I'm not a misanthropist as my default setting. As individuals and as a species we are all capable of compassion and cruelty. Like any social animal. I am however critical of civilisation for a bunch of reasons, but from an anarcho-primitavist perspective, not a "humans bad" perspective.
I don't think humans are meant to exist in gigantic, anonymous populations. It's the anonymity of these masses that brings out the most destructive behaviour. Leaders don't know their subjects personally, so they're not held accountable for what they sign off on. If ever I am feeling "misanthropic", it's actually grief for a version of humanity that once existed. And will never exist again without a huge disaster and noone wants that.

Humans are complex like any animal and full of good and bad traits, the negatives behaviours don't matter that much when scaled down. Warfare between tribes is different to warfare between nations. Clearing a patch of forest for a settlement is different to clearing the entire amazon for soya beans. I have sympathy for misanthropes to an extent because people around us are indeed a faceless mass. A force. Not just the individuals we live with and the strangers on the other side of the valley. That does also of course mean that good deeds are scaled up too! It's not all bad. I'm sure some people would call me an ecofascist but I don't particularly care.

I'm curious to know if endangered or exploited theriotypes correlate with misanthropy at all. It could make for an interesting poll. The newer planet of the apes series are my favourite films. My sympathies are pretty one-sided. I have a tattoo of the Caesar symbol. Irl I want nothing more than for the zoos, circuses and other facilities to be empty so the entire third act of Rise makes for very cathartic viewing. The way humans have historically treated their cousins is abysmal, and still is now. Not to mention habitat loss etc. And that fact brings out the egdelord in me for sure. I am prepared for bonobos and other apes to go extinct in my lifetime. The only remaining populations will be in captivity. Existing in a vacuum with no effect on their former ecosystems, a living museum exhibit. They don't even look or act the same anymore because being stuck inside 4 walls makes them mentally and physically ill.
Though like I said before, for every large scale act of cruelty, there are equal acts of kindness. And people who make it their aim to combat the damage done are wonderful and I couldn't be misanthropic towards that if I tried.

For me, getting older and learning about the world made me realize that where my anger at "humanity" comes from is actually from power structures and... topics that may be too political to mention? The point is, humanity isn't bad, it just has bad tendencies when there are bad motivations, and bad power structures create bad feedback loops. These things aren't inherent to humanity though, and you truly need look no further than many indigenous communities for evidence that it's not "simply human nature" to devolve into those exploitative power structures. We don't benefit from denying that it does happen for the sake of "loving humans," but we're the only ones who can fix what we've done, so it's best to not shoot ourselves in the foot as a lost cause either. I'm only in my second week of classes but I'm already seeing a lot of this (embracing that we are the solution) in both my political ecology class and my environmental management class. Also, being exposed to the way humans rise up to push back against those power structures for the sake of strangers they will never know, that also gives me great hope.

My therianthropy has never intersected with any misanthropy, and I think part of that is because identify as a jaguar person, someone who is both human AND jaguar. It would be self-loathing, and frankly, I just don't care to do that, when I know it's far more productive for me to look for the good and focus on what I can contribute to, like my degree. Which, in essence, is so I can leave the world better than I found it.

I have a username that I use on therian-centric forums, in order to keep my therianthropy posts online separate from my legal name as well as my gaming nick. But it has no deeper meaning. Susitar is literally the Finnish word for wolf (susi) + a feminine suffix. So in English, it would be something like "wolfess". Just a placeholder to protect my real identity.

When I was 14 and started to awaken, before I found the therian community and didn't really know what was going on, I did create a "wolf name". I loved the novel Watership Down, so inspired by the rabbit names there, I gave myself a "wolf name": Sea Breeze. I had also seen some furry art (without knowing that it was an entire subculture), so I drew some art of this "Sea Breeze", a fox + wolf hybrid with water magic. So in a way, I made a fursona when I was 14?
But it sounded more like a pirate name, to be honest, and I never did use it for anything in the long term. I also realised I was a wolf, and not a fox at all (even if they are my favourite animal) and abandonded all ideas about a "magical hybrid with water powers".

Susitar was something I came up with much later, I think I started to use it on Tumblr first (2010). I realised that Tumblr was much more public and open than say, Werelist. On Werelist I had used my normal gaming handle at first. But my irl friends knew about that username - and I didn't want them to know about my tumblr account. Later, I went back to change my username on Werelist to Susitar as well.

Like many others in this thread, I don't think most wild animals have names in the ways that humans do. Maybe dolphins or something have names, but wolves don't really need that.

Tl;dr: I have a username on therian sites. It's not a "spiritual name" or "therian name", it's just an online handle.

Omg Bag, congrats <3
I never thought I'd ever see this happen

Therians having names for their theriotypes really confuse me, your theriotype is supposed to be YOU. I understand if you were a pet in a past life, or maybe you have an identity disorder where you sometimes don't feel like yourself, but past that I really do not get it at all.

