Word of the month: quadrober

In 2009, a time that now seems innocent and carefree, Lemonday, the now-forgotten but once-popular hipster band from Krasnoyarsk, had a song with the quirky line: ‘Put an animal's head on your head, go out in the costume of a naked animal.’ It’s unclear whether this is directly connected to the song, but at around the same time, the music correspondents of one highly intellectual Moscow publication who went by the names ‘Horse’ and ‘Chicken’ would literally attend events wearing the corresponding headgear. It was around this time that the phenomenon of quadrobics (or ‘quadrobing’)—moving about on all fours in imitation of animals as a form of sport or fitness activity—emerged. In 2008, Japanese athlete Kenichi Ito, also known as the ‘Monkey Man’, set a world record for running 100 meters on all fours. However, over the years, this unusual athletic oddity has shifted into being something more complex, becoming popular among subculture groups and, in a sense, threatening a dehumanization of the younger generation by blurring the lines between human and animal behavior. Quadrobers differ from other animal-obsessed subcultures (like furries or therianthropes) by focussing on movement over identity, making it a distinct but complicated phenomenon.

In general, any social phenomenon can be considered fully formed and established when it meets two conditions: it must attract the attention of the authorities, and Viktor Pelevin must write about it. This has already happened with quadrobics—the subculture is being considered for a legal ban (at least in Russia), and Pelevin's new novel, which will be released on 3 October 2024, contains a scene where the writer-protagonist nails all twenty-five of his novels to the wall, rubs them with onions and sausages, then puts a leash on his naked lover—a literary critic—and makes her bark at the books.

But let's leave these fantasies to the author's conscience and take a brief look at the history of quadrobics. Elements of this activity, before evolving into its current form of extreme amusement, have appeared everywhere. For instance, two thousand years ago, the ancient Chinese physician Hua Tuo invented the ‘Five Animal Play’ exercises, in which a person would successively imitate a bear, tiger, deer, monkey (likely where Kenichi Ito got his inspiration from), and bird. In addition, retailers have long used the playful marketing tactic of sending people dressed in furry cow or crocodile costumes to roam the streets and grab shoppers’ attention—indeed, the Kazakh film Tale of the Pink Rabbit explores this topic. Undoubtedly, Iggy Pop can be considered a prime example of a quadrober, occasionally performing with a horse's tail attached to his jeans, and his song ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ requires no further explanation.

But even within this logic, Iggy was merely a plagiarist if we consider Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 1915 poem ‘This Is How I Became a Dog’. Soviet culture was generally deeply infused with images of people turning into or interacting with animals, ranging from the animated Mowgli to the sci-fi film Ichthyander, which is about a man with amphibious traits. In this context, special attention should be paid to a rather eerie 1960 recording where the patriarch of juvenile literature, Korney Chukovsky, literally forces children to imitate animals. It illustrates how animalistic behavior was sometimes used in Soviet education not only for entertainment but also to teach.

Be that as it may, let us leave the discussion of the potential dangers of quadrobics to the development of a child's personality to the psychologists, lawyers, and sports trauma specialists. In this regard, we will only note one amusing ideological inconsistency.

Conservative traditionalist thinkers, in particular, actively oppose quadrobics, seeing it as yet another form of posthumanism, claiming that modern man has already learned to change genders and is now ready to abandon human form altogether. But it depends on your perspective, for quadrobics can just as easily be seen as a return to ancient, archaic, and deeply traditional layers of consciousness with their animism and totemic beliefs. And if the conservatives are so eager to plunge humanity into the depths of the past, they must account for the fact that this path may lead slightly deeper than they would prefer.

In reality, the absence of ‘normal’ human role models for children speaks much more about the state of the adult world. If this void persists, and worthy adult role models don’t emerge soon, imitating mammals and birds may not be the only thing we see. In the future, we might witness a trend toward insects (echoing Bosch or Kafka's Metamorphosis) and further still toward inanimate nature and atmospheric phenomena—especially considering that a subculture called ‘snowflakes’ (for hyper-sensitive and intolerant human beings) has already existed for several years.