Dogpatch Press

Furry Family Ofrenda on VRchat

It seems appropriate to write about losing things and carrying on, after a doomful week in America…

Hydraheads, an artist in Canada, is a player of Flight Rising, “a social web-based activity site featuring dragon breeding, adventuring, combat, and collecting.” You get your own clan of dragons and work with other clans. It’s more than solo fun, it was also a family connection. Hydraheads joins Dogpatch Press with a story:

Recently, Flight Rising closed my own account and my deceased mum’s account. I adopted and inherited from her before she passed.

It happened when someone attempted to hack in, and I couldn’t reset my password, so I started a trouble ticket and they investigated. They closed my account and hers, because they considered it an unfair advantage in the game to have two accounts. I had been active on both, and it’s against their TOS.

I appealed anyways, because I didn’t really want to lose my mum’s account or dragons she gave me; but you can’t exactly merge accounts or transfer progen dragons. My appeal was denied and I permanently lost both. They issued half-hearted condolences to my mum and said I could start a new account. It stung, mainly because I used her account to set it up as a comforting memorial for myself. We used to play it together and it was our thing.

This made me recognize and reflect on how furries on a wide scale put importance on and have tendencies to memorialize our lost members, friends and family, in ways that I think are uniquely touching. It says so much about how we value each other and are connected. Community ties can be so widespread through a single furry, and make support for one another when facing mortality… The more I look, it’s everywhere. A lot of us live very digitally. For some furries that were more isolated, this was their life. Maybe it was their only way to participate in the fandom.

Be it shrines on Second Life, or VRchat, obituary posts, or the ∞ of Furaffinity (RIP Dragoneer), you can see the outpour of friends and strangers coming together for someone like Dogbomb when they pass, and the continued memory for furs like them kept alive by the rest of us. It’s a beautiful thing.

Furry Family Ofrenda on VRchat

Losing an important account like that says something about the difference between corporate owned spaces, and things we make and own. Having a choice of how to keep things private also brings to mind an experience for Patch O’Furr:

Go back 5 years, when my girlfriend then brought me into her favorite things, before I brought her into mine. She helped found a huge monthly Bike Party event years before I met her. It brings 1000 people to the street on festive lit-up bicycles, like a rave on wheels, with music speakers on trailers, and dance party stops in special places. We started going together, and I figured out how to mount a fursuit head on my bike handlebars and ride in partial suit or bring a full suit on a trailer for the stops. Then she joined me for street fursuiting events. She even volunteered to be a helper and dressed fabulously for our furry contingent at San Francisco Pride, and fit perfectly as a non-furry.

In 2021, she died, and hundreds of people rode bikes for her memorial. Only a few dozen private furry followers got to read about it and see our photos together, because I wanted to keep it personal.

Around then, there was a glitch with this news site. I’m not the admin and it’s purposely kept minimal, like an old-school paper zine put on the web. The glitch wasn’t immediately solveable and I was busy. Then an insistent stranger who claimed tech expertise got upset that I wasn’t personally fixing it immediately, talking down to me without knowing how the site was set up. They assumed I was admin and had the latest install of WordPress instead of a version with a legacy theme on purpose, which couldn’t accommodate what they expected. Since I wasn’t fixing things right away, this person called in friends and led an online harassment dogpile campaign while I was busy helping my girlfriend’s mom. As hate posts poured on, I wasn’t looking. I was saying goodbye with her family at the edge of the San Francisco Bay closest to where she grew up, and scattering her ashes on the water.

Her memorial was huge on the street, but it stayed purely for those involved because I wanted it to stay private. Now the bike party runs every month and everyone there is carrying on for her. I’ll keep photos to myself, except this one was us…

Till next time, LA pic.twitter.com/oUvm6I1x0U

— [adult swim] (@adultswim) November 17, 2019

Hydraheads adds:

Sorry to hear about your girlfriend, goodness. It’s people like them that are still a part of our community by extension, even if they weren’t a furry, they were loved among and by furries. My mum thought furries were cool AF, even if she didn’t fully understand it, haha, but she was so supportive too.

That’s beautiful despite the circumstances occurring, I’m genuinely relieved that your IRL friends could do that for you to preserve her memory. And I like where this topic is going, about perseverance and strength, and trying to find and make those things in the shadow of uncertainty that comes after death. A friend shared this one with me and it has helped me cope: “When someone you love passes away, the things they leave behind or the qualities you remember them by are now gifted to you, and become your qualities. That’s how they live on through us.”

We continue to try and live and honor those things and carry forward through bad times. With your personal story about your girlfriend, it’s important that we ourselves as a community recognize the reach we have to one another. Good and bad. Whether our family and friends were furry or not. They were a support for you alongside and part of that network or our community too.

Considering the elections and what everyone is now facing going forward in America, more than ever we need the strength of each other, and the memories we hold of each other helps to propel us towards the vision and keep our focus. The importance of why and who we stay strong for. Ourselves, our family. For those ahead and after us, and in honor for those that have already departed.

One of the best keepers of memories is Changa, who is deeply involved on VRChat with the Furality event, and founded the Furry Family Ofrenda. Since 2020, it has collected memories of departed fandom members to view with a Dia de los Muertos theme.

Have you ever had a close call with death, and did it make you think about instructions for what to do when the time comes? If you have a very active life online and with a fursona, should your identities be remembered all together, or kept separate just for those in the know?

Like the article? These take hard work. For more free furry news, follow on Twitter or support not-for-profit Dogpatch Press on Patreon. Want to get involved? Try these subreddits: r/furrydiscuss for news or r/waginheaven for the best of the community. Or send guest writing here. (Content Policy.)

It harms pets too, never overlook animal abuse as a red flag.

In 2018, I told Dizzy he shouldn’t come to a furry party at a club in San Francisco. I was one of the organizers who keeps an eye on who is coming. He was a soft-looking guy who acted persistently pitiful about it, so I let him know it wasn’t because of something I knew he did, or any personal issue. It was for caution and to keep things harmonious, and there were other events he could go to. If he had a bad reputation, he could change it by doing good at other ones. I just wasn’t going to be pliable to begging for pity. If you don’t respect someone’s “no”, that’s a red flag itself.

To my confidential knowledge, the caution was because of multiple people tipping me to beware of someone abusive who they were uncomfortable being around, who they said would try manipulating for sympathy.

A few years before this, some other manipulation pulled me in to being a victim of a con artist. (He was judged liable for fraud and elder abuse after I had to defend whistleblower retaliation, cross-sue and beat him to stop it, winning a $32,000 judgement. When people sue me for defamation, I don’t settle and I bankrupt them.) The con artist was a monster with a lot of power over others, who were viciously whipped up against me for reporting abuse by their then-trusted manipulator. The experience of being the only person to point at The Emperor’s New Clothes and fighting for vindication made it easy to say no to Dizzy, stay firm, and watch what happened.

We had no more contact until it just came up again. Now I see things got worse after 2018 for Dizzy (AKA Hushpuppy, real name Brooks Buncher). A lot of Beware evidence was gathered by other people and got him removed from many groups. An elder abuse lawsuit also comes up and a TV news report that interviews him about being homeless in San Jose, CA. There’s allegations of rape including pets. Then he was charged with serial domestic violence causing the 2022 murder of a furry named Fin, who I had no idea existed until now.

One source talked to me about having an experience in common with many others, with being convinced into sex by Dizzy and then pressured and disturbed by possessiveness. It involved a super sketchy abandoned house and “hardcore guilt tripping rants”:

I was both surprised and not surprised when I saw the murder charges, and it seems like a lot of people who knew him had similar reactions. Dude is crazy and the venn diagram of domestic abusers, zoophiles, and rapists is basically a circle.

I don’t know how many people knew or tried to help Fin, but even many police and hospital visits didn’t do it. It’s so disturbing and sad. Maybe that doesn’t mean to blame the furry community for failure, but it reminds me — I never see helpful action from anyone who reacts to Bewares with counter-complaints about terms like “witch hunt” — which I see a lot when trying to report patterns of behavior. Superficial social media often has knee-jerk reactions to single offenses that may be mischaracterized, but petty offenses are different from allegations of abuse. Patterns is a good word, because there are often many victims before an abuser is caught once. It’s very helpful to apply a little pattern recognition, which is often dishonestly omitted from complaints about “witch hunts”. I will never trust anyone who presents callouts as a problem with false equivalence to abuse.

Some people tried to do something about an abuser here, but not enough. Now the least I can do is tell what happened and pay respects to Fin.

I’m sick of organizers who don’t take charge of supporting more than escapist fun while they pass off decisions to police or others and say it’s not their job to judge. Actually it is. When you run a group, you can just tell someone “no”, then see if they respect it. Whether an organizer is even capable of saying “no” is a test of competence itself. I’m not talking about conventions taking liability, I’m talking about the pure social level and social fallacies about who is welcome.

Next: a nice story about memorializing.

Like the article? These take hard work. For more free furry news, follow on Twitter or support not-for-profit Dogpatch Press on Patreon. Want to get involved? Try these subreddits: r/furrydiscuss for news or r/waginheaven for the best of the community. Or send guest writing here. (Content Policy.)

Two arrested during preparation for a big party

On 9/26/2024, a popular furry event organizer (Frisky Hyena) and another group leader were arrested together for child sex crimes. They have been in jail without bond since then. Both had furry scene influence in the San Francisco Bay area, after Frisky relocated there from Las Vegas. This report features Steven “Frisky” Darling as the owner of Party Animals West (PAW), with an LLC registered in Nevada.

Frisky’s organization used a team of helpers to throw parties around the year, sometimes with rooms at conventions, or partnered with other furry brands or DJ’s. PAW also hosted a chat group of 1000 followers who would mobilize support across furry spaces. Their larger events would attract hundreds of paying attendees, using venues with professional light and sound, like a barcade chain with locations in several big cities. Many gave support without knowing Frisky’s secrets, but after he was jailed, his partner Scoop stepped in to play one of his surrogates for actions that are very controversial now.

For the last weekend of September, supporters were looking forward to a huge occasion in San Francisco. Folsom Street Fair would draw hundreds of thousands for kink-themed activities, including many furries to the PAW barcade party on 9/29/2024. As it approached, on 9/27/2024, Frisky’s surrogate Scoop decided to tell the PAW chat group that Frisky’s phone was broken and he couldn’t answer. His accounts were allegedly accessed for impersonation messages to tell close contacts he was taking a break.

Frisky has a slew of serious charges with a long history

Frisky’s surrogates knew, and weren’t telling, that he was jailed the day before on charges of:

• Sodomy with person under 16
• Oral copulation with person under 16
• Lewd Act Upon A Child
• Penetration By Foreign Object: (V) Under 16
• Contribute To The Delinquency Of A Minor
• Arranging a Meeting with a Child for Lewd Purposes
• Attempting to Contact Minor w/Intent to Commit Offense
• Distribution or Exhibition of Lewd Material to a Minor (with Prior)

After keeping people in the dark to take support for Frisky’s event, over the next month, the arrest news started to circulate. It shocked many, but others were upset that it was being reported at all (neglecting aid for victims to come forward). If that isn’t messy enough, hindsight and connecting dots finds a history of red flags, where sources report complaints were suppressed in Las Vegas for a long time until history repeated in San Francisco.

Since 2017, complaints went without action even from the police

In Las Vegas, Frisky had built a reputation of unreliability and failing to pay debts, until relocating to California to resume parties there. Around 2017, an apartment sharing debacle led to discovering illegal media on devices Frisky kept there. He was known for preying on minors, but reports to police in Las Vegas had no results. Allegations have come out about furry groups enabling this situation by favoring cliquish friends.

More recently in the SF Bay Area, details of the arrests match a situation of risky people being allowed in groups, putting all members at risk while certain organizers shift blame and act like others should do their job for their meets. The problem started with letting risky people in at all especially after being warned and overruling it. These negligents have a chronic history of sympathy for offenders, rejecting responsibility and overlooking problems until police intervene, if ever. This reporter has been experiencing that behavior since 2018 while negligents turn their backs on protecting their groups.

Party promo – lives were ruined.

Suppression surrounded Frisky’s arrest for a month to keep his PAW organization operating, instead of accepting that it’s fatal to things under his name. Some people did work against the in-group pressure. Las Vegas Fur Con (LVFC), other events, performers, and associates ended their relationships. Finally, there was a grudging statement about dissolving PAW from operators like Scoop whose credibility was lost.

How soon could this have been stopped? Abuse might have been prevented if complaints were heard and leaders took responsibility. It could have been easier to prevent at the gate instead of trying to fix it after. We don’t yet know the extent of the problem, with multiple offenders and ties to other suspicious people. The whole situation has legal action pending, with sensitivity about it being undermined on behalf of offenders and helping them to escape consequences again. Therefore some information is protected for security and this report is edited to be a general summary.

Furry space can be for predators to access victims, and leaders to prioritize selfish fun over ruined lives, with negligence about red flags. Or…

You can take action

If you have any information about abuse in the community, or enabling by organizers, and are reluctant to come forward without confidentiality — Dogpatch Press has an established role of working with whistleblowers, making legal privilege from being compelled to disclose private information. That gives ability to report what others can’t. Even if police aren’t helpful, solutions may start with carefully documenting what’s suppressed. (Be careful, because even people who slept with Frisky didn’t know about problems made worse by leaders suppressing things.)

Police don’t manage your community. YOU DO. Protecting it doesn’t have to wait for years of processing while suppression makes things worse, and there is no entitlement to invitation into its spaces. It can be run with care instead of making it so open that anything can crawl in.

To understand harmful management patterns, also check the recent article about Garden State Fur the Weekend and what it welcomed in.

Some sources

PAW chat group: now closed (a full export is on file.)

https://ghostarchive.org/archive/BEg4f

https://archive.ph/Mrd1n

Like the article? These take hard work. For more free furry news, follow on Twitter or support not-for-profit Dogpatch Press on Patreon. Want to get involved? Try these subreddits: r/furrydiscuss for news or r/waginheaven for the best of the community. Or send guest writing here. (Content Policy.)

After a mismanagement crisis was excused with PR statements, New Jersey furries are sick of more deception from the same broken leadership. 

Garden State Fur The Weekend was set to have their first convention in May 2024, but in January, their organization was rocked by a staff revolt. It leaked out with a Dogpatch Press report — Grassroots action: Leadership changes and weeding out hate at Garden State Fur The Weekend. The inside story can now be told in more depth, because cautious community members who stayed quiet before have come forward to ask for new reporting. GSFTW’s own PR person quit and reports being lied to. Numerous sources with deep involvement spoke to Dogpatch Press about how a chronic problem was “fixed” by moving it higher:

Many sources spoke on condition of whistleblower privacy.

Trouble before launch

The mismanagement was insufferable, especially by the con Chair, Dashing Fox. Dashing and his sympathetic board were enabling nazi-furries who infested GSFTW chat groups, like the Furry Raiders, with their child-preying leader Foxler in Colorado. The infestation got nothing but excuses. Who were these assholes coming in from outside and making themselves at home, like they had permission to make the place their doormat or were secretly in charge?

It was like that from the beginning. GSFTW was registered in February 2020. In April 2020, Dashing tried to put Foxler’s right-hand man Aeveirra on staff. Dashing was warned of their toxic nature by a vigilant staffer who understood the security risk. A month later, he still went on the Furry Raiders podcast to promote the con, as if he was bent on making a shit magnet for the worst of the community. The podcast blatantly named him a friend of Aeveirra.

Warned in April, ignored in May during con startup. The corruption was baked in since 2020 and persisted for 4 years with numerous instances of ignoring it.

