There is also those of us on another plane entirely: we who own farms and need a ranch hand to help keep up with all the chores. I've done it alone for close to a decade now, and only lately have I begun learning a hard lesson that this will be unsustainable if I keep on the way I'm going. From clearing and fencing acreage, to pouring concrete and welding, to framing and roofing a house, to bottle feeding calves and raising up a pack of dogs, I've come a lot further in the last several years than most people ever could've gotten -- and I've done it entirely alone. An army of one. I'm often inundated with projects, things to build/fix out here plus farm chores on top of those. It'd be awful nice to strap on tools with a fellow handy zoo. Its tough working a job and one-manning a farm alone. Hell, its tough making ribald sex jokes all day to just the dogs or the wall I'm framing, har har. I should've started this place with someone years back instead of going it alone all this time. Nowadays I'd love to meet a friend good with his hands and with a construction background of his own, as a farm is no shortage of things needing attention. Living out here, owning land and animals, its a work/life balance all its own. Failing that, even just somebody with an aptitude for it, minus the tools and experience. Somebody interested in trades, who can follow along and learn what I can teach.
Unlikely as it is that I'll ever find that zoo, I'd take a tenant for the apartment I'm renovating half my house into. I'll be on the hunt for that sometime next year as well.
Agreed strongly with Pes, the men who use dogs as a means to a woman's pussy (and never have their own sex, with their own dogs) have no business calling themselves zoos. That shoe doesn't fit their foot. And I feel obligated to put this in, as Rexandme & Co often touch on this but haven't fully articulated it here (likely because they've already had to expound on it 100x elsewhere) : one recurring thorn we're irked by in the non-owner population is the perception that y'all have shirked the responsibilities of having an animal but still want to enjoy the fruits of it. To us, this comes off as nonowners wanting to have their cake and eat it too. A nonowner who finds someone willing to share, in effect, gets a windfall; all the perks without any of the drawbacks. If we share, you get casual relations with someone else's animal without having made the sacrifices, commitments, borne the struggles of ownership on your own. You get off free in so many ways, while we pay in risk and all the aforementioned to make (and keep) our ownerships reality. A nonowner has a fling and goes home back to his cozy fun carefree city life after a romp in the country with us and ours, while we're holding the bag, keeping up all the work that it takes to have this. That kind of easy-come, easy-go rubs a lot of us wrong. Nothing rankles an owner faster than the thirsty folks wanting something for nothing with an animal we're emotionally, financially, sacrificially invested in, a partner we wrapped and entwined our very lives with. Its simply not something you can understand til you've done it, like we have.
That said, it ain't all doom and gloom either. The thing can be done right, too. Friends can be made in good faith and in the correct way, as certain lines of yours read when I read between 'em. You're in the right headspace, or a better one than most anyway. You're open-minded in your approach and asking the right kind of question, thinking in some of the right ways. I used to host public, purely platonic M&Gs in Austin in the BF years, and I will again eventually. We'd go out for lunch or dinner as a small group and try to meet people we meshed well with. M&Gs (at least mine) were emphatically NOT about sex, period. I don't do swinger hookups or dog swaps or whatever the hell. That ain't me. I came up in this all the way back to the pre-BF era when it was Midnitecrow PLF and Bianca. Call me a greymuzzle, I've been around a long time. I've watched the empires rise and fall. I went off and did my own thing, got where I am alone. Now I'm on a search to make a genuine connection with a small group, close-knit, the way it used to be in the 90s back before BF, Snakething and the leaks, and all that nonsense.
M&Gs aren't about finding dogs to swap. They're about safely being social and rubbing elbows in a normal way with our own brethren. I've met a handful of zoos irl, and will continue taking the risk in sensible ways according to my system of best practices, because I'm ever-deterimined as some of you are to establish real community. But I didn't own land at the time, just had foster dogs (yes I moonlight in shelter work), and many of my attendees didn't own either, so sharing animals didn't even come up in our M&Gs. I'm still not sure how and when exactly I'll broach the sharing of mine now, but I posit that sharing isn't out of the question for someone who puts the time in becoming a good friend of yours, entirely on its own merit outside and beyond zoophilia. Sharing between two people who've invested in becoming good, close-knit friends by the more old-fashioned tried & true ways, like those described above, ie. having commonality, spending time working and playing (nonsexually) together, yes, it can be done. A real friend goes a long way bridging that gap between an owner and a non. Don't count on it, and it won't happen often. But it can flourish when the conditions are right between people who found friendship first, aligned the gears and meshed well in life off the forums.
So be prepared to factor in ordinary human commonality and compatibility, too. That's what all those thirsty throngs completely skip over. It looks as though it never even occurs to them to find a normal friend here first. Some need a refresher that the pool of potential friends is tiny. There aren't many of us the world over, so the chances two people who happen to be zoos will have anything else in common are that much slimmer. Zoos thrown together may find they have nothing else in common outside zoophilia, and a friendship cannot sustain on zoophilia alone. It goes nowhere, just peters out without ever having gotten off the ground. That one happens all the time. The two people have to like some of the same things, share some of the same background and life experiences. We each need some overlap outside of this to make a friend. That's where it begins.
So us owners can be looking for all sorts of things, but one thing is certain to all: trust is crucial. Being able to trust someone with your life, your life's work, your animal's lives, all of it -- the two of you are, in effect, putting your lives in each other's hands. Trust is key, and its no small thing to earn. So of course, yes, we tend to more readily trust fellow owners, for reasons that should be obvious: they've made the same sacrifices, same commitments, have everything of equal value to be lost. They bring the same thing to the table -- and it ain't just another knot to tie or mare pussy to eat: its two owners being able to approach on the same plane. We know all that zoophilia is, and all that it isn't. We're putting up the same collateral, taking the same plunge into a risk pool with our own kind. That isn't an understanding the non-owners can have. They haven't walked in the shoes yet, so they're not capable of approaching us on an equal plane.
Closing, my advice is to concentrate on making friends in the usual way first. A good first and second step are posting and PMs, respectively. Having a post history gives us an understanding who's who. Striking up threads with people in PMs is a great way to advance to the next step and delve into a person you find interesting, get to know each other. To explore the other's mind, to ask questions we're reluctant to on the public forum, to really understand who's at the other end. When you can walk away from that with the warm fuzzies, it progresses to M&Gs or 1:1 meetings irl. And with commonality and trust, friendship follows. There are no shortcuts. Or none safe and worth taking.
