Well, it appears as if I've finally decided to sign up and become active on this subreddit. I've been lurking and reading the things you guys have been posting for a while now but I never mustered up the courage to establish contact or give my two cents about certain topics. But mainly, I just wanted to get it all 'out there' and this place seemed like the best place for it.

But I should probably introduce myself somewhat first (edited out some unnecesarry stuff):

Ever since I was a small child there were animals in my life in one way or another, since I grew up around them (horses, cows, pigs, chickens, dogs, cats, mice, hamsters, lizards, spiders, snakes, frogs...you name it) and I've always been very fond of those animals and always felt very comfortable around them; even more comfortable than I was feeling around humans. But when I entered my teenage years, I noticed that certain thoughts and fantasies kept on creeping into my mind and I wasn't able to shake them off. I was of course confused and frightened by those thoughts and feelings, I never noticed before. But that was nothing compared to the shame I was experiencing at that time. I knew my parent's opinion about zoophilia/bestiality and hearing about local sadists, which raped and killed horses made me feel incredibly ashamed of myself. I thought that one day, I would turn into such a monster as well and I never spoke to anyone about it, fearing that they would call me 'sick in the head' or send me to a psychiatric hospital. The fact that my family decided to get a dog didn't really help. Hating and feeling ashamed of myself, I started to ignore him completely. I acted like he doesn't exist and wasn't kind to him in any sense of the word. I didn't even call him by his name; instead I just refered to him as 'dog'. After a while I was able to more or less completely repress my feelings and stopped thinking about it altogether for the years that followed.

Then a few months ago and after a lot of soul searching, I was finally able to come to terms with the fact that I'm attracted to animals. But with that came the desire to talk to someone about it, which brings me here. After someone directed me to this subreddit, I started to lurk and contemplate about signing up to reddit as well. I don't know why it took me this long to create an account (maybe it was fear), but now I finally did it. I'm still not quite sure whether or not I'm going to regret this decision, since I'm little paranoid when it comes to this subject.

In any case, I just wanted to introduce myself and say 'hello' to everyone, as well as apologize if this sort of introduction isn't wanted around here.