The problem wasn’t drama over petty differences or “politics”. These nazifurs are a security threat to anything they touch, with a long history of sabotage and crime at cons. January’s report linked evidence of their malice like this:

• Had a secret plot to bring Proud Boys street violence to Midwest Furfest 2019, forcing MFF to head it off with bans.
• Ardently defended sex-offending friends, causing multiple arrests with conviction for witness intimidation and retaliation at this reporter.
• Publicly embarrassed Anthrocon with political hate symbols in the fursuit parade, forcing AC to make new policies to prevent repeats.
• Funded Free Fur All, the nazifur convention, which fell apart due to competing factions having to put up with each other’s insufferable trolling.
• Free Fur All’s mission was to host “canceled” people like the Confederate Fursuiter; main suspect in the chemical attack on MFF that hospitalized 19.
• Schemed for control of regular furry groups and cons, and abused power when they got it, driving away the real community.

This threat pattern was openly documented since at least 2017. Dashing’s enabling for it irritated the community for years about meets he hosted, but it didn’t boil over until GSFTW launch was near. The pattern predicted future disaster, unless it was forced to change against resistance at the top.

The entire board is the problem

Who else stood in the way of change? Inside GSFTW, Dashing’s loyal board knew and enabled problems for years. Then they treated the Aeveirra incident as old news from 2020, while nazifurs kept making themselves at home under their watch.

This raised scrutiny on who some of the board members were; not New Jersey furries, but transplants from Megaplex in Florida, allegedly motivated against COVID masking after a board rift there.

COVID badly delayed many cons in 2020, so the Aeveirra incident wasn’t actually that distant. Isn’t that interesting timing to grab opportunity to start a con? It also wasn’t the only red flag about problematic people getting on staff; and there was more mismanagement concern than that.

Staff faced problems about money with budget numbers hidden, unlike at other cons run by the same staff. Money questions are extra shady when Dashing’s friend Aeveirra funded the Free Fur All nazifur con, a “spitecon” started after the founders failed bid to run an Oklahoma convention in 2020.

The purpose of GSFTW came with strangely competitive talk about taking the place of other furry groups and events, against the nature of nonprofit, volunteer-based fandom. (Below, Furrydelphia’s management talks about hostility by GSFTW.) But let’s return to January…

“The inaction of the board is deafening” — a staff ultimatum, walkout, and removal of Dashing.

Rifts about nazifurs grew with GSFTW management as staff attempted to get them to see reason, without success. This led to a January 10 staff ultimatum to remove Dashing and problem people. On January 11, the pressure forced the con to make a statement against nazifur activity. Evidently words weren’t backed by action. With the ultimatum ignored, on January 12, the Dealer’s Den team, Registration Dept. and others walked out. Here’s before and after messages from then by Hospitality lead Osiris Adustus:

At least 15 staff joined the revolt. One whistleblower says:

“Over the course of those few days, various people tied to the con and its leadership continued to tell on themselves, essentially handing us the evidence of who they really are. Given how GSFTW was able to somehow bounce back from that in such a short time frame… it gives the appearance they had people on standby or secretly had people on the downlow already and misled staff on who was who.”

The next day, January 13, the con was forced to act again, with registrations and money at stake. Now Dashing would step down as Chair, and be replaced by new chair Shy Matsi. Finally some nazi-furs were removed from chat groups (but not banned from the con). Dashing excused himself as being uninformed about them, and blamed sickness for resigning a day after a staff revolt.

Later in May, Dashing also blamed his Furry Raiders podcast appearance on “poor research”, which omits how it called him Aeveirra’s friend, and the warning he ignored about it from his own staff.

Dogpatch Press made many requests for comment after the revolt, and got a little PR and a lot of stonewalling. Dashing blew deadlines to respond. Despite serious misgivings, the January report put a charitable spin on the forced action, and did hard work to avoid harming the con and engage anyone willing to do better. GSFTW got back to business, as if benefit of the doubt is deserved for people who just learned that nazis are bad… (and need to keep learning, again and again)… Meanwhile, Dashing’s sickness excuse stayed the only official removal reason, at least until the coast was clear.

A month before launch, GSFTW changes from a nonprofit to a for-profit LLC — owned by Dashing — without comment. 

Why didn’t the con really fix things? In April, the step to “remove” Dashing was walked right back.

From April 2024, ownership makes Dashing the responsible public face in the open government record naming him.

What’s the point of switching to a for-profit LLC, besides making Dashing’s removal a revolving door for his ownership? Did anyone even catch on to it becoming the toy of someone who misused the community so badly? The switch was so close to launch in May, that hotel and travel plans would be done for many goers, so was this timed to suppress awareness and let them believe it was nonprofit, while diverting support to Dashing’s private benefit? We could ask, but GSFTW and Dashing have already been evasive.

The greasy gambit worked. In May, the launch proceeded. You may be thinking… did the con make some people happy? The average con-goer doesn’t scrutinize leadership when there’s fun to be had; but that low standard and PR about “new” leadership hides how a chronic problem continued with Dashing’s replacement Chair, Shy Matsi.

Evidently, Shy Matsi just played Dashing’s right hand. After Dashing had blown off questions and used the sickness excuse, he wasn’t too sick to be spotted in Con Ops, run main stage events, and be front and center at the closing ceremony.

Tweet by Zero, a deeply involved community organizer and con staffer.

Dashing publicly and openly resigned as Chair while citing his health as the reason, but remained as the CEO, contract holder, and de facto leader. Shy Matsi played a figurehead, a cardboard cutout for Dashing to stand behind while remaining in charge and protecting all of his problematic friends. They think they can take community support for granted by fooling you with a title switch!

Excuses from the puppet Chair: nazifurs can be LBGTQ too, so let them in?!

Shy Matsi does more ass-covering than just for Dashing. After a staff revolt and forced statements — after the con was over and it wasn’t even crucial time for PR — he proceeded to deflect responsibility, pile up excuses, and beg tolerance for alt-right trolls as if hateful malice just makes different opinions equal to the targets. It made the con PR about zero tolerance mean “except when they’re our friends, or use their identity to excuse their toxic beliefs and behavior”.

January 11, 2024: Official PR by con during staff revolt

May 8, 2024: Shy Matsi excuses alt-right hate by prevaricating.

Zero Jackal collected a Google doc of chat logs of trying to reason with Shy Matsi right after the con. (Full log images.) The chat was in a group of friends including community mods and con staffers who had worked with or known him for a very long time, but distanced over time as problems grew.

Several whistleblowers have discussed the long history of enabling before GSFTW existed:

“Shy Matsi has harbored nazis, far right extremists, and all sorts of other unsavory folks in this really fucked up mentality of “giving a home to everyone”. This insistence on ignoring issues and “just being nice” doesn’t work. Shy is wholly incapable of ever telling bad actors to go away. He’s repeatedly made excuses for awful people, or allowed people banned from local chats into furmeets, as to not be “mean”. I used to respect the guy but he enables this stuff. Locals who have known him for literally 2+ DECADES are cutting ties with him as he refuses to explain why.” — More logs collected from the mod chat:

Shy Matsi is of POC and LGBT identity. This raises eyebrows in the community in light of the enabling for threats towards POC and LGBT people, like the crimes and definition of “collaborator” in the January reporting.

Critics of the enabling include the targeted identities; and to underscore the incongruity of Shy’s collaboration, Dashing made conflict with other furry groups for being in support of Black Lives Matter, while spreading partisan political narratives against it. (Circa 2021):

Shy Matsi was even more than just an enabling friend of Dashing. They roomed together with another cause of complaints, an alt-right troll named W0nderdawg, a fellow meet host, making very personal corruption in handling of the problem.

The nazifurs they let in… who used GSFTW to put politics on Fox News.

After GSFTW did damage-control in January about removing nazifurs, security sent messages to several: W0nderdawg, Astral (a NY-based Furry Raider who waved a hate flag in Anthrocon’s parade), and Astral’s friend Peter. They were banned from the con chat, but not the con.

Astral and Peter were then photographed at the con. Not just attending, but being interviewed on Fox News. The Fox demographic has one relationship with furries: mocking them for anti-LGBT propaganda, including hoaxes about litter boxes to dehumanize them in “joke” form. Letting Fox use GSFTW for their entertainment would be like slamming yourself in a locker when you see a bully coming.

Below: Astral, his friend Peter, and a clip from a Fox News Jesse Watters show, where Peter declares: “Trump 2024 baby!”

A whistlebower claims “The Watters crew WAS tipped off about the con from an insider, but I’m told they just showed up and started filming with no press pass.” At least, that’s what staff would think when hit by surprise… but what if the GSFTW board secretly colluded with Fox?

The Fox News clip of Peter also shows Shy Matsi, the Chair, on his left near the con ballroom. Clearly the cameras weren’t hiding, press pass or not. They got comfortable to hang out. We know because Peter went on the notorious alt-right Kiwifarms hate forum to boast about how they interviewed him longer.

Besides helping Fox News push politics on the fandom, Peter says he brought many friends and did A/V work for GSFTW, and there he is with camera.

More problematic staff

Here’s a few staff who had been officially listed. Turbulent staff turnover, as you will see below, may or may not apply now — it’s hard to trust the con’s PR — the point is this was the quality of who was trusted to run this con at some point.

• Arctico, IT lead, spread inflammatory MAGA sentiments. GSFTW claimed Arctico didn’t show up for the job after this drew public criticism.
• Zade, DJ coordinator, who follows numerous nazifurs. A tipper says “I have no idea how this man has been allowed to remain socially in the fandom for as long as he has, despite being an overt racist and nazi apologist. His twitter is a cesspool.”

“We were lied to”: PR lead Pawsouls quit GSFTW, wished the work was for a “more deserving boss”

Pawsouls was PR staff in January, when contacted for comment by Dogpatch Press without much result while GSFTW did damage control. Whistleblowers had their own criticism: “Pawsouls constantly defends Dashing’s actions, attempting to sweep it under the rug, instead of addressing it. They were asked, had their chance to explain and didn’t…”

After the con, Pawsouls had a change of heart, and quit GSFTW with statements that shed light now:

May post-con tweets: (1) (2)

October tweet

This shows how staff goodwill would be misused by a non-transparent Board. Pawsouls followed up with gracious replies for this report:

“PR was told Dashing would be stepping away from a front-facing and leadership position, as he was recovering from mental and physical stressors and being in the hospital. Only for that to be twisted into him stepping back on stage, without confirmation from anyone that such a thing would be happening, which was then left for PR to handle blindly. And that’s not including having Fox News at con without PR Dept. approval or oversight. I know registration also wasn’t aware.

The sudden wave of changes a day or two before the con, and then during the con, was insane and we found disrespectful. I got into an argument with Dashing during the con, and the Board, about how it seems everything seemed to just done without following the con’s own CoC (which a fellow member of the PR team helped in writing). It was met with Dashing just stating excuses and throwing blame on me and my team.

At that point, my focus shifted into making sure my friends were safe during the con overall. A lot of staff were local furs I know and friends of mine. Which why when I left, a lot of staff left. I believe it’s almost all new people on staff now.”

It’s murky how Fox News even knew about a small, local, first-year con, and succeeded in filming there without a pass. Pawsouls says:

“In terms of approving them, that was left with the board. They seemed to know what was going on and didn’t notify anyone on staff.”

Who quit after the con in May, making a new staff collapse?

“To my knowledge, all of PR left, head of Reg, head of Dealer Den, original head of the gaming room, head of Security, multiple floating volunteers, and I believe one or two board members.”

Pawsouls was used by Dashing for diligent service, while under fire without quitting for personal interest so the con could happen with safety for friends. Some involved were critical of not getting support before, but Pawsouls didn’t have to come forward now about being misled, and do the same diligence in speaking for public interest. The candor is valued.

Budget and finance sketchiness raises questions

Lack of transparency has been a common whistleblower complaint. For example, staff requests for budgets were stonewalled, with instructions to provide Amazon wishlists for the board to pick what to approve, when every item was needed.

Some leaked discussion with Kiba, the GSFTW treasurer at the time:

Whistleblowers questioned the finances and official attendance, before and after con:

(Before) “If their first year is anything like similar cons, they’re looking at at least a $30,000 hotel contract, plus service charge and tax. Plus their AV needs, equipment, etc, they’re going to need at minimum 60k to get their event off the ground. Their reg is $65. That means they need almost a thousand people to make it happen. I don’t really see them getting that many folks. Same exact thing that happened to CCFC. That’s the problem with a lot of new cons. Eyes are bigger than their stomachs so to speak.”

(After) “Their numbers ain’t adding up. Nearly 1k attendees (but sure didn’t have that in person). They had to have had outside benefactors artificially boosting their reg numbers on paper and secretly funding the con so it wouldn’t go belly up. U said it yourself, Aevierra and Foxler are no strangers to propping cons up financially like Freefurall.”

Official attendance was 957, but there were claims about the con being empty, including the Saturday rave at peak of con. Is 957 accurate, and not inflated with Reg Dept turnover making it hard to detect? Claims of sparseness may not be easy to verify, but would make it murky if the budget was covered, what it was, and from what source. Can you trust what they say? Even their own PR person came out to say they lied.

The bottom line: This is how hate finds a home, unless the community says no.

Incompetence at the top risked the first con’s ruin by causing a staff revolt, but it wasn’t enough to get better care inside. Note Pawsoul’s complaint of what it was like to run PR after January PR apologies. It puts red flags on any future cons.

Even with an appearance of a nice regular con, the idea of growth for GSFTW is tainted with reports of spite and competition towards nonprofit community, and harboring staff that other cons dropped for good reason.

Tweet by the Chair of Furrydelphia.

Dashing, Shy, W0nderdawg and others in this report continue to inhabit local organizer chats and grasp influence. Those who came forward are fed up and would like the public to give no more chances. “Why not let it die, and make a new con with a better team, instead of the one that let nazis fester?”

Afterthought: A pattern where Shy Matsi’s site was so insecure, it leaked revenge-porn.

Here’s a story that was left out of January’s report to avoid bias, showing HOW CHARITABLE the reporting was.

Around 2017, I had personal adult images made with a partner for fun, kept privacy-locked on Furries Xtreme, a hookup site owned by Shy Matsi. They were leaked as revenge porn to retaliate at Dogpatch Press reporting. A Furries Xtreme admin would have access to locked profiles, and one was in Nazifur groups who targeted enemies that way. Put 2 and 2 together.

When told, Shy Matsi did nothing. Zero Jackal says: “This tracks. I have receipts of multiple people in his chats (most of whom myself or other mods have kicked for GOOD reason, like sending us death threats), have notified him to do something about it, and he’s refused / outright ignored us.”

Imagine if you were harassed with revenge-porn leaked under Shy Matsi’s watch… and still gave him neutrality about becoming chair of GSFTW, with responsibility for the con’s trust and safety. The owners had so much leeway to improve after Shy was talked to in January, and Dashing blew off questions. This reporter is still doing the job, after harassers thought they could run off reporting for public service. Now that includes a personal opinion:

If you expect cons to be trustworthy and safe, and you were thinking of going to GSFTW in 2025, don’t. Save your money and tell your friends to Beware.

UPDATE: more cronyism, and insight about shady finances and the greasy LLC switch

Showing their true colors:

In a new hilarious turn of events, since apparently he has nothing to say for himself, Shy has now adminned Dashing on the NJ Events Chat (bottom). At this point I'm calling it, and he's 100 percent in bed with the nazifurs. Seriously mental behavior. pic.twitter.com/3v6D2U7J4v

— Zero Jackal (@Zero_Jackal) October 25, 2024

If the con’s official attendance number was inflated up to the break-even point for estimated cost of this con, when allegedly many less people attended… Who paid for the hotel deposit? And how can the attendance be verified?

Notice that no official fursuit photo has been seen. This is a point of pride for legitimate cons. Proportionally, a con of around 1000 furries would have 200 fursuiters.

