Somewhere on the forgotten edges of the internet, in Discord servers you’ll never find without an invite, there are videos. Grainy clips of teenagers bounding through forests on all fours, wrists folded back at impossible angles, spines bent like predators mid-hunt. They call it quadding. x
If you stumbled onto it by accident — maybe a TikTok algorithm slip, maybe a forum screenshot in a meme thread — you’d think you were watching cosplay. Maybe parkour, if parkour was somehow feral. But to the people inside the subculture, this isn’t performance. It’s identity.
Quadding is part of a larger world called therianthropy — a tangle of belief, instinct, and embodiment where people identify, in part or in whole, as non-human animals. Wolves. Foxes. Lynxes. Housecats. For therians, the animal self isn’t a fantasy they put on; it’s something they claim has always been there, buried beneath the skin.
And quads — running, crouching, living for moments on four limbs — is how some of them bring that self to the surface.
The Origins of Quads: From Shadowed Forums to TikTok For You Pages
Long before TikTok’s algorithm weaponized visibility, therian culture hid in plain sight. In the mid-2000s, forums like Werelist and Kinmunity acted as sanctuaries for people who couldn’t explain why they felt claws where there were fingers, or tails where there was only spine.
Some of these spaces became laboratories for movement. Anonymous users traded tips about how to mimic wolf gaits, cat crouches, and fox-bound landings without snapping wrists. Photos — blurry, low-lit, sometimes clearly shot on flip phones — showed packs of teens sprinting quads through suburban parks at night.
For years, this lived underground, dismissed by outsiders as fringe roleplay. Then came TikTok.
Suddenly, videos of quadding racked up millions of views. Tags like #therian and #quadruns blew open doors the community had kept locked for decades. Overnight, what was once a quiet ritual became viral fodder.
But visibility came at a cost.
Embodiment vs. Performance
To understand why quads matter, you have to understand how therians see themselves. For many, identifying as a wolf, a lynx, or even a domestic tabby isn’t about fantasy. It’s an inner truth. They talk about phantom limbs — tails they can “feel” even when they know there’s none. They describe sensory differences, like perceiving sound or scent in ways that don’t fit human norms.
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Quadding, then, isn’t pretending. It’s aligning.
Practitioners describe dropping into “the animal mind” — a meditative state where human thought dissolves and instinct takes over. The shift is partial, not physical, but quads make it tangible: crouched low, knuckles brushing earth, back curved like a hunting cat ready to spring.
For outsiders, it looks like play. For insiders, it feels like becoming.
How Quads Work: Between Biology and Ritual
Quads — shorthand for quadrupedal movement — can look chaotic, but the serious practitioners train like athletes.
There are whole tutorials about redistributing weight through the wrists and forearms to mimic feline or canine strides. Some experiment with quad rigs: custom prosthetic extensions that lengthen arms, shift balance, and make the gait more animal-like. Others stay minimal, preferring to “feel” the body of their animal self rather than recreate it anatomically.
For feline therians especially, quads are fluid. A domestic cat therian moves differently from a cougar therian — low, close to the earth, muscles coiled for short bursts of speed. Wolves favor endurance; cats, stealth. The nuance is everything.
There’s danger, too. Sprains, torn ligaments, dislocated shoulders. In one old forum thread, a user casually posts X-rays of fractured wrists from practicing quads on concrete, captioned with:
“Worth it. For ten seconds, I wasn’t human.”
Packs, Rituals, and the Quiet Revolution
Not every therian practices quads, but among those who do, it becomes a kind of ritual. Some run alone in forests or suburban green belts, headphones stripped away, letting breath and heartbeat sync to the imagined rhythm of paws on dirt. Others gather in packs, small groups meeting offline to practice together, often in secluded places.
These meet-ups blur the line between exercise and ceremony. Members describe feeling “seen” without having to explain anything. In one private Discord archive, a feline therian wrote after a pack run:
“We didn’t talk for the first half-hour. We just ran. The silence wasn’t awkward; it was instinct. Like I’d known these people in another life.”
It’s these small, intimate moments that outsiders almost never see — the parts that aren’t filmed, aren’t hashtagged, and never make it onto TikTok.
The TikTok Explosion and the Backlash
Quads didn’t stay hidden forever. TikTok’s short-form chaos turned what was once niche ritual into viral spectacle. Millions of views came fast. So did the ridicule.
Reaction videos mocked quad runs as “cringe.” Comment sections filled with derision and harassment. Some practitioners doubled down, turning virality into pride. Others retreated further underground, locking servers, deleting clips, and going silent.
Inside the community, TikTok caused a split. Some embraced the exposure, believing visibility fosters acceptance. Others argue it dilutes meaning — turning identity into entertainment.
It’s a conversation happening everywhere, from gender to fandoms: who gets to define the story when the world starts watching?
The Deeper Meaning of Quads
Strip away the memes, the mockery, and the algorithm, and quads remain stubbornly intimate. At their core, they’re about becoming something closer to instinct — something freer than human categories allow.
For feline therians, this connection can feel ancient. A lynx therian once described their quads practice as “remembering how to move like my ancestors.” For others, it’s about reclaiming control over a body that never felt like home.
In a way, quads sit at the intersection of embodiment and rebellion. Against biology. Against expectations. Against the human-centric assumption that identity ends at the skin.
Quadrobics Tutorial
Conclusion: What Quads Reveal
So, what are quads in therian culture? They’re more than running on all fours. They’re an experiment in becoming, a private ritual disguised as strange movement, a reminder that identity is rarely simple or neatly human.
To watch someone quad is to glimpse a truth they’ve carried quietly for years: that beneath the skin, there’s something else — something older, wilder, untamed.
You can laugh at it. The internet already does. But if you stay long enough, listen closely enough, you start to realize: maybe it’s not about pretending to be an animal.
Maybe it’s about remembering you were one all along.