Kāma is one of the four aims of life.

Hindu thought names four aims of a human life, the puruṣārthas. Pleasure is one of them. Not a weakness to be forgiven, not a concession to the body, but one of the four things a life is for, alongside duty, prosperity and liberation.

The classical texts ask that kāma be pursued in harmony with dharma, and in its right season of life. A tail, worn with someone you love, is about as dharmic as kāma gets.

There is a whole literature of it, the kāmaśāstra, and its most famous book was written by a scholar, Vātsyāyana, as a serious treatise, probably in the third century. It is mostly about how to live well as a cultivated person, and only partly about the part everyone has heard of.

Vātsyāyana sorted lovers by animal, according to size, about seventeen hundred years before we did. He then counts the pairings, three equal and six unequal, and says that the equal ones are best.

So do we. Start with the one that fits.

In the Sundara Kāṇḍa, the “beautiful book” of the Rāmāyaṇa, Hanumān goes to Laṅkā to find Sītā and is caught. Rāvaṇa decides that the worst thing he can do to a monkey is to set his tail on fire. His men wrap the tail in cloth, soak it in oil and light it.

It is a mistake. Hanumān leaps from roof to roof with his tail burning and sets the whole city alight.

In Vālmīki, Hanumān simply grows as they wrap him. In Tulsidas’s Rāmcaritmānas, the version most people know, his tail grew longer and longer as they wrapped it, until Laṅkā ran out of cloth, ghee and oil. Ours stops at 28″.

The cow is sacred: Kāmadhenu, the cow of plenty, gives whatever is asked of her, and many Hindus will not eat beef or wear leather. Ahiṃsā, not harming living things, runs through the whole tradition.

So, plainly: no cow was involved in anything we make. The fur is synthetic, the plush is synthetic, and the shark is not a shark.

In a Hindu temple a tail can be holy. The cāmara, a whisk made from the tail of a yak, is waved before the deity during worship and over kings on their thrones: an emblem of royalty and of the divine, painted beside gods in a thousand temple carvings.

We do not suggest that our tails be used this way. We only note that, in the tradition, a tail in the presence of the gods is an honor, not an insult.

The demon king Hiraṇyakaśipu had a boon that he could not be killed by man or beast, indoors or outdoors, by day or by night, on the ground or in the air, by any weapon. He thought himself immortal.

Viṣṇu came as Narasiṁha, half man and half lion, neither one nor the other. He took the king at twilight, on the threshold of his palace, on his own lap, and killed him with his claws.

It is the greatest loophole in religious literature. We mention it because a tradition in which God himself reads the small print that carefully will not be troubled by a tail.

At Khajuraho, in central India, the Chandela kings built temples around a thousand years ago whose outside walls are covered with lovers, in stone, in every arrangement. At Konark, on the coast of Odisha, the thirteenth-century Sun Temple does the same.

These are not brothels. They are temples, on the outer walls of holy buildings, carved by the best sculptors of their time, and pilgrims still walk past them to pray. A tradition that put that on its temples will forgive a tail.