A tipper supplied more visual clues of sparse numbers:

Next, an explanation for the greasy LLC switch. There’s one logical, reasonable, sensible reason why anybody would turn their event from a 501 nonprofit to an LLC, changing the entire organization structure just a month before the event. Tip:

“I was talking with some very high up people who work in the convention scene, and in this conversation we put two and two together.

As a 501 organization you’re only allowed to accept a certain amount of monetary donations from a singular source. I believe it cannot be any amount over $5,000 or more than 20% of the overall revenue generated from an event.

However an LLC is allowed to take in as many donations from any source that they want, as long as they are put on their books as taxable income.

So what I think happened is they were getting very close to the convention and they did not have nearly the amount of money required to fulfill the deposit necessary on the hotel reservation. So they get in touch with some of their right wing friends to bankroll the event… but one problem, they can’t accept the money as a 501. So they as fast as possible switch to an LLC, which allows them to take in as much dirty money as they need to in order to fund the event.

In other words they never had the attendance required to fund the event, so they had to have external funding in order to make it run. There was never a thousand people there or registered for the convention.

There is a pitfall to being an LLC which in their shortsightedness I think they fail to understand. As an LLC you are an official business and everyone who works for you is an employee that requires payment. You are not allowed to have any type of volunteers or non-paid staff as an LLC. This also means that if they were in LLC during the time of the convention, then they essentially had people working illegally for them as unpaid employees.

This can be easily verified through a quick Google search of the IRS website.”

GSFTW is now a for-profit business, and by mismanaging it, they are now taking gambles with all of the community’s support and payment. Remember whose decisions brought it to this point while watching what happens next.

Like the article? These take hard work. For more free furry news, follow on Twitter or support not-for-profit Dogpatch Press on Patreon. Want to get involved? Try these subreddits: r/furrydiscuss for news or r/waginheaven for the best of the community. Or send guest writing here. (Content Policy.)

People love a business run by and for their community. A place that knows you and welcomes your friends, run by people you trust, who answer your concerns.

Seattle’s Slightly Furry cultivated that look for their cider making brand, while reaping support like $73,000 in donations to their for-profit business. It lifted them above fandom by converting popularity into sales, getting their product in stores and bars, with mainstream news and festival prizes.

As Slightly Furry promoted being ambassadors for the furry fandom to the public, watchdogs started raising concerns about shady management that ignored community interest. Initial complaint emerged from ConStaffWatch on July 16, then was reported by professional investigator Naia Ōkami on August 3, after she was banned and censored for trying to engage them for questions. Dogpatch Press also sent questions on August 12, which were knowingly received with no answer, then published a report on August 22.

Facing a shocking story, dodging, then pushing ahead

The August 22 story featured activism against animal abusers and their secret presence in the community. The outstanding example was Adam Britton, a formerly respected zoologist exposed as a serial killer of pet dogs. Britton gained collaboration by networking with other zoophiles. Some emerged among Pacific Northwest furries. One was a co-owner of Slightly Furry, named K0mpy. Although Britton and K0mpy were not known to have direct interaction in the iceberg that spawned them, it’s beside the point. The point is, conscious networking between zoophiles at all raises demand for abuse, and it deserves a solution without conflict of interest. [Edited for clarity.]

Instead of addressing questions for the story, Slightly Furry posted a Code of Conduct for their followers at the time given for answers before publishing. The terms of it showed a bias to shrug off the networking as a “personal problem,” while punishing the sharing of evidence. Critics characterized it as a tactical PR move; they would play ambassadors when convenient, but sidestep when one of their owners was corrupt.

Meanwhile, in 2023, Slightly Furry had won a prize at Cider Swig Festival, an annual event with dozens of vendors. Assuming the problem was swept away, they were on track for more goodwill and sales with an advertised return to the September 2024 event.

Trouble behind the scenes, and wavering support, while direct action raised the pressure

The tactical PR move didn’t succeed in deflecting protest towards Slightly Furry. Many community members circulated bewares, while activists went beyond unproductive engagement to contact the Cider Swig festival, asking them to drop support. Soon, the direct action made impact.

The festival removed Slightly Furry from their channels, with proof from the sponsor:

This must have REALLY stirred things up and forced crisis management. And then… a reversal.

The festival resumed promoting them in the lineup. A few weeks later, Slightly Furry finally posted a response to the controversy, just before the festival. Like the Code of Conduct coincided with a publication deadline, the timing implies the reason was crisis management about public pressure to the festival.

Slightly Furry’s response.

Sep 25 – Breaking our silence

Hiya folks, we want to acknowledge the concerns raised within our community and have taken time to reflect, consult experts, and make decisions with the well-being of our members in mind and apologize for not responding sooner. While our personal relationships and feelings are deeply valid, we are committed to handling this situation objectively, ensuring that all decisions serve the best interest of our entire community.

Since July 1st, K0mpy has not been involved with Slightly Furry in any capacity, and there are no plans for future involvement. We are filing updates with the State of Washington to reflect the change in ownership which takes time to process and be reflected in public record.

Slightly Furry has always been, and continues to be, a space where harmful behaviors such as zoophilia, zoosadism, or any form of harm or exploitation have no place. We remain committed to maintaining spaces where all members of our community feel safe and respected. Our mission is to ensure the Slightly Furry community is inclusive, safe, and welcome to all. We are dedicated to continually improving our policies and practices to maintain this commitment. In situations where potential harm is raised, we will act swiftly and decisively, ensuring that the space remains a positive environment for all. We heard your feedback about our code of conduct and are working to simplify the wording and make it more accessible to all.

Slightly Furry moderates all spaces with community safety as our top priority. If any reports of harmful or dangerous behaviors are brought to our attention, we will take swift action, including removal from our virtual and in-person spaces, if necessary. We understand that rebuilding trust takes time, and we are committed to ongoing reflection and improvement to ensure our spaces remain inclusive, safe, and supportive. We welcome feedback and are open to continue conversations on how we can do better.

Take a moment to feel the reasonable goodwill, then let’s pull out a puzzling detail.

LAST MINUTE EDIT: THE ABOVE LINE WAS STEALTH-REMOVED FROM THEIR STATEMENT ON SEPT 28 – WHILE THIS STORY WAS ON TRACK TO PUBLISH AND THEY WERE AT THE FESTIVAL.

PROOF IT WAS THERE

Sounds legit, but… July 1?

Separation from K0mpy on July 1 (with no reason given) would be weeks before ANYONE said ANYTHING, when initial complaints rose on July 16.

If July 1 was true timing, it makes grudging response hard to explain as a need to wait for legal clearance to say K0mpy was already gone. They could have headed off controversy by mentioning his separation at any step between multiple sources of concerns for many weeks, instead of publishing a sketchy Code of Conduct for PR while dodging questions. There has been no formal correction sent in response to reporting that K0mpy was an owner in August. Think hard about why the festival dropped support in September, and what had to be done to get it back.

Why back-date to July 1? One reason: “he’s not fired, he quit”. Face-saving PR mitigates dispute between owners, but without transparency there could have been. That lowers credibility, because is it really cutting ties or just on paper? Maintaining quiet partnership may be a familiar problem to long-time watchers.

Hold on, this isn’t just one reason to be skeptical. There’s also this, and the next part:

The good, the bad and the ugly

The Good: Activists won a statement that promises one thing they most wanted; deplatforming one shady person from some of their community influence. (UPDATE: Slightly Furry’s stealth edit leaves this up to them to further explain – if they answered questions!)

The Bad: K0mpy runs a kink events production company too. This was just one individual while a network remains in the community, with more ties than reported. Yes, there are alleged actual victims here… and a lot that hasn’t been said yet.

Reference to K0mpy’s husband by a privately verified and protected source, who does NOT typically do callouts.

The most ugly result was exposing how some Slightly Furry supporters really don’t get what’s going on, and are too grudging to even try. They’d rather spread excuses and misinformation than sincerely address zoophile networking, while attachment to alcohol business gets priority and whistleblowers get backlash.

Attitude behind the PR

Here’s misinformation posted in the Slightly Furry chat group towards the previous Dogpatch Press report:

• 2015 tweets by K0mpy: The confession to consuming zoophile media isn’t a decade+ old.
• The strange claim that 2015 was “a different time”: That would be a very naive person’s idea of a long time ago. This reporter has been reporting since 2012, and been a furry since the early 1990’s. Ask what the time was like right here.
• Zoophilia always meant sexual interest in animals. Here’s a 1998 website for furries showing no different meaning then, specifically linking to abusers. Implying that it wasn’t a problem then — so it shouldn’t be now — compares to excusing someone who used to be into pedophilia.
• Calling photos “blurry”: Omits how they were directly posted by K0mpy’s husband with an unmistakeable “zoo pride” symbol this year.
• Reporting by Patch O’Furr is falsely attributed to Naia Ōkami. Naia wrote her own separate report on her own site, and has never posted here. The reporting on this site has the byline right under the headline. Apparently they didn’t even care to read it before backlashing.
• Out-of-context character attack at Naia, to discredit reporting she didn’t do: It deceptively frames things that Naia has addressed, such as her condemnation of Matt Walsh for an ambush she is being blamed for. The attack disrespects her queer identity and omits crediting work to remove abusers from the community because of caring about victims — actual, proven community service — not just priority on alcohol sales for cronies.

This isn’t just random misinformation from an onlooker, it’s a glimpse into private attitude behind the PR. The source posts about being part of Slightly Furry operations, at least delivering product for them and allowance to enforce their group policies. Using their group to excuse zoophilia, smear watchdogs, and spread misinformation about reporters is a bad way to show goodwill and trust for problem solving. (For a kicker, recall that they made a policy against reporting with the screenshot!)

Naia’s response, and ongoing concern

Naia Ōkami:

“I’m not impressed with Slightly Furry’s statement for a number of reasons. It seems very performative and an attempt to get their attendees to return in the midst of other financial problems they have been having. They were unwilling to engage with the original whistleblowers and instead, kept them banned from their taproom and “virtual spaces”. They are not interested in collaboration against abuse, transparency regarding their operations and dealings, or doing better and it shows by their actions of making a hollow apology to the community but refusing to even speak to the individuals who blew the whistle and were most effected by their actions. Furthermore, they kept their code of conduct regarding screenshots to punish future whistleblowers. The snake is simply shedding its skin.”

You can say: “They conceded with a statement and got rid of the shady manager, what else do people want?”

How about recognition that zoophile networking is bigger than isolated individuals, while the community deserves to cut ties with it, with leaders who give more than minimal and grudging effort forced by pressure and attended by backlash.

Followup to the previous article: 60 Minutes Australia features Adam Britton

As this piece publishes, 60 Minutes Australia is airing a TV episode about Britton’s crimes. This is intensely interesting for those following the case. Britton’s silent ex-wife was a subject of heated questions about protecting her role in his life. The show trailer shows her breaking silence for the first time to condemn him for ruining hers.

Now there’s major mainstream news about animal abusing over there. And a controversy about conflict of interest on the independent fan level over here.

What more evidence can be published about zoophile networking that connects these things?

It sure would be interesting if someone does it. Especially with the perspective of a human problem like abuse scandals emerging from churches, schools or Boy Scouts, and not just a problem for PR to save face.

Keep watching the news.

__________________________

In August, the questions sent to Slightly Furry aimed to discuss a human problem like abuse scandals emerging from churches, schools or Boy Scouts. They covered positive fandom success, and tried to probe the issues with zoophilia, with broad concern about responsibility of protection that goes with claims of ambassadorship and queer representation. Queer history includes internal organizing to deplatform abusers.

Much care was put into preparing to report, but there was no response except the PR to evade pressure. There is a lot of petty controversy online, and business benefits from PR, but that’s not a solution for abuse scandals where abusers benefit from coverup or lack of notice.

In Seattle, the problem in furry made only a few serious arrests for a network since 2017; it can’t be understated how serious it is to have uncaught members operating freely and even commanding influence now. 

For all the headache this may cause people tied up in it, the problem only gets worse by ignoring it. The headache of responding gets better by being pro-active: don’t do business with zoophiles. Don’t let them in your groups. If one tweeting confessions isn’t enough of a red flag, then maybe the problem is with the entire social circle that ignores it. You can not trust businesses or one-weekend cons to solve this. It’s for 24/7/365 decisions by everyone to draw a line.

Like the article? These take hard work. For more free furry news, follow on Twitter or support not-for-profit Dogpatch Press on Patreon.Want to get involved? Try these subreddits: r/furrydiscuss for news or r/waginheaven for the best of the community. Or send guest writing here. (Content Policy.)

Vote HERE for the 6th Annual Good Furry Awards 

See the nominations HERE before you vote. Since 2019, the Good Furry Award has been recognizing fan-nominated furries for outstanding community spirit. It has grown from one award to 4 categories:

• The Image Award is for furries who give the fandom a positive image through videos, podcasts, vlogs, documentaries, websites, and other social media.
• The Good Egg Award is for furries who do good deeds for individuals, animals, organizations, or the community.
• The Furtastic Award is for furries who are excellent at other things not easily categorized as the above two and so is a catch-all for general pawsomeness.
• The Lifetime Achievement Award is selected by committee, and is in its 3rd year.

With the amount of awards, payment is phased out, and now winners get a trophy from founder Papabear Grubbs Grizzly of Uncle Bear Publishing.

The winners will be announced at Biggest Little Fur Con in Reno on October 15.

Art by DBruin

Like the article? These take hard work. For more free furry news, follow on Twitter or support not-for-profit Dogpatch Press on Patreon. Want to get involved? Try these subreddits: r/furrydiscuss for news or r/waginheaven for the best of the community. Or send guest writing here. (Content Policy.)

(Content warning.)

Three stories with one cause

It was a major week of news for activists against animal abuse, especially the kind that comes from zoophile networking.

AUSTRALIA: Adam Britton was once a prominent zoologist, but now he’s a convicted serial killer of pet dogs. International media featured Britton’s August 8 sentence to 10 years in jail. Outside the court, activists protested for better animal protection, followed by a unity walk with Kiki’s Justice, an awareness campaign named for one of Britton’s victims. The worldwide shock of the case is documentary-worthy.

OHIO: Britton’s online accomplice was Lucas Vanwoert, a truck driver, furry and dog torture-killer. His wife Heather VanWoert was convicted for participating in the crimes, but released in May after a short sentence. It’s a wake-up call about abusers in the furry community. Many furries oppose abuse, but are troubled by how others enable lovers, friends or business partners involved.

SEATTLE: furry brand Slightly Furry brews cider, runs a taphouse, and has an owner named “Kompy” involved in zoophile networking. Watchdogs aired evidence at the same time as Slightly Furry ran a crowdfund and raised over $73,000 from donors to support their for-profit business. Slightly Furry refuses to respond about Kompy’s corruption — except by censoring and banning people who ask questions. Why do they refuse to explain this to the community, after taking so much support and calling their business an ambassadorship of furry to the general public? What will stop the enabling, after Pacific Northwest furries already faced exposure of a shocking abuse ring?

This is about networking, not just isolated offenses. When zoophiles organize to meet each other, this enables a spectrum of harm to animals who can’t consent, from coercive molesting to deadly zoosadism. Demand for abuse media is raised by the network as a whole — a well-known effect of pedophile networks, where participants are held responsible whether or not they did abuse themselves. (Below: more about how this works and how it gets enabled. Like: “It’s no-contact… trust me bro!”) Networking is never harmless.

Reporting zoophile networking

This news is reported by Patch O’Furr, with thanks to Naia Ōkami in Seattle. It’s the latest in ongoing coverage at Dogpatch Press:

• 2021: Introduction to Naia Ōkami — an investigator who got an abuser convicted after reporting about it here.
• 2023: Previous report about Adam Britton, Lucas VanWoert, and how the problem intersects with the furry community.
• Naia was a local customer of Slightly Furry in Seattle, until they banned her for asking questions.
• Patch and Naia live-tweeted Adam Britton’s sentencing on August 8, in cooperation with Kiki’s Justice and observers in the court room.

