The first days of being a pet are the hardest. Your brain is used to being active; needing to think about things, work out what to say, and make plans. Your body is used to being upright, bipedal, and dextrous. This is rather at odds with being placed into the role of a mute quadrupedal animal. It’s frustrating, humiliating, and even somewhat scary: There’s the worry about “What happens if there’s an emergency and I can’t use my hands?”

But all the problems adjusting were, like so many of my problems, due to the discrepancy between my self-image and my actual state. A dog doesn’t get stressed about having no hands because it doesn’t feel like it should have them in the first place. Time passed at a crawl to start with, but as days passed I slowly found myself adjusting.

The change in body image was profound and somewhat strange. Slowly I shifted from perceiving myself as having had arms and legs folded back on themselves; to simply having four short, stiff legs. My sealed-away hands almost faded from awareness altogether, going from vital manipulators to useless appendages. Initially, I found this shift noteworthy and perhaps unsettling, but my brain soon followed suit in adapting to the role change.

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