Genetics had managed to successfully give human traits to animals.  It started out with a limb or two on lab mice.  Eventually, they transformed all limbs into human ones, albeit still with animal fur.  Some tweaks managed to get the rest of their body to also take the shape of a human's and maintain their fur just like they did with the limbs.  The last stage required more rigorous experimentation, for the genes that produce the human brain had the tendency to also cause brain cancer, and they had to find the right mix that still allowed brain growth while inhibiting this tendency.  What they would create, though, was not a human brain, but what the animal's brain would be like if it developed in the same way as a human's.  They retained their instincts, or at least as far as they could without compromising for the higher degree of cognitive ability.  For animals already with a social structure, this did little, but for the solitary ones, this made their territorial tendencies much more difficult to deal with, for now, they could strategize and prepare for intruders into their space.  Then, they decided they would instead attempt to appeal to the creatures' ability to reason, and this seemed to temper their instincts.

	With such great success in creating what was effectively animal people, they took their process to a larger scale and transformed a great array of animals all in the same environment to see how they would interact with each other and their environment.  This took place in a biosphere in order to have a large enclosed space suitable for testing several creatures at once without affecting the larger environment.  They did not expect much, since their process could not make social abilities appear where there were none, and there was also the issue of what to do with the species that ate meat.  It figured that the ability to reason worked on them as well, and they could be made to cooperate with prey species as long as they were given another source of meat.  In order to avoid later philosophical issues that they were sure would arise from eating their feral brethren, they got assistance from another breakthrough that could grow meat from cellular cultures instead of growing the whole animal.  They could now feed their meat eaters and never have any issues.

	These first "furry" communities eventually came to be integrated into human society, as they learned the ability to make their own technologies and develop their own ideas.  The process that created them was then taken into the wild and more communities were created that also came to interact with human ones.  Soon, humans came to share their civilization with human animal hybrids, which at first reflected the local population of wild animals, but eventually, as the populations mixed further, hybrids from around the world came to share the same space, and pretty much any kind of hybrid species could be seen in most places.

	Interspecies relationships were hard to accomplish, since the process did not alter reproductive capabilities in any way, and regardless of the matter they were shaped like humans, their DNA was still too different to be compatible with each other.  Their ability to show affection for each other, though, was able to overcome this barrier and such relationships came to be accepted.  Eventually, a process was developed where the DNA of either parent could be used to create an embryo with random sex and either of the two parent's species.

	The world thus came to have a civilization consisting of a mix of humans and furries, though some humans came to wonder if the process could be done in reverse to give humans animal traits the same way that they gave animals human traits.  With some gene therapy involving the established hybrids created by the original process, they could indeed transform humans into the same hybrids as what now existed.  While there are plenty that are willing to undergo the process, not all humans were interested, and they remain a regular feature of society as a whole.  They happily share their world with the furries, although they are content with staying human.