When furry spaces are used to shelter the networking, it doesn’t mean everyone knows about it — it means there’s a job to do — but the reported evidence has suffered poor comprehension, weak help, and backlash inside the community. (Below: much more about this and how it can change.) Of course, it’s not just with furries. It’s like suppressed abuse coming out from churches, schools, or Boy Scouts. It can be anywhere from anyone, including the most trusted people…

Adam Britton, the famous zoologist who was secretly a serial killer of dogs, is being sentenced now in Australian court. I'm watching live updates from people in the court. Adam's crimes were in a network that needs to be exposed, which made furry news. https://t.co/99HCQ9s74U

— Dogpatch Press (@DogpatchPress) July 11, 2024

Adam Britton is one of the worst and most prominent zoosadists ever reported

Britton built a successful career as a zoologist working with crocodiles in TV and movies, with the likes of National Geographic and Sir David Attenborough. Then he set up a shipping container as a torture room on his rural Australian property.

One by one, he took 42 dogs there to exploit and kill them slowly over days each, prolonging the victim’s pain for enjoyment on videos made for secret trading. While feeding the demand of a secret network, he fed their remains to the crocodiles that made his career.

In court, the torture details were so severe, that court staff and observers were directed to therapy. Kiki’s Justice is sharing suicide helplines to those who know.

It’s a glaring example for how devotion to an animal-related profession doesn’t exempt anyone from abusing. It’s commonly known that pedophiles slide into child care work and exploit the opportunity, but it’s little known that zoophiles do the same thing. Many cases overlap both things, and Britton was charged for downloading child abuse images too.

Britton calls himself a zoophile. His court defense portrayed him as helpless to control a paraphilia condition that he hid behind professional achievement. That was the excuse for his systematic, calculated deception of families trying to rehome dogs that they couldn’t keep, who got fake reassurances of their welfare after they were killed. “I can’t stop. I don’t want to”, he told eager trading partners who remain uncaught.

He submitted this apology to the court:

I take full responsibility for the demeaning crimes that I perpetrated on dogs. I deeply regret the pain and trauma that I caused to innocent animals, and consequently to my family, friends, and members of the community I affected. I let you all down, and I’m truly sorry.

I now acknowledge that I’ve been fighting a rare paraphilic disorder for much of my life, and that shame and fear prevented me from seeking the proper help I needed.

No amount of words can convey how sorry and ashamed I am, nor undo what I did. But I am determined to prove that I am better than this, that I will seek longterm treatment, and that I will find a path towards redemption.

Please give my family the space they deserve to heal. They were not aware or involved in any way.

Adam Britton

On August 8 in Australian court, watchers were breathless with anxiety that Britton might only get short jail time for each of 42 victims, to be served all at once.

The outcome was mixed. 10 years of jail was taken as too short, but relatively more than the outcomes of other cases within the limits of the laws.

Britton could be eligible for parole after serving 6 years, but with 2 served before trial. He could walk free as soon as 2028. He is supposed to register as a sex offender, and has a lifetime ban on animal contact, but it’s limited to mammals — so he might try to work with crocodiles again.

Outside the court, furious activists waved signs and spoke to media about weak animal protection laws. Then on August 10, the Kiki’s Justice Unity Walk led supporters and their dogs to a picnic with guest speakers about animal welfare.

An organizers said: “From the Adam Britton case, animal lovers have come together and stood united in their fight against those who abuse animals. Friendships have formed, from a place of absolute heartbreak. People are working together, to address social media and hold those platforms to account. And to use Adam Britton’s own words against him “We can’t stop… we don’t want to.””

Kiki’s Justice represents families of some of the killer’s victims. They plan to take out ads any time he’s up for parole. His academic work, TV appearances and online accounts are being removed. His doctorate might be next. A book will document what happened, and the activism goes on for other cases.

One observer said: “what he did far surpasses the death by neglect and killing a dog by beating, which is what people imagine dog killings to be. We must make people aware of him, and make him aware that we will never forget and will track him when he is released.”

8 years jail for Lucas VanWoert, wife gets a slap on the wrist for participating

Lucas VanWoert is Britton’s most known accomplice. He used furry name “Graves” as they exchanged 705 files of animal and child abuse and inspired each other to torture and kill. In their networking, there’s 3 things to notice about VanWoert:

• Anyone can call themselves a furry, and as far as his online profiles show, he was a nobody without special favor or influence in the community. But…

• He was far from an isolated abuser in furry. The owner of a secret trading group that hosted VanWoert and Britton was also in furry spaces. VanWoert wasn’t well hidden, with the same online handle across kink and bestiality sites visible on the web. He was also mutual followers with furry-zoophiles in a secret iceberg of thousands (covered in a previous report.) And…

• He was enabled so strongly by at least some, that his wife Heather Vanwoert also got 12 animal abuse charges.

On May 30, Lucas Vanwoert was sentenced to 97 months in prison, with 15 years probation after release. Heather VanWoert was convicted and served 6 months in jail but released in May. The light sentence caused disappointment and alarm among activists who know animals aren’t safe when predators have little consequences. That and their presence in furry shows a reason to join activists for change and transparency, and not let the opposite happen…

FRUITLESS: Seattle’s Slightly Furry dodges questions about co-owner Nick “Kompy” Charbonneau

Furries like supporting projects by each other. Seattle is a fertile place for that. Slightly Furry harvested that energy for cider brewing, and opened a taphouse, making a physical base for events and groups. That powered over $73,000 in donations for repairs — with a rotten side they can hide if it doesn’t raise sales of a for-profit business.

In 2018, shocking evidence emerged of a zoophile network in the Pacific Northwest furry community, with deadly zoosadism at its core. A few participants got decades in jail. Many had no consequences and remained active. For a time, Matthew “Cupid” Grabowsky was one of them. Dogpatch Press reported he was a convicted zoosadist at furry events, but his presence was protected by PNW organizers, until investigation by Naia Ōkami led to his new conviction and removal to jail in 2021.

Look for negligence and enabling when a known, severe problem returns with permission by organizers.

Nothing was foreshadowed in glowing P.R. about Slightly Furry in Seattle news from The Stranger. The story features three owners: Aaron “Martini” Kalin, Raymond “Spork” Araldi, and Nick “Kompy” Charbonneau (who also runs a kink event production company).

Kalin wants the taproom to feel like the first floor of a furry convention, a social space where furries can be themselves and the curious can get a taste of what an active FurCon might feel like. He even envisions the bar as an ambassadorship of furry to the general public, an important aspect of both his and Araldi’s identities.

“It’s not just for marketing,” Kalin said. “It’s me putting myself out there in probably the most intense, bravest way that I can possibly think of, saying, ‘No, this is really me, I’m not going to dial it down that much for you. So you can kind of take it or leave it.’ And luckily, as far as we can tell, the public has received it pretty well.”

The curious public might look at Slightly Furry’s “About us” page. Then they might wonder, where’s the third owner, Kompy? Why aren’t they putting him out there? Maybe something is dialed down. Here’s 3 things that they might not want to have bubble up.

THE “ZOO PRIDE” FLAG. Kompy’s husband posted selfies with this sticker on his phone made for zoophile networking. (NSFW archive / Info.) There is no mistaking photos from the source. Consider the conflict of interest this makes for Kompy and Slighty Furry’s management.

HOOKING UP WITH CONFESSED ZOOPHILES. Cenny is a furry who gained 30,000 Twitter followers and $5,000+ a month for making adult media with other furries. He has years of wide criticism for zoophile networking, including consuming real-animal media. The clout drew enabling and denial, but he proved critics right by coming out with the zoophile Zeta symbol (ζ). It’s the most obvious networking there is. Kompy and Cenny are so close that they make porn (NSFW) with Kompy’s husband. Again consider the conflict of interest for Slightly Furry’s management.

• Evidence: Cenny archive / Cenny husky is a zoo / Cenny Beware / Zoo on Cenny’s F-List
• Youtube videos: Zoophilia Doesn’t Belong in the Furry Fandom / The Cenny Husky Drama

CONFESSION BY KOMPY: Not just networking and enabling, but directly consuming zoo media and raising demand. Kompy deleted this to hide the evidence shortly after watchdogs pointed it out.

Add up three clues. Once can be a mistake… twice a coincidence… three times triangulates a location.

It isn’t Safe-For-Petsylvania. It’s not part of the Pro-Consent-letariat. You don’t need to be on moral high ground to know it’s not a place of hope or trust, if you want to report abuse and expect a priority on victims. If you want to try, don’t knock on their door. These boozy would-be furry ambassadors will be lost in the sauce or out at the zoo.

If we still give benefit of the doubt, there’s a simple way to clear things up. Ask them directly if they support zoophiles. It’s easy to say “no”.

Kompy’s Curiouscat page. Even if you want to be roofied at an alcohol venue with sketchy management, inebriated sex has no legal consent defense.

Slightly Furry owner Aaron “Martini” Kalin acknowledged a request for questions for a news story, which were ignored.

They couldn’t answer when asked point blank: “Should there be such a thing as Zoo Pride, and is it welcome at Slightly Furry?”

They also couldn’t answer if they had any safety policy or a process to report a problem.

Then on the given publishing deadline, they posted a strange Code of Conduct. It defines consent to restrict sharing evidence, like screenshots… but a Code doesn’t override law, in the opinion of a furry lawyer consulted for this:

“The appropriate benchmark has repeatedly been whether a speaker has a reasonable expectation of privacy in the environment, and most cases I’ve seen have said “not in chat rooms,” analogizing them to voicemail. It’s kind of like if a con had a “no recording” policy for panels and then tries to argue a panelist or audience member had an expectation of privacy if someone did record. It’s not gonna stand, probably because you don’t have an expectation of privacy when speaking to a large group of people.”

Naia was banned by Slightly Furry for asking questions, and thinks the Code hides “sketchiness”. (The lawyer also noticed that QR code access isn’t good for legal agreements.) Naia says:

“The obvious intention of this policy is to have a chilling effect on criticisms of the bar, its owners, its staff, and its patrons. It’s extremely bizarre that these policies are hidden behind a QR code. This can be done for a number of reasons, including their intention to possibly need to change policies again, as they have done as a result of this scandal, and not wanting to have to constantly change physical signs. A much more obviously apparent reason is to hide the sketchiness from newcomers.”

The announcement.

Then there’s the most relevant part. Slightly Furry’s Code defines community concern about zoophile networking as a personal problem.

If the abuser isn’t abusing at their place — like their participant who was convicted of deadly zoosadism — their Code says it’s not their problem.

Of course private bedroom activity isn’t public interest — but when it’s a person of community influence, a manager with power for running events and their safety — is it really our problem to address the amount of zoophile networking, demand for abuse media, and rape they enable?

Until they make it their problem too, Naia and other watchdogs like Con Staff Watch have been documenting it for them.

Based on the evidence, the well-documented Zoophile Mute List by Heika displays Slightly Furry as a zoophile supporter.

Herd denial and learned helplessness towards a zoophile-industrial complex 

Consider the general human problem, not just for furry readers. Like suppressed abuse coming out from churches, schools, or Boy Scouts.

Movies like Spotlight depicted abusive priests getting moved from church to church, letting them prey without recognition. It was buried by active shifting. The disconnection of furry spaces also lets abusers cycle freely through new groups using new fursonas. Abusers don’t need active cover to skip town with passive policies like “if it didn’t happen here, it’s a personal problem”. Different route, same result.

Group disconnection starts with being marginal, as many gay people know. They find safety in niche community. Bigotry helps set the problem up before it’s inside, and insiders get an overactive immune system towards negative attention. When Bewares get conflated with bigotry, and freedom means from transparency… in-group-ness can liberate against outside problems, but stifle ones inside.

Suppression helps abusers hide. It’s enabling when evidence is blindly blown off with the “cancel culture” or “witch hunt” cliches sent towards previous reporting. The blindness starts to change when community members get aware, inform each other, do transparent ambassadorship, and meet outside help while the general public is also getting informed.

Herd denial doesn’t just represent individual corruption, but a wide scale “nobody’s job” dilemma. It’s not just misuse of influence, it’s built into how the internet let interest communities spiral fractally into more and more granular and unregulated niches. From furries, to liberated kink, to hidden abuse, to core zoosadists, with lagging recognition and inadequate remedy. (What can a little blog do besides say it’s everyone’s job?)

In internet no-mans-land, zoophile networking starts with signaling. They use codes, flags, hashtags and personal ads to furtively meet, then propaganda like magazines, blogs and podcasts to consolidate groups, while begging inclusion like an identity with rights. Some of these studiously avoid sex. It’s a fake front.

No matter what, networking raises access for other zoophiles who claim that animals can consent. There’s no network without the touchy ones, with no way to tell the difference from the “trust me” ones. Then a spectrum of abuse grows beneath notice while animals are unable to tell. Not saying “no” isn’t consent, and animals can’t consent, any more than toddlers can, so abuse is not an identity, and rights are for victims. (This report is not directed at pro therapy that isn’t networking.)

Even when abuse is known, it’s so rarely prosecuted, that there are individual abusers with more victims than the total of American prosecutions each year. (Around 100 cases with all statistics kept “artificially low”.)

Vacancy of oversight makes easy apologism. Networking participants do hairsplitting between “bad abuse” and a “good zoos” myth — as if coercion is consent, or a pure non-contact network exists for innocent fantasy or quack DIY therapy, and “trust me” will protect victims. Then if a bad one does get caught, “good” ones deny responsibility for doing abuse themselves, after they enabled demand and opportunity. Some offer up sacrificial tokens after the harm, (in other words, throwing liabilities under the bus), and claim to make things safe by catching abusers after giving them a place to prey.

There are no safe zoophile networks. If one is visible anywhere, something is wrong, and you can show them the door. It’s certainly possible, because pedophile networking isn’t welcome in your space, is it?

“Not our job” ends up being learned helplessness. It doesn’t take police help to stop giving attention, favor, enabling, or $73,000 in donations towards a threat of zoophile networking getting influence over community management. But sex and alcohol and clout make an industry where zoophiles like Cenny make a comfortable living, and asking their friends to care gets you banned. If the community doesn’t solve its own problems, one alternative is for whistleblowers and activists to team up with outside groups, taking it beyond limited bubbles and fruitless appeals to places they can really be heard.

A few links about networking: 

• ActiveFence (Trust & Safety for platforms): How Are Pedophiles Hiding In Plain Sight on Platforms?
• Wall Street Journal: Instagram Connects Vast Pedophile Network
• Australian government report: history of pedophile networking as organized crime.

Follow the group here.

Like the article? These take hard work. For more free furry news, follow on Twitter or support not-for-profit Dogpatch Press on Patreon.Want to get involved? Try these subreddits: r/furrydiscuss for news or r/waginheaven for the best of the community. Or send guest writing here. (Content Policy.)

https://x.com/NickyWoolf/status/1802698153272947183

Listen to Fur and Loathing here.

Here’s a wrap-up for the investigation of the Midwest Furfest 2014 chemical attack, by Nicky Woolf with help from Dogpatch Press. For the last episode, we recorded discussion of these points (although not all made the final cut…)

• Being a community under attack.
• The limits of the justice system, and how people can get away with crime, even if we know it.
• The need for community protection from inside.
• It can also take resources and reach we don’t have by partnership with outside help.
• Without public awareness and being fully informed, negligence can cause more harm.
• How different could things be if we had more transparency 10 years ago?