Wow..I did not know of any of this but from what I have read, DustWolf was getting tired so I am glad he can rest but I also hope he still comes here once in awhile.
Congratulations to Bagera too

Well I guess I came to the conclusion that I was never 100% human, and that’s what feels right to me.
I don’t think my younger self realised that I was an animal, but I definitely showed it in different ways. Anything that wasn’t human I clung to. Anything that just involved animals fascinated me, and I felt a longing towards being different in this life.

But perhaps I don’t exactly know why I’m a therian. Maybe it’s just something we’re born with, like a different way of thinking.
Personally, I think as a therian I can help protect the beautiful nature around us, it’s apart of me and I feel extremely set to protect it.

I don't have a "therian name" per se, but I use Ashoka as my username on here and OKP, just to have something to differentiate from my username elsewhere which is generally my fursona's name. Mostly wanted something different even if it's really just a few syllables that don't particularly mean anything specific. I agree with the idea that mostly theriotypes wouldn't have a name in the human sense of the word. Like, my lynx and fox are just me so they have my name. (My vampirekin type and fictotype are a bit different since they did/do have names, given in a past life and from source. But still essentially part of me, so I don't generally go by those names in person.) I do think that if my theriotypes did have a name of some form which others of the species used to identify them, it would be something like their scent or appearance-related to distinguish them from others. Animals are much more physically sense-based than humans. (hopefully this is understandable the way I wrote it)

I think I relate a lot to what @WereKitty said in that I cannot, in good faith, have ever called myself human. I remember being 7 maybe? Curling up like a dog, actually hating the length of my hind legs because they didn't tuck neatly into my body. I can't even deny that I experienced honest to gd species dysphoria as a pup, and I didn't even have the words to explain it back then, but that was most of the reason why I didn't verbalize it until I was an adult really. I've experienced strong, unrelenting, sometimes euphoric shifts throughout my life, and feelings like those don't just come from nowhere. I feel strongly that I am just innately a wolf, however non-literal that needs to be for someone else to understand it. I feel so strongly that I cannot really ignore it. I would legitimately struggle to do so, much in the way that I would struggle to just ignore other integral parts of my identity.

I agree with OP about the complexity of identity. For me there's a lot of complexity with this question, as I'm a firm believer that every facet of one's identity is influenced by multiple of both outer and inner factors, ranging from one's upbringing and their stage of life to mental illness and other identity features. My identity as a fox has equal chance of being independent of anything else and a certainty no matter what just as much as it has a chance of being caused by my childhood pets, the media I grew up with and their portrayals of the species, or even the fact that foxes were the first uncommon wild animal I saw in person. The general being a therian is the same way for me, where it's hard to pin down one specific thing that I could point to as a cause or influence.

One big factor I often think of, though, is my autism and anxiety combo. Foxes are small/medium predators that are extremely flighty and skittish, as I am. My behaviors, my mannerisms, they all would be completely normal were I in the body of a fox or some other similar species. Often times, people only need a reminder of a nudge to connect the dots and associate me with foxes. My own family and mate have made connections where I hadn't yet, such as my body language and vocalizations I make when I'm not masking around them. Things that are instinctual and normal to me give others a specific impression in such a way that they think of an animal like the kind I secretly identify as before they think of my known mental conditions.

Of course, I say this with the knowledge it looks like I'm just being an autistic wildlife lover, but I also don't see everyone else like this identifying differently. I've met a number of other wildlifers in college, in online spaces, and in person, and it's rare for them to identify or even see themselves as another species. In these groups, I've only met a handful of furries, which makes me think it's not even for a lack of the right words to describe it. I also have looked into autism and anxiety and the different ways it shows and affects those with it (to better learn about myself) and there's a number of things I do that don't fit. Whether that's therianthropy or more research needing to be done to better understand autistic individuals, I don't know, but I think all of this put together paints the picture of my autism and therianthropy overlapping, but being separate things.

All this to say that from a wholly practical standpoint, ignoring spiritual theories, I do think my therianthropy is in some way innate and a part of my core self and its own thing. If it isn't, then it's most likely an offshoot of my autism, even though a good chunk of it doesn't align with that theory.

Focusing on the spiritual side of things, I personally feel this innate therianthropy of mine is my soul being that of a fox's. How exactly a fox soul got into a human body, I doubt I'll ever know. I don't think it's anything to do with past lives, I personally don't have any memories and don't think I ever will, if I even have past lives at all. I also don't discern or feel any difference in the human and animal parts of my core self, if I even have both and am not simply a fox that knows how to be human, so I don't think it's me having both a human and animal soul either. My therianthropy is also just too long-term and innate to my core self to be a walk-in (and my earlier point about not feeling any kind of separation between them). I haven't really heard or thought of any possibilities to explain how I got this way spiritually other than my soul simply being an animal's.