoyle ideas about childrearing, none of the characters ever think to bring this up in the show. This ends up causing some drama in the later seasons, when Goliath meets his long-lost biological daughter Angela, who was raised by humans on Avalon. With her human upbringing, Angela has trouble understanding why her father doesn't acknowledge the significance of their familial bond, and why he doesn't treat her any different than the other members of his clan. Perhaps part of the reason is because of his bad relationship with Demona (Angela's mother—and, if anything, Angela's relationship with Demona is worse).
• Hanna-Barbera produced an animated special on The Last Of The Curlews that does this for the bird in question.
• Simba: è nato un re starts out as this, an Italian series about orphaned lion cubs raised by wolves after their father is shot by humans.

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