REVIEW: “Fur and Loathing is so fucking good.” – Podcast Promise

There are good and bad True Crime shows. Bad ones have sleazy stories with annoying hosts who giggle about suffering while milking it for views. But “Crime and Punishment” is the title of one of the greatest novels of all time. The good kind teaches about the justice system and the pursuit of resolution.

Fur and Loathing aimed to deliver original research with respect for the community. The producers of the show thought the great review at Podcast Promise really got everything they were trying to do:

I feel like most true crime is ultimately exploitative and antithetical to my politics and ethics.

But not all true crime is most true crime. Some true crime is anti-cop, anti-prison, and pro interrogating our carceral systems. Some true crime is made in partnership with its subjects, or the families. And some true crime, like Fur and Loathing, is made with deep reverence and contribution from maligned, largely disenfranchised communities.

I think Fur and Loathing is pretty much exactly what I want in true crime.

This approach will be followed for more Furry True Crime reporting to come… but we can’t talk about that yet. Stay tuned.

NEW WITNESS REPORT: “I stepped on a pile of what looked like fine white powder”

This tip recently came from a furry reader. This story of handling the crime scene certainly says something about the outcome…

Hello,

I just started watching the MFF 2014 coverage on the Fur and Loathing podcast. I have some first hand knowledge if this would help.

I literally stepped in (what I now understand to be) the cleared crime scene and I had no idea what it was at the time.

I walked up the stairwell after they let us back into the hotel after the all clear. The mess that was left was one floor under my room in a stairwell.

I stepped on a pile of what looked like fine white powder with small clear curved glass shards mixed in. From how much white powder and glass that was left I would guess that it would have filled a small glass mason jar. It looked almost like someone dumped baking soda and glass mixed together.

What blew my mind was that there was nothing in the hallway whatsoever to mark that this was evidence or anything of the sort. Plus that it was just left there. Not even a little yellow wet floor sign to indicate that a mess was on the floor.

It would not surprise me if some hotel cleaning staff swept it all into the trash the next day, while having no clue what it was.

I am sure that I was not the only person in the wee hours of the morning to step in it either as lots of us took the stairs to get to our rooms rather than waiting for the elevators.

That was a hell of a first furry con for me.

I don’t recall much more than that and in hindsight I wish I had gotten a picture of the mess. I was so tired that it did not cross my mind until I got home from the con. Thank you!

MORE READER REACTIONS (Spoilers)

Another reader wrote about the suspect Magnus Diridian, who has a news tag for background to this:

I had some discussions with family after they heard the last episode of Fur and Loathing (I got them hooked on the entire series). Magnus sounded very guilt ridden when questioned about the attack. I wonder if he had genuine remorse for making that Confederate fursuit. Or was just upset that it was received the way it was. Magnus’ behavior is the kind of stuff that a school shooter might be thinking: “I’m in pain, you’re hurting me, here is a message that is equivalent to what I’m feeling.”

Dogpatch Press replied:

Magnus has a past of being a chronic violent felon, alcohol abuse and guilt, and always wants to bury things but he can’t because he won’t admit his past. So he does a bunch of coping, contradiction and compartmentalizing. I think he just hates consequences, and he definitely wasn’t remorseful while bringing out the Confederate fursuit for years after 2017. Notice 2020 date in the photo.

Magnus’s stunts seemed reactive and trollish rather than supporting or organizing anything, apart from the Trump sign. So he didn’t have a manifesto. But the Confederate suit is a statement. He isn’t a sophisticated propagandist but we can call this political.

I wish the show could have gotten into threads that it didn’t. The fake Lemonade Coyote suit for example, made to piss people off by stealing from a dead guy. Or what was said by some witnesses who wouldn’t go on the record about what they knew. And allegations of violent crime that isn’t the stuff he was convicted for.

Magnus is an interesting guy in some ways. He was active for a long time with other interesting people. I don’t hate him so much as consider him messed up, but I don’t think we’ll ever have real justice about the attack, and don’t think he should be welcome at cons or in the fandom. He is currently active with nazifurs. That says a lot about what they do.

Why did the FBI’s Angelo Defeo fly from Chicago to Colorado to interview the well-known nazifur Foxler? And why did Magnus freak out when I asked him about Foxler in 2018, and admit knowing him for a long time (since before Foxler was grabbing notoriety?) That makes interesting questions about their association and how Foxler got charges dropped for his own crime case. So what did he have on Magnus?

I always wondered if there could have been others involved, but I don’t think there’s evidence of that, and Magnus is the only real suspect. He was known for using stink bombs in public. Why would he need someone else for an attack?

In 2018 I reported a witness from MFF 2014 saying that Magnus had an altercation with con staff there about running in the street in fursuit while drunk, and he got threatened with a ban. He was mad at staff, and that sounds like a motive.

The reader continued:

The show had one FBI person who had just learned of the event and the FOIA docs and even he was just as puzzled why this wasn’t taken seriously enough. ‘You’re missing something.’

Something missing could mean police hiding their own errors after mishandling the crime scene. Maybe the Rosemont police really didn’t want the FBI near. Chicago has a legendary history as one of the most corrupt places in the US. Corruption scandals have gotten federal oversight over local police departments before. We may never know more unless someone inside speaks.

OLD, FAKE NEWS

This review repeats misinformation that has plagued the fandom since the attack.

The claims can be killed by listening to the show, and they don’t even follow basic chemistry. Neoprene is rotted by chlorine. Latex chlorination is done by liquid, not powdered chlorine. That treatment isn’t activated with a device made to be smashed to mix 2 things into poison gas. The police ruled the attack deliberate from the beginning. Rumors about an accident were never valid.

FINAL THOUGHTS – How do we look at technical innocence?

A suspect was questioned many times and unable to clear himself. They couldn’t charge him, so police won’t stop him from going to events. It’s up to the community to beware. 

Innocent until proven guilty is a relationship between citizen and government. It’s technical, but not the whole truth. Outside of courts, we use personal judgement about character every day, like when letting someone in your house, paying or employing someone, dating, voting, or letting someone care for dependent kids or animals.    

“Technically innocent” applies to people like Casey Anthony, George Zimmerman, Kyle Rittenhouse, or OJ Simpson. Even when people like this are rejected, sometimes they grab for a kind of American anti-celebrity by capitalizing on notoriety. OJ tried to sell his “If I did it” book. George Zimmerman auctioned the gun he used to kill Trayvon Martin for a lot of money. Kyle Rittenhouse was supposed to be made a “hero” for politics (but is a failure with it). And of course America’s most successful anti-celebrity is currently trying to get back into the White House as a convicted felon. 

Fur and Loathing may not be able to show justice is done, but hopefully can make you think a lot about what happens when it isn’t.

MORE NOTICE

The ICYMI podcast about internet culture hosted Nicky Woolf; he covered the show, and extra background about how internet subcultures work and the place of furries in them. American Hysteria podcast (recorded after episode 2 of the show) covered Nicky’s career.

Like the article? These take hard work. For more free furry news, follow on Twitter or support not-for-profit Dogpatch Press on Patreon.Want to get involved? Try these subreddits: r/furrydiscuss for news or r/waginheaven for the best of the community. Or send guest writing here. (Content Policy.)

For members who completed an RSVP

Photo by Heather

The San Francisco Pride Parade is Sunday, June 30, 2024 — General info at SFpride.org

The biggest outdoor furry event of the year is back for Northern California. Don’t miss this huge party and statement of progress for LGBT people and allies. ABC7 will broadcast the parade to watch from home, while hundreds of thousands of people line the street from 10:30 a.m. until late afternoon.

The NorCal Furries will march on Market Street, for a mile to the end near the Celebration area at Civic Center. Over 200 are expected to come and be loved more than ever, after being shortlisted for a Best Contingent award last year. They have been in the parade for over 20 years (see the Pride tag). This year they have an after-party at their own club for the first time. Here’s how to participate!

JOINING THE GROUP — RSVP here

If you don’t RSVP, you can’t be guaranteed a spot and may be turned away, so join now!

• Telegram event chat group: The live connection to everyone and best place to get help.
• Telegram off-topic chat group: For talk that isn’t crucial for the event.
• Donations are still accepted: Help pay for the float, because volunteers work hard to make this.
• Volunteers are still welcome (message a group mod).

PRE-PREP AND AFTER-PARTY at Spritz! 181 Eddy Street — RSVP here, must be 21+

Spritz! is 21+ by law, so bring ID for checking at the door. The club is a short walk from Powell BART. You can meet and suit up before proceeding to the start of the parade, and meet afterward to desuit, eat, drink, relax and party. There will be DJ’s, food, drinks, chill space and play space.

• At 9 – 10:30am, you can change clothes and get breakfast before leaving for parade assembly. You can leave personal items and pick up after the parade.
• At 5 – 11pm, dinner is provided at the after-party, and you don’t have to be in the parade to come.
• Donations and volunteering are welcome, message @RelayRaccoon on Telegram.

from Callie Cat

PREPARATION AND GETTING AROUND — Map of parade route and meet spots

This is a high-energy moving event. It requires walking several miles and self-reliance to get around the city. There are 200 members but only 30 spaces on the float, so be ready to walk unless you have a mobility challenge (contact a mod for a rider space). Know your limits and don’t overheat, but expect mild weather. Hydration will be provided. The only bathrooms are portapotties with long lines. Dress right, bring sunscreen or snacks as needed, and a charged phone. Don’t bring anything you can’t carry, cargo items may be turned away.

Know the map and schedule for the full day:

• Streets will be gridlocked with traffic before the parade, so don’t expect parking or rideshare near it.
• It’s smart to ride BART. See the BART info page about their Sunday schedule and tips for Riding With Pride.
• You can start at Spritz! for breakfast and changing, or just start at the parade assembly.
• Parade assembly is a mile from Spritz! and public transit is the best way to get there.
• Give yourself a lot of extra time to get there, because the parade won’t wait, and latecomers get left behind. Don’t cut it close!
• At the end of the parade, marchers split away from the float, and will need to go several blocks through crowds to regroup.
• Regroup (if you want water and a break): Quaker Meeting House, 65 9th St.
• Go with others or get yourself back to Spritz! Any BART station lets you cross Market when the street is closed.

Read on for details by hour.

PARADE ASSEMBLY — Use 155 Main Street for directions, marchers arrive no later than NOON and volunteers by 11 am.

Find assembly area N2 for contingent #132, on Main between Mission and Howard. The float will be there very early, so you can arrive as soon as 8am.

• Coming by car: No cars or dropoff allowed at the assembly. You may find garage space if you’re very early (by 8am) and plan to get breakfast.
• Using BART: travel to Embarcadero station. The south central exit is closest to the assembly.
• There may be hours to wait, but expect to hang out and don’t plan anything except leaving this time open for parade step-off.
• Again, if you arrive later than noon, you may be left behind, don’t cut it close!

COSTUME AND FURSUITING — No hard bins, soft folding bags only at parade.

Fursuiting isn’t required, wear any themed clothing, but for suiters:

• NO HARD BINS at parade, they will be turned away, only soft folding bags will be carried, pack light and avoid bringing extra cargo.
• Suiting on public transit has been fun for many members, and coming in suit is smart.
• Change at Spritz! or you can also change at a parking garage or right on the street (nobody cares at Pride.)
• Consider partialing for comfort, and expect rough streets, don’t wear soft indoor feet.
• Is your costume not safe for TV broadcast? Contact a group mod to discuss and make arrangements.

PHOTOS — Group photo at noon.

Be photo-ready if costuming, and stay alert to assemble because the crowd will be chaotic.

• We want photographers, and if you plan to do photos or video, please tell us and share afterward.
• Join this Telegram channel to collect photos and ask @patchofurr to give you posting power.
• Hashtags for social media: #Norcalfurries, #Furrypride, #SFPride.

WHAT TO DO IN THE PARADE – Show your Pride and stay safe.

When the float starts moving, it won’t stop, and monitors will stop anyone from going on or off. Keep marching pace and listen to the monitors. Monitors please be on the job! It’s about a mile long route that takes an hour.

• While marching, be alert about where the float is. Try not to bunch up as a group, leave gaps or be too distant. The front-facing banner is how watchers see the group first, but going up to the side crowd barriers is good too. Use the whole street between the float and crowds on both sides. Dance, pose, give hugs and high fives. Wave at the TV cameras placed early in the route.
• End at 8th and Market, but don’t follow the float. Marchers continue walking forward towards Civic Center, then loop around for a few blocks to regroup at Quaker Meeting House, 65 9th St.
• You can rest at Quaker Meeting House until 5. Spritz! has dinner at 5 but you may go there right away. Make sure to pick up personal items before leaving.
• Crowds have usual risks, see this street safety page. No glass bottles allowed. For continuing to the festival at Civic Center, bags and many other things are restricted, see the SF Pride security info page.

NEED HELP ON SUNDAY? 

Volunteers will be hard-pressed, so please contact them only for emergencies after using net search, the Telegram group and other members for advice. Contacts: @Zorenmanray, @Patchofurr, @Mr_Disk0, @Superjayhawk, @DidgeDingo, @RelayRaccoon.

SEE YOU THERE! Special thanks to all above organizers and Spottacus for helping make this possible. Art for banners by Kado Husky.

Like the article? These take hard work. For more free furry news, follow on Twitter or support not-for-profit Dogpatch Press on Patreon.Want to get involved? Try these subreddits: r/furrydiscuss for news or r/waginheaven for the best of the community. Or send guest writing here. (Content Policy.)

Dutch furry fandom is spawning the Otterdam Furry Arts Festival, a public event celebrating furry culture and art. Part of the festival is a conference to connect academics, researchers, and community members for multi-field learning and presenting. It will happen physically and online, and you don’t have to be professional to contribute.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS — send proposals for work you can present at the event or online — DEADLINE IS JUNE 24, 2024

The Call For Papers has details and suggestions of work to present. History, philosophy, behavior study, economics…

We encourage the submission of proposals for academic papers, short workshops, practitioner-based activities, best-practice showcases, and pre-formed panels. We welcome established academics at all stages of their careers, and warmly embrace independent scholars. We also encourage submissions from non-academic furries and welcome other presentation formats such as photographic essays, alternative presentation styles, etc.

Here’s more info from one of the Organizing Committee. Vanguard Husky is a Postgraduate Researcher in the UK at the Birmingham School of Media, Birmingham City University. He runs Chasing Tails: A Furry Research Blog.

Furry Studies: An idea whose time has come — by Reuben “Vanguard” Mount

Just under a year ago, an academic colleague and I were approached with the idea of hosting a Furry Studies academic conference as part of a wider furry focused event. Honestly, there wasn’t much consideration before we accepted. I had been studying the furry fandom as a furry myself for three years at this time and was stunned to learn that this would be the first academic conference focusing on furries.

The furry fandom has been around for a long time. I know I probably don’t need to tell anyone reading this, but even if we take the first “furry party” as the benchmark, we’ve been here for almost forty years. Conversely, Furry Studies has been around arguably since 2007 with the initial studies from a group of social psychologists that would later become FurScience. Since this beginning, the number of furry academics has grown, with some incredible voices and viewpoints from countries around the world.

This was our starting point when we were approached to organise the first furry academic conference. We wanted to bring together these distant international voices that study furries to come together either physically or digitally to share their research, their thoughts and their knowledge about the furry fandom. It was also this desire to bring together knowledge that led to the creation of Minerva, our mascot.

The final result – drumroll please – is the Furry Studies 2024 conference (furrystudies.org) in Rotterdam, Netherlands, as part of the programme of the Otterdam Furry Arts Festival (otterdam.art). This will be a full-day event at the Nieuwe Instituut (nieuweinstituut.nl) on Friday October 18th 2024, with several sessions planned to fill the whole day. The opening keynote from Joe Strike (joestrike.com), who you may know from their amazing and insightful books about the furry fandom – Furry Nation and Furry Planet.

The theme of this conference is “Being Furry”. The intention of this was to begin with a provocation that was wide enough to prompt a variety of discussions, and one that we think every furry – academic or not – could speak to even if they couldn’t definitively answer. Also, as the first furry academic conference, we wanted to keep the theming simple to lead to more- complex and in-depth questions for future conferences – but that’s a thought process for later!

The Call for Papers is on our website. It’s been warmly received by the academic side of the furry fandom and we have received some incredible and insightful submissions so far. We’re still taking submissions until June 24th so make sure you drop something in before then!

But this isn’t just for academic fluffs! We welcome anyone interested in attending in person or online as registration and speaking slots are open to all. Plus, with all of the incredible events taking place over the weekend for the Otterdam Furry Arts Festival, and the fur con Reffurence (reffurence.com) happening the weekend after, there’s plenty to enjoy during this October in Rotterdam. So make sure you drop down and say hello!

Like the article? These take hard work. For more free furry news, follow on Twitter or support not-for-profit Dogpatch Press on Patreon.Want to get involved? Try these subreddits: r/furrydiscuss for news or r/waginheaven for the best of the community. Or send guest writing here. (Content Policy.)

The first four episodes of Fur and Loathing are HERE (six episodes are coming out weekly.)

Before Episode 5 comes out, here’s a surprise bonus episode. This mid-series break is making time for the investigation team to develop new leads that emerged after the series began.

Patch interviews Nicky, and pitches him listener questions about investigating the 2014 Midwest Furfest chemical attack. This Dogpatch Press exclusive video is 20 minutes longer than the official half hour audio edit published everywhere else. (In the extra run time, you can hear about another attempt to disrupt the con… Video transcript below).

Exclusive document: FBI interview about the chemical attack.

Never published before, this document is a result of FOIA requests to law enforcement. The team at Brazen gained much more robust responses than past journalists did. From the stacks of papers, this is the FBI’s interview with a member of the Hazardous Materials Team at the Rosemont Public Safety Department.

FBI Interview of Rosemont Public Safety Department Sergeant Greg Brosch_(Redacted)

Interview video transcript

00:00:00:10 – 00:00:12:15
Patch O’Furr
Hello and welcome to the Fur & Loathing bonus episode with me and Nicky Woolf. I’m Patch O’Furr, and I’m here live from sunny, midnight California.

00:00:12:18 – 00:00:18:11
Nicky Woolf
Nice and thank you for staying up so late for this.

00:00:18:11 – 00:00:23:22
Patch O’Furr
I’m a bit of a werewolf, you know. I like the full moon. I like all the night times.

00:00:23:24 – 00:00:29:24
Nicky Woolf
Hell yeah. For listener context it is 1:15 a.m. in San Francisco right now.

00:00:30:10 – 00:00:36:24
Patch O’Furr
Yeah. So, Nicky, let’s do a quick refresher about the developments in the show so far.

00:00:37:07 – 00:01:10:12
Nicky Woolf
So episode four came out on Monday of this week. So we started out the show, we went to Midwest FurFest. We went to see the scene of the crime. Absolutely fabulous time at Midwest FurFest, and seeing the scene of the crime was a real kind of game changer, I think, for us, because the geography of the space is so different from how I’d been imagining and the things that would mean about how the gas had to spread completely kind of changed my view on things.

00:01:10:16 – 00:01:38:13
Nicky Woolf
And then we had this massive reach out through Freedom of Information requests to the FBI and to Rosemont Police, got an incredible treasure trove of documents back, which included the massive twist that the FBI’s final suspect that they were investigating in 2019, which is the last action we know the investigation took, was not the person that you and I started out thinking was our lead suspect.

00:01:38:13 – 00:02:02:15
Nicky Woolf
Well, we’ll get to those in a little bit. But a new suspect at the board, Caleb Kinkade, who we tracked down, he wasn’t named in the docs. We tracked him down using a combination of Google Street View, we knew what town it was in. We did sort of Google Street View around the town. We found the house. We knew he was in a blue house when he was interviewed and we found one.

00:02:02:20 – 00:02:22:20
Nicky Woolf
And then we zoomed in on it and saw a furry paw decal in the window. So we were like, Oh, this is our guy. And so then we found contact details for him. We got in touch and we went to Oklahoma to to chat with him and do our own little interrogation. And that was the episode that just just came out.

00:02:23:05 – 00:02:31:02
Patch O’Furr
I saw that you brought some insight on the police investigation that was even surprising to people who told me that they were there.

00:02:31:07 – 00:02:56:05
Nicky Woolf
Yes. The police investigation, it turns out, looked entirely different from how it did on the outside from the FBI docs. We know that they were working behind the scenes quite a bit more than you and I had both gone into this story thinking, in that they were running down leads in 2015, 2017 and and as late as 2019. So there was stuff going on beneath the surface.

00:02:58:02 – 00:03:19:21
Nicky Woolf
The problem was and we’ll get into that a little bit later, is that despite working on it, they made some pretty colossal screw ups, which seem to have been our guesses as that’s what kind of hobbled the investigation from being able to make any arrests or charges.

00:03:19:24 – 00:03:31:20
Patch O’Furr
Now, tell me, Nicky, what did we do to deserve a bonus episode? Were there any developments after the show started coming out? Can you give us any hints?

00:03:32:10 – 00:04:03:22
Nicky Woolf
So, yes, we’ve had we had a tip. Actually, you had a tip that we’re now chasing down and a few more bits of information have come out still in ongoing conversations with the FBI and a couple of other sources. And so we thought we’d put out a bonus episode to give an extra week to do a bit of reporting and chase down a few more leads before we go into the kind of final, final stretch of the show.

00:04:03:22 – 00:04:09:10
Patch O’Furr
Oh, man, that’s so exciting. Yeah, you’re changing it as we go.

00:04:09:21 – 00:04:18:14
Nicky Woolf
Yeah, I don’t want to say too much about those about those leads, but there’s some some pretty dramatic stuff in there. But no spoilers.

00:04:18:20 – 00:04:30:20
Patch O’Furr
We also got questions from from furry listeners coming up. Yeah, let’s go. Well, let’s see. I’m trying to operate my mouse with my giant paws!

00:04:31:04 – 00:04:58:23
Nicky Woolf
Oh, in the meantime, we can talk about one of the police screw ups, which is relevant to episode four that just came out. And we were doing a kind of re-dive through a lot of the Freedom of Information Act documents. And what happens in episode four, we end episode four coming out pretty much kind of catching the Oklahoma suspect in what we think exonerated him fairly.

00:05:00:10 – 00:05:30:03
Nicky Woolf
We were fairly confident and how we came out of that interview and then relooking through the FOIA docs and we had, you know, 300, 400 pages of documents buried really deep because we were looking at the investigation into Kinkade. One of the things that went wrong on the Caleb Kinkade, we’ll get into this in kind of episode six wrap up the two of the weird things.

00:05:30:03 – 00:06:05:17
Nicky Woolf
Actually, one of the things is that the tip off the FBI were chasing down with Caleb came four years before the incident and we thought that was a typo at first we thought, you know, they got a tip off in 2010. That must have been a typo. Right. But then when they go to interview Kinkade in 2019, they say, Hey, can you explain how this tip off came four years before the incident, to which they note Caleb’s response was, “What the fuck?”

00:06:06:07 – 00:06:27:21
Nicky Woolf
Which, yeah, that’s quite a reasonable response, to be honest, to being told that that some kind of time machine tip off came from before the event. We we have no other information in the documents about what the hell that was about. They said it was with some specificity to the incident. God only knows what that I mean. Honestly, that’s super weird.

00:06:28:19 – 00:07:01:14
Nicky Woolf
But the other thing that came out of this recent deep dive into the documents is that buried, buried way deep in one of the documents is that a different set of officers straight after the incident, when they said they first started looking into Kinkade pretty soon after the chlorine attack and quite early on, two task force officers who didn’t seem to be all that much in the rest of the documents, I think they were just kind of attached to it on the beat for that part of the investigation found–

00:07:01:21 – 00:07:32:21
Nicky Woolf
So Kinkade’s alibi had been that he was home with his disabled father, who he looks after, and that he’d gone to visit his nephew on the Saturday and they found a witness who said and it’s super heavily redacted and poorly phrased, so no one seems to have noticed it, including the rest of the FBI. But they chased down his alibi and it stood up in 2014.

00:07:32:21 – 00:08:05:24
Nicky Woolf
And that’s why we didn’t see it, because it was in the old docs. They were still investigating him for five years after that. So it seems like someone at the at the task force maybe filed the papers wrong or something. But I think the rest of the FBI don’t seem to have seen that part of the documents any more than we did before just a few days ago, because it’s so deeply buried and it’s phrased in a way that unless you really, really parse it, looks like it’s hidden.

00:08:06:07 – 00:08:34:23
Nicky Woolf
It says that they hadn’t seen him since Thanksgiving and was at his mother in law’s house. And we thought that meant that he was there for Thanksgiving. There’s actually a full stop there, which is partly covered by one of the redacteds. So that means it actually says, but on the night at ten so 1030, he was placed in Oklahoma, which on top of what he told us, that we feel exonerated him

00:08:34:23 – 00:08:58:10
Nicky Woolf
in the interview, the FBI had also stood up his alibi. So why he was their the main and final suspect in 2019 is even more baffling and speaks even more to the situation where the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing in this investigation. That’s just been so completely wild to me. But yeah, institutional, you know, fuck ups at every turn.

00:08:59:05 – 00:09:33:19
Nicky Woolf
And that’s also on top of the fact that they screwed up the evidence testing on site. And we spoke to someone from the FBI who was in a few episodes ago who said that it was wildly beyond— it seems like the FBI, where we’re trying to get confirmation of exactly when the FBI was informed. It doesn’t seem like they were informed until much later on the Sunday after the attack, because if the FBI had been informed at the time, there is no way they would have allowed people back into the hotel.

00:09:33:21 – 00:10:03:24
Nicky Woolf
They would have treated it as an active crime scene until all investigations were. But the Rosemont police, the Rosemont first responders cleared up the stairwell, cleared the crime scene, tidied it up. Wild, absolutely wild. I can only imagine someone someone at the FBI when they found this out, must have hit the roof. I mean, absolutely gone, like, “What the hell were you doing?”

00:10:03:24 – 00:10:20:23
Nicky Woolf
[Laugh] It was the Weapons of Mass Destruction Unit was called in, and they must have been like, “What the hell are you doing? What the hell have you done? There’s people in our crime scene.”

00:10:22:06 – 00:10:36:06
Patch O’Furr
Well, hey, it’s it’s really interesting to hear it from you. Well I wanted to jump to the other topic, I wanted to ask, how do people like the show? Have you been hearing from people?

00:10:36:09 – 00:11:03:06
Nicky Woolf
Yeah, seems to be going down really well. The reviews have been great. People seem to like it. It seems like— and this was very meaningful to us while we were making it, because obviously it’s a show for a general audience, but this is also really meaningful to us that the that it be something that the very community could enjoy and be proud of and that would do justice to representing that community.

00:11:03:06 – 00:11:05:09
Nicky Woolf
And I hope we’ve— I hope we’ve achieved that.

00:11:05:09 – 00:11:20:10
Patch O’Furr
Yeah. So I had a question from a listener Dralen Dragonfox over in Toronto, just asked “What kind of response have you received from the broader furry community?” And I guess you just answered that.

00:11:22:12 – 00:11:23:15
Nicky Woolf
Very positive!

00:11:23:15 – 00:11:29:02
Patch O’Furr
But I can jump in as well because I think—

00:11:29:02 – 00:11:30:11
Nicky Woolf
Yeah, what have you been hearing.

00:11:30:11 – 00:11:54:13
Patch O’Furr
So I am seeing fantastic reactions from anybody who’s ever heard the show. Just just beautiful, really great reviews. They love the quality of the show, but also how much you care. And that’s kind of surprising to some people. And I think we’re just lucky to have your professionalism on the story.

00:11:54:13 – 00:11:55:01
Nicky Woolf
Thank you.

00:11:55:01 – 00:12:23:21
Patch O’Furr
There is another side to this, because I am seeing people who obviously have not listened to the show and they’re still spreading the same old denial and the story that, “Oh, it was just an accident. We don’t believe there was ever any crime at all.” And there’s sometimes people are attacking the people who are doing the reporting, calling it fake news, saying there’s nothing new here.

00:12:24:13 – 00:12:47:00
Patch O’Furr
And, you know, it’s kind of disappointing, but it’s— I don’t know how surprising it is, but I also say that’s a great reason that the story needs to be told and people should also know how much work it took. And how much effort we’re putting into it with the whole team over at Brazen.

00:12:47:00 – 00:13:06:15
Nicky Woolf
And also, you’ve been working on this for four years. You’ve been, you know, putting in the lonely legwork of of standing this story up and being like this. This is something that matters. And I think to a certain extent, I think some of it comes down to what we were talking about just before, which is the police didn’t seem to be taking it all that seriously.

00:13:06:15 – 00:13:11:04
Nicky Woolf
So I think quite reasonably, people’s reactions have been, “Alright. So why should we?”

00:13:11:11 – 00:13:21:08
Patch O’Furr
You know what we know. Let me just ask you for a little rundown on the kind of work that you’re doing. First off, how many states have you gone to?

00:13:21:08 – 00:13:46:18
Nicky Woolf
So we have been to Illinois to to Midwest FurFest, and we have been to Oklahoma to talk with Caleb Kinkade, the Oklahoma suspect, the FBI suspect. And we have been to Wisconsin. And that is that trip is going to be a episode five, which comes out next week, a week today, when this when this broadcast.

00:13:46:18 – 00:13:50:14
Patch O’Furr
I remember there was a little bit with me over in California that was pretty cool.

00:13:51:04 – 00:13:56:02
Nicky Woolf
Oh, yeah. Well, I didn’t get to go., which was— I was very sad about that. That was with Nick.

00:13:56:15 – 00:13:58:21
Patch O’Furr
Yeah, we have to meet. I’m going to have to get you a drink.

00:13:59:03 – 00:14:00:21
Nicky Woolf
I know. I’m going to get you a drink.

00:14:01:05 – 00:14:05:06
Patch O’Furr
Yeah. How many helpers are on the team, by the way?

00:14:05:19 – 00:14:32:19
Nicky Woolf
That’s a really good opportunity to shout out to all the people who’ve done so much hard work on this, Arnav and Lucy our researchers have been so fantastic. They’ve done just incredible work. And Goat Rodeo, the whole production team, especially Max and Ian, who worked extremely hard on this. The total size of the team. I mean, it sort of depends how you count it.

00:14:32:19 – 00:14:49:13
Nicky Woolf
There were like some producers who also helped out. Then Nick has helped out with a whole load of edits. That’s Nick who you met in California, but yeah, everyone at Brazen and everyone at Goat Rodeo, it’s just been terrific.

00:14:49:23 – 00:14:54:01
Patch O’Furr
And in your travels, how many people have you talked to so far?

00:14:55:23 – 00:15:38:21
Nicky Woolf
Oh, I’d have to go into our interviews. I think we we reached out to, and in some cases exchanged some messages with, skyward of 100 people. And I think we’ve spoken to and done formal interviews with at least 20, 25 spoken off the record or informal interviews with maybe another 25. So yeah, lots and lots of people, lots of voices have gone into informing this reporting. There’s been a real — and I think quite understandable — reluctance of of people in the community to speak because of how often, you know, the community gets burned by the media, and how often journalists will come in and sort of ridicule or not really

00:15:38:22 – 00:16:04:02
Nicky Woolf
understand, or go through the old kind of tropes of just being like a sort of internet sex thing, you know, from the George Gurley article [in Vanity Fair], even the title of the podcast, Fur & Loathing, as any furry listening to this will know, is the title of a CSI episode that was really just a hit job on the community.

00:16:04:18 – 00:16:27:05
Nicky Woolf
And so then you were talking about this. We talked about how the title will will be received. And I think in that sense, it’s also been positive. People have people have said it— but, you know, people have mentioned it. And when that’s come up on on Twitter or BlueSky, I’ve said, yeah, we went back and forth.

00:16:27:10 – 00:16:41:06
Nicky Woolf
I just personally liked the name and hopefully we can reclaim it. Hopefully we can be the the Google search for that above the CSI thing and sort of memory-hole the CSI. That’s the idea.

00:16:41:11 – 00:17:10:22
Patch O’Furr
So you’ve got a whole ton of people, some very fuzzy and colorful ones and now that makes me curious about one of the very clever ones we’ve already heard from: Caleb. I want to talk about meeting him. And I actually have a listener question from Flen, the silly wolf-otter. So Flen asks, he says, “I’m from North Georgia, but I want to know what Oklahoma was like.”

00:17:10:22 – 00:17:16:09
Patch O’Furr
“I bet it was culture shock and Caleb seems like an interesting guy.”

00:17:16:20 – 00:17:42:06
Nicky Woolf
He’s a fascinating dude. I mean, going to Oklahoma was less of a culture shock for me than than it might have been because I’ve been based in the U.S. as a general assignment news reporter for a really long time. So I hadn’t actually been to Oklahoma, I think, before, but I think that made it the 46th state I’ve been to.

00:17:42:18 – 00:18:12:09
Nicky Woolf
So I’ve only got, I think, Montana, one of the Dakotas and one of the states, two of the states that are basically next to Montana to go. So I’m yeah, I lived in Ohio for a while, so Oklahoma’s bit more southern, but still where we were had a bit of Midwestern vibes as well. That’s going to annoy more people than anything else I say on this show.

00:18:13:11 – 00:18:15:14
Nicky Woolf
But yeah, I think Ohio prepared me for Oklahoma.

00:18:16:03 – 00:18:37:03
Patch O’Furr
Well, a lot more states than I’ve been to! I got to catch up with you, right? Yeah, so when you were chatting with Caleb, I thought it was, you know, really funny to hear stories about fart competitions. But, you know, I told some friends actually recording it is a feat of podcasting.

00:18:37:21 – 00:19:01:00
Nicky Woolf
So yeah, we had a a microphone, a shotgun mic that was on a boom. Luckily for Nick, who was holding it— I don’t know if Nick or Max was holding it, but very much at arm’s length trying to capture the sound. But yeah, I can well believe he’s a champion. He was really a powerfully good farter.

00:19:01:10 – 00:19:04:24
Patch O’Furr
Quite a voice. Did you have to do extra takes?

00:19:05:17 – 00:19:08:13
Nicky Woolf
Oh, he, gave us as many takes as we wanted. Yeah.

00:19:10:01 – 00:19:13:11
Patch O’Furr
Good job! A new milestone in your career.

00:19:14:00 – 00:19:38:18
Nicky Woolf
He was pretty, obviously, and as I say in the episode, somebody being charming and nice doesn’t preclude them from you know, it doesn’t mean their innocence. I think his innocence was showed by the mistakes he made about not knowing in the episode how the attack took place, but boasting about knowing. So he he got it wrong.

00:19:39:05 – 00:20:02:07
Nicky Woolf
So he thought that was a strong indicator. And then that was backed up by the fact that someone on the task force in 2014 before five more years of investigating him, but nonetheless his alibi stood up to the FBI. But yeah, he was he was really nice and he was generous with his time and spends a heck of a yarn.

00:20:02:19 – 00:20:31:01
Patch O’Furr
Okay, well, you know, it must be hard to view just sort of put in the spotlight like that with such a serious story. So I will let that rest for him and move on, because coming up, there’s another suspect. We named him: Robert Sojkowski.

00:20:31:01 – 00:21:03:08
Nicky Woolf
Yeah. This is Robert Sojkowski. Very controversial figure in the community. In the next episode coming up, we start to evaluate where things are with him and but but yeah — another really interesting angle of investigation. I don’t want to go too much further down down that road, but I think I think people are going to be really interested to hear what happened when we went up to Wisconsin.

00:21:03:14 – 00:21:07:20
Patch O’Furr
Yeah, I would avoid spoilers, but you know, I interviewed him in 2018.

00:21:08:06 – 00:21:09:06
Nicky Woolf
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:21:09:16 – 00:21:16:07
Patch O’Furr
Let me just ask, what did you do to try to reach him?

00:21:16:07 – 00:21:43:00
Nicky Woolf
It was it was hard to track him down. Not as difficult as tracking Caleb down because, you know, he still has things like his YouTube channel running and we got a whole bunch of numbers for him and a Telegram handle. And the Telegram was still active. So one of the cold calls were made to him is on Telegram and that’s the one he responded to.

00:21:43:16 – 00:21:59:20
Nicky Woolf
I mean, again, this is neither proof of guilt nor innocence, but he has also been open with us and has been willing to talk and has also been generous with his time. So well, you know, that’s not a data point one way or the other, but I think it’s it’s worth saying.

00:22:00:16 – 00:22:05:22
Patch O’Furr
Okay. Did you want to say anything else about the behavior or are we just going to find out?

00:22:06:03 – 00:22:09:17
Nicky Woolf
Let’s let’s hold off on that. We’ll get to that.

00:22:09:17 – 00:22:24:10
Patch O’Furr
Okay. Well, let’s get back to what the listeners want to know. I’ve got a lot of questions and I guess, yeah, we can start out with BowieBarks. And Bowie. asks—

00:22:24:10 – 00:22:25:00
Nicky Woolf
Hello, Bowie.

00:22:28:10 – 00:22:39:18
Patch O’Furr
And Bowie has questions about going to the Midwest FurFest. Seeing that it was your first furry convention, what did you enjoy most?

00:22:40:11 – 00:23:43:14
Nicky Woolf
I loved every second of Midwest FurFest. It was just such a joyous, just a brilliant environment to be and just so visually overwhelming and the vibes were fantastic. My favorite moment of it, and actually someone I forgot to give a shout out to is Tommy Bruce, photographer who was the first furry we ever got in touch with for the show. First person we spoke to, and was very kind and showed me around Midwest FurFest, and has been also kind of our furry moral compass with this. We’ve had this kind of fascinating conversation going and we went to this screaming— er, screening review of a whole bunch of short films made in VRChat.

00:23:44:16 – 00:24:20:21
Nicky Woolf
And they were fabulous. There was a lot of in-jokes that only a few people were getting, so we’d have one film, and like one very specific group in the room would burst out laughing and they were just surreal kind of comedic things. And then interspersed into those were these just beautiful, heartbreaking kind of, you know, goodbyes to to someone who maybe passed away or just I-miss-yous to people who live across the world, many kind of people who only interact and get to get to meet in VRChat.

00:24:22:06 – 00:24:30:18
Nicky Woolf
And so it was like swinging between like laughter and tears the whole time. It was just beautiful, like, really, really moving.

00:24:30:24 – 00:24:43:03
Patch O’Furr
So nice. Wow. Yeah. So Bowie went on to ask, was there anything that challenged you?

00:24:43:07 – 00:25:31:24
Nicky Woolf
Challenged— I mean, just trying to see everything was such a challenge. There’s so much on. We were running from— we went from a panel on the very beginnings of history of the fandom, which was fascinating. Running from there to a panel on— this was dramatic to me., it was not just a panel on fursuit making, it was a panel by three big fursuit makers on just how to get your commission even noticed by them. And you know these are people who are making a suit for $10,000, $15,000 and just to get your commission noticed by them was something that needed a panel that gave advice.

00:25:32:08 – 00:26:00:12
Nicky Woolf
But just getting from all of these panels, from panel to panel to, you know, stall to stall, trying to see everything was exhausting. And I think Cara, who’s the producer who was with me, her Apple Watch or something, said that we’d walked something like 14 kilometers over the course of each day, maybe more. Just doing that in a full fursuit…

00:26:00:12 – 00:26:03:19
Nicky Woolf
… must be— and it is hot. I mean, it is like—

00:26:04:21 – 00:26:06:15
Patch O’Furr
Wow.

00:26:06:15 – 00:26:07:04
Nicky Woolf
So yeah.

00:26:08:09 – 00:26:11:08
Patch O’Furr
This is why they have a fursuit lounge.

00:26:12:03 – 00:26:16:20
Nicky Woolf
Air-conditioned all the way down.

00:26:16:20 – 00:26:37:09
Patch O’Furr
Saves lives. Yeah. Okay, so, boy, I’ve got quite a list here. One more for BowieBarks. And this is a hard one. You don’t have to spend a lot of time on this. But you called furries a bellwether for the rest of the world. What you think is coming?

00:26:37:09 – 00:27:01:05
Nicky Woolf
That is a huge question. And I think what I meant was furries and kind of all digital communities to me in this kind of— There’s like a deep theoretical answer to this that it’s more like an essay unto itself, but in brief, I think what the Internet has done is changed the geography of communication almost completely.

00:27:03:00 – 00:27:33:06
Nicky Woolf
And I think the furry fandom is a good example of how you can have a fandom that I think Uncle Kage said it in a really good way when we spoke to him, but it was that it’s a fandom without a corporate piece of content that is being fandomed. It’s like a self-made fandom, you know? It’s not cosplay in the way that people are dressing up as Marvel characters or Disney characters and things like that.

00:27:34:14 – 00:28:09:12
Nicky Woolf
And I don’t think you could have that without the Internet, without that kind of peer-to-peer communication network. But I also think that the effect of that peer-to-peer communication network that allow, you know, folks who might be in a small town, not have a huge amount in common with the people around them and have found the furry community online as that community and again, through these VR videos, we saw a lot of that emotion coming through.

00:28:09:12 – 00:28:50:14
Nicky Woolf
But unfortunately, that same infrastructure makes it much easier for the far right to both infiltrate and organize. And I think within the furry fandom, we saw a lot of that, especially in 2017 when oh God, to even have to name him when when you know who that guy started to try to come to furry conventions. And, you know, these alt right figures saw it as an opportunity to infiltrate and you end up with things like the furry raiders.

00:28:51:18 – 00:29:19:05
Nicky Woolf
So I think the Internet does both of those things. And I think wider society, more more traditional groups in society are starting to experience that as communication becomes more and more similarly online and more kind of mainstream groupings and and even politics. And we’re already seeing, you know, Donald Trump is running for president again. That doesn’t happen without the Internet.

00:29:19:17 – 00:29:24:11
Patch O’Furr
Okay. Next question from Arrkay the Bird. Yeah, Arrkay…

00:29:24:18 – 00:29:25:21
Nicky Woolf
Hello Arrkay!

00:29:26:05 – 00:29:32:10
Patch O’Furr
… asks, is there any hope for justice or new evidence that the police can use to prosecute?

00:29:33:00 – 00:30:12:08
Nicky Woolf
So the thing that’s difficult in that question is one thing we ran up against, we spoke to some experts to try and firm it out and all we could really got was it’s complicated, but we’re fairly sure that there is a statute of limitations issue on what happened. Now, the statute of limitations in Illinois is at a default five years, which is why we think the FBI made a final push to be interviewing Caleb in 2019 because that was just before the five year timeline.

00:30:13:11 – 00:30:42:23
Nicky Woolf
Now, there’s nothing in the documents that specify that there’s a statute of limitations. And one of the formal questions that we’ve asked the FBI for comment on was this question. And they said no comment. Statute of limitations would be different on a federal terrorism charge, which is one of the potential things that could be being looked into. Another thing the FBI wouldn’t answer as is this case still being it’s still open, still considered under investigation.

00:30:42:23 – 00:31:03:09
Nicky Woolf
They wouldn’t say, well, I think pretty standard for the FBI to answer those kind of questions with no comment. But we we don’t know if new information that we bring up from the podcast and we’ve heard from different sources. We’ve spoke to some of the same sources the FBI have. We think we’ve spoken to different sources. We have different eyewitness testimony.

00:31:05:04 – 00:31:18:06
Nicky Woolf
But no idea if if this will lead to more law enforcement action because they’re so opaque and because we don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes and what kind of pressure they might be under.

00:31:18:07 – 00:31:24:09
Patch O’Furr
Well, that makes a good link to the next question. And this one is also from Dralen Dragonfox.

00:31:25:11 – 00:31:26:01
Nicky Woolf
Hi, Dralen

00:31:27:10 – 00:31:45:18
Patch O’Furr
Dralen says, I love the accidental support that you got from the FBI with the badly redacted FOIA files. Have you seen that before or have you seen them mess up on purpose, like some misspell names so they can say there’s no documents?

00:31:46:14 – 00:32:19:09
Nicky Woolf
That definitely happens. In this case, it doesn’t seem like they were doing redactions to avoid it. It was almost so dramatic compared to previous reporting that happened on this case. We got so much more documents than, say, Vice did when they sent their requests. That was a piece that this maybe five years ago. It could be some sometimes it’s as simple as you capture FOIA officer in the right mood and they’re like, okay, yeah, maybe we will.

00:32:19:13 – 00:32:42:24
Nicky Woolf
Sometimes you’ve no idea whether it’s been run up the chain or not, whether someone at the FBI has said, “OK, we want to get these documents out, maybe they can find something that will allow us to—”. There’s also a lot of accidents that go on. I think a lot of our documents were very poorly redacted and that may have been incompetence.

00:32:43:04 – 00:33:05:10
Nicky Woolf
We don’t know whose. Some of the documents were from Rosemont Police, but were given to us by the FBI for their response. We don’t know who did the redactions that we don’t know if it was Rosemont-redacted or FBI-redacted. I mean, in one case, they put somebody’s Social Security Number unredacted and now that’s—

00:33:06:00 – 00:33:46:01
Nicky Woolf
That’s a screw up. I mean, that should not be in a Freedom of Information Act document with that being there. They also — and this is an interesting sign about how how they think about the furry community — is that they would redact, uh, witnesses, real-world name and not redact their fursona name, which implies they just sort of don’t know how, how core a piece of identity a fursona name is and how easy it would be for someone who really wanted to, to identify, you know, to track down a person with their fursona name.

00:33:46:01 – 00:34:09:22
Nicky Woolf
And in the past I’ve had documents released to me accidentally. I did a FOIA investigation when I was at The Guardian into a national security story about police surveillance. And we sent a Freedom of Information request to, 50-something police departments. And one of them gave us classified documents either by accident or because they wanted them to come out.

00:34:10:07 – 00:34:22:22
Nicky Woolf
So it can it can happen positively. But yeah, there have definitely been stories of purposeful misspellings being introduced into FOIA docs in order to make journalists lives difficult, so it goes both ways.

00:34:22:22 – 00:34:40:17
Patch O’Furr
You really have to finesse it and know what you’re doing. BowieBarks dropped in another comment, he said another podcast was saying to be vague with FOIA to keep them from guessing exactly what you’re trying to get at so they don’t redact it.

00:34:40:24 – 00:35:12:03
Nicky Woolf
I would say if we’re doing advice to you know, general FOIA advice ,you can’t really ask a vague question because they aren’t giving yes or no answers, they’re either providing a document or not. So document specificity is the most important thing if you’re looking for a police report and you know roughly what date, all that kind of thing is what I would put in.

00:35:12:05 – 00:35:38:10
Nicky Woolf
It’s not the same thing as asking a journalistic question. So you can’t put a FOIA request in saying something like, is this still active? You have to say, we want all email communication between X and Y date between this agent’s email address and responding to a keyword search of X, Y and Z.

00:35:39:01 – 00:35:59:22
Nicky Woolf
That’s the kind of thing that helps with a FOIA response. If you know even more about what the documents might be, that’s your kind of best shot going in with a Freedom of Information Act request. If you give them any vagueness, that’ll give them an opportunity, an excuse to to not to not give you back anything.

00:36:00:23 – 00:36:42:00
Nicky Woolf
So that’s FOIA advice, okay. Let me look at Arnav and see if that’s good FOIA advice. Arnav’s the FOIA king. I’m getting a thumbs up on that advice. On the subject of FOIAs, we will be sharing some of the FOIA docs as we go and we will have one exclusively for Dogpatch Press, which will be the first original incident report that people can go through and read. It’ll go up on Monday along with this video, so people can have a look through and get a little window into what a FOIA document looks like and see what happened on on the night as well through the through the eyes of the first responders.

00:36:43:18 – 00:36:45:14
Nicky Woolf
So that’ll be fun.

00:36:45:15 – 00:36:57:18
Patch O’Furr
That is that is some exciting direct documents there. How much support did you have from the FBI and local police, versus how much did you actually have to work in spite of them?

00:36:58:19 – 00:37:27:15
Nicky Woolf
Except for the surprisingly generous FOIA response we’ve had very, very little cooperation from either the FBI or Rosemont. None of our direct questions to them, none of the official questions have been answered with anything other than a no comment. Even for working with the security agencies, which I’ve done a lot of before in my career., this has been a real code of silence.

00:37:27:24 – 00:38:05:01
Nicky Woolf
This is unusually unhelpful, non-compliant surprisingly, which is what makes this and this is just kind of vibe-based, it is how they would be responding— It’s more likely how they would be responding if this was still an active case or if they thought this could still be an active case. But it’s also, to a certain extent, it’s their default way of being so it’s hard to read too much into that.

00:38:05:01 – 00:38:22:06
Nicky Woolf
But yeah, we’ve had to work with the documents, which again have been hugely, hugely important to the to the investigation. But in terms of actively speaking with the FBI in Rosemont, it’s been despite them definitely.

00:38:22:06 – 00:38:39:12
Patch O’Furr
Okay. Well, that might actually answer the next question. And this is again, this is Arrkay the Bird and Arrkay asks, “Are there interviews coming up with law enforcement who took the case seriously?”

00:38:39:12 – 00:39:17:22
Nicky Woolf
No, they have not allowed us access to any of the officers involved or anyone who might even represent the officers involved. And again, I think we said this earlier, but Agent Defeo, Shaun Rose, if you guys want to get in contact, I think you guys have done good work and good for both of you for sticking with it in what seem to be quite difficult, internal conditions. If either if you want to chat my, you know, my emails are open. But yeah we’ve been offered no access to them whatsoever.

00:39:17:22 – 00:39:52:24
Patch O’Furr
Okay, let’s see. Well, we have a question from Bean and you know, this is a funny one. I want to start off saying that when you choose a fursona, there are certain cartoon characters that are just instantly, you know, it’s fun to recognize. Like, for example, if you want to have an animal who is a bank robber then it might be a raccoon — you’ve got stripes, you’ve got the mask.

00:39:53:15 – 00:39:54:15
Nicky Woolf
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:39:55:08 – 00:40:01:01
Patch O’Furr
So If you chose a persona, what would it be?

00:40:01:13 – 00:40:26:03
Nicky Woolf
So this is a great question because going into when we went to Midwest FurFest, we had this idea of doing a scene where we get people together and, you know, find find Nicky’s fursona. And obviously my last name is Woolf. So part of that might be easy. But I was also thinking of, you know, some based on puns and things like that.

00:40:26:13 – 00:41:14:09
Nicky Woolf
But the more people we spoke to, the more I started to get the feeling that actually that was maybe not offensive necessarily, but kind of in poor taste. I think it was Tommy again who who might have said this but it was or it might have been someone else we spoke to — but it was the idea that that it wasn’t taking it seriously, that a fursona is for a lot of people, a really meaningful and important part of their lives and picking one, you know, finding a pun and being like what’s mine felt like it wasn’t taking that as seriously as it deserved to.

00:41:14:09 – 00:41:37:13
Nicky Woolf
Someone even might have said that it’s sort of like, what’s your gaysona? You know, like and that kind of— they’re not directly comparable. But yeah, we sort of shelved that idea as being in slightly poor taste. But I think given my name is Woolf, if I was— it would be a wolf, I think.

00:41:37:13 – 00:41:54:16
Patch O’Furr
Let’s see. Well, now Bowie is here with another question. Boy, he’s a very curious dog here. Will you be involved with the community more or will you do any other investigations related to furries?

00:41:55:04 – 00:42:24:15
Nicky Woolf
So I already went into this with lots of friends in the fandom. I’ve come out with lots more. I’d love to go to more cons. I had such a great time. So yeah, I think I’ll definitely stay involved. And other investigations, absolutely. Looking for more stories. It’s part of my— my kind of beat is internet subcultures and furries are such a huge part of that

00:42:24:15 – 00:42:46:21
Nicky Woolf
Actually, so for example, in the QAnon podcast I did, we worked very closely with a guy called Fred Brennan who’s also in the fandom, which is interesting. So yeah, it just shows how much crossover there is with the furry fandom with other kind of internet subcultures and communities.

00:42:48:10 – 00:42:58:20
Patch O’Furr
Okay, let’s see. Well, Arrkay asks, “Are there any ideas for a season two?” I’m just going to say you’ll find out.

00:42:58:20 – 00:43:15:06
Nicky Woolf
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Watch this space or listen to this space, I guess. But I will say if people— help in terms of getting season two: if everyone can leave nice reviews on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and things, that always helps.

00:43:15:13 – 00:43:40:04
Patch O’Furr
So tell all your friends, share it around, since your fine work is worth sharing. I guess we’re getting towards wrapping up a little bit. And I just wanted to point out — one point the show makes is how much the police messed up. I’m just curious, do you see any lessons?

00:43:40:04 – 00:44:28:23
Nicky Woolf
There’s some specific ones and some general ones. Some of the specific ones, as we found out and a lot of this was in the first two episodes, but we found out some pretty unpleasant stuff about Rosemont Police Department itself. Rosemont is this weird, financially designed town. It’s got a population of about 3,000 at a budget in the high millions because all these conventions happen, there are all these kind of business centers, the airport hotels are there, and they’re a tiny police force run internally, that’s independent of a major police force like Chicago.

00:44:30:06 – 00:44:59:08
Nicky Woolf
And it seems like there were some quite serious organizational failures within that police department that we think may well have contributed quite heavily to the early mistakes that were made. And certainly there were other allegations of things going on in Rosemont Police Department that that we heard that build a picture of it being pretty disorganized place. And for some of the people we spoke to a kind of unpleasant place to work too.

00:44:59:16 – 00:45:31:00
Nicky Woolf
And then the organizational stuff is whenever something like this happens, you have so many different agencies that get involved, so much paperwork is produced. When you have three different divisions at the FBI, you’ve got field office, you’ve got the WMD unit, you’ve got the Behavioral Analysis Unit, and then you’ve got the Rosemont Police Department, you’ve got Chicago Fire, who were also some of the first responders, because Rosemont asked for their assistance.

00:45:31:00 – 00:46:12:03
Nicky Woolf
And that’s how you end up with stuff like one part of the investigation checking up on, say, Caleb’s alibi, but other parts of the investigation seeming not to have realized. And you just end up with all these communication failures where one part of the investigation doesn’t know what the other part is doing. Rosemont Police Department destroyed what might have been some crucial evidence, such as the tapes of police interviews with suspects. We are trying to figure out if that’s standard practice.

00:46:12:11 – 00:46:31:02
Nicky Woolf
That’s one of the things that we’ve asked the FBI. That’s another of the things the FBI has given us a flat “no comment” on is where the chain of custody of the evidence is, because, again, they cleared the crime scene straight afterwards. This is the Rosemont responders. We don’t know where the broken glass from the device ended up.

00:46:31:02 – 00:47:00:09
Nicky Woolf
We don’t know if that’s in some kind of locker somewhere or if it was literally just thrown away. That all kinds of different people who are handling evidence all with different aims, and then you’ve got what people are investigating for. We don’t know what specific crime is being investigated. And that’s an important question for the statute of limitations question because a federal terrorist defense will have a different statute of limitations to the basic Illinois five years.

00:47:00:24 – 00:47:33:10
Nicky Woolf
We don’t know if the case was being investigated as a terroristic crime or as something lesser. We think if they were making a push for the five-year statute of limitations, they were looking for something lesser than than a terrorist offense. But we don’t know. All of this stuff is very opaque. It’s hard to come out of this question with what is, I think, obvious to anyone who’s followed any kind of the news in the United States…

00:47:33:17 – 00:47:39:23
Nicky Woolf
… for any of the last ten years. But I think some law enforcement reform probably wouldn’t go amiss in general.

00:47:40:14 – 00:48:07:03
Patch O’Furr
So earlier I mentioned that there were non-listeners who were just denying and dismissing the story, saying there wasn’t a crime, there’s no news, you know, I mean they haven’t listened to it. So I just wanted to make a little reminder about the gravity of the story. And if we put the attack next to others like it, is it really fair to call this one of the biggest ones?

00:48:07:20 – 00:48:51:12
Nicky Woolf
Yes, ultimately. There has not been, as far as I know, an attack— a single attack of this scale. The reason that we’ve been calling it the second biggest chemical weapon attack is that the 2001 anthrax campaign, I think, hospitalized fewer people but killed three people. And some of that— one of the things we’ve heard from law enforcement that we’ve talked to who weren’t involved in the case, but former law enforcement who are giving us advice, is that the fact that nobody died, I think may have put it in a different law enforcement category, even though 19 people were hospitalized, including one infant.

00:48:51:12 – 00:49:18:22
Nicky Woolf
And it’s very serious. But, yeah, there’s not really been anything of this scale before or since. And yeah, we’ve spoken to a lot of former former law enforcement and former FBI who’ve all started off saying, Yeah, “What the hell are you talking about?” And we run down the details of the story, the scale of the, you know, the casualties, the number of people who were hospitalized.

00:49:19:08 – 00:49:42:07
Nicky Woolf
And universally, all of their responses have been, “Holy shit, how am I just hearing about this now for the first time?” And I think that’s a very good question. I mean, we’ve spoken to people who were working in the chemical weapons investigative unit for national FBI. And when someone like that is saying, “How the fuck did this not come across my desk?”

00:49:43:23 – 00:49:50:07
Nicky Woolf
I think that’s a really good question. How the hell did that not come across their desk?

00:49:50:07 – 00:49:56:13
Patch O’Furr
Is there anything we could say on behalf of the victims? Did you speak to anybody who was hospitalized?

00:49:57:01 – 00:50:20:07
Nicky Woolf
We didn’t. And I think quite reasonably so. We have a lot of written testimonial sources and lot of contemporary documents we got in touch with— we reached out to almost everyone who we knew was affected and people declined to speak, I think probably quite reasonably, because it was a very traumatic event.

00:50:20:07 – 00:50:45:20
Nicky Woolf
So I wouldn’t want to speak on on their behalf. I do think one of the questions and maybe a question for you and and also a question that we want to ask for people in the community is what should a punishment for this crime be? What would be fair justice? What would that look like? And that’s something that isn’t my place to answer.

00:50:46:20 – 00:51:16:08
Patch O’Furr
One of the things that stands out to me, which I don’t know, is part of your, you know, the math behind figuring out what to do with this story. But from inside the community, I recognize this attack is actually only the first one that was a terror attack or a would-be terror plan that was targeting Midwest FurFest.

00:51:17:01 – 00:51:37:12
Patch O’Furr
And the other one is generally not even recognized. People know half of the story but they don’t know the deeper half and that half of the story is in 2019 when alt-right personality Milo [Yiannopoulos] wanted to go to the con and people.

00:51:39:14 – 00:51:40:09
Nicky Woolf
He-who-shall-not-be-named.

00:51:40:14 – 00:52:12:15
Patch O’Furr
Yeah, sorry, we’ll just use— we’ll just call him Mr. M. Well, in 2019, Mr. M there, wanted to attend Midwest FurFest and it was recognized as a kind of a troll plan and he was rebuffed. He was rejected in advance of the con. But what almost nobody saw or knew was there was a deeper plan to bring the Proud Boys.

00:52:13:04 – 00:52:37:06
Patch O’Furr
And of course, they went on to do the January 6 riot at the Capitol. So this was a plan to bring domestic terrorism, street violence by a group that is now officially convicted of terrorism to a furry convention. So here we go. There’s this. This is the second time Midwest FurFest was targeted.

00:52:37:22 – 00:53:09:00
Nicky Woolf
And it’s not just that. Right. You know, even earlier this year, there was another bomb threat. The furry fandom is often targeted by by this kind of thing. And it is at that intersection where trolling can sometimes spill over into actual violence. Right. And that, I think, is a risk that the it’s quite active all the time. Thank you so much for chatting with me, Patch, for this bonus episode.

00:53:09:00 – 00:53:31:07
Nicky Woolf
Always a pleasure. Hello to viewers on Dogpatch Press. Subscribe to Fur & Loathing wherever you get your podcasts if you’re watching this. And if you’re listening to this as part of the feed, I hope you’re enjoying the show. Don’t forget to leave a review — unless you’re not enjoying the show, in which case, I guess, well done for getting five episodes in anyway.

00:53:31:07 – 00:53:41:11
Nicky Woolf
And yeah, tune in next week for our penultimate episode. We start to close in on some theories.

00:53:42:06 – 00:53:43:01
Patch O’Furr
Thank you so much.

00:53:43:04 – 00:53:44:19
Nicky Woolf
Thank you! As always, a pleasure.

00:53:44:19 – 00:53:55:17
Patch O’Furr
I’m so glad you gave so much time and attention and all of your professionalism and your talent. And yeah, I’m just looking forward to hearing more.

00:53:55:17 – 00:54:14:13
Nicky Woolf
And thank you so much for all your hard work on this story. It’s been fantastic and thank you for staying up so late to chat.

Like the article? These take hard work. For more free furry news, follow on Twitter or support not-for-profit Dogpatch Press on Patreon.Want to get involved? Try these subreddits: r/furrydiscuss for news or r/waginheaven for the best of the community. Or send guest writing here. (Content Policy.)

On Youtube, founder of Altfurry admits it was for “Radicalizing mentally unstable people” — leading to swatting each other — Video below.

Casey “Len Gilbert” Hoerth lives with his parents in Texas, and used to be a freelance financial blogger for mainstream sites. It was the closest thing he had to a real job or creative outlet, despite trying to publish an embarrassing erotic furry Nazi novel called The Furred Reich.

Casey’s fandom for 1940’s Nazi Germany would lead him to fall in love with modern neo-nazis. This fueled his ambition to use furry fandom as a doormat for alt-right hate politics. While supporting friends at the deadly torchlight Unite The Right riot in 2017, Casey gathered fellow trolls in a fringe of hate groups called Altfurry. His plan was to groom new recruits with redpilling for “revenge based guerilla tactics.”

Taking cues from general neo-nazism, Casey would hide behind deniability, and downplay his trolling as fiction and fandom. Meanwhile, he sought alliance with real terrorists. Casey reached out to white supremacists like Christoper “The Crying Nazi” Cantwell and the Patriot Front hate group, and tried to get friends to join the Jan 6 riot at the Capitol. Altfurry would end up linked to criminals while Casey traded prison mail with convicted mass shooters and made video promoting the Midwest Furfest chemical attack suspect.

Casey’s former employers found out and deleted all of his work from their websites.

Without a job or purpose, Casey was left with what he considered kindred spirits in Altfurry. His ambitions amounted to nothing but constant treading water as they failed over and over. He eventually became a truck driver and tried to gain influence by meeting sympathizers on his routes, then by grabbing for control of the defunct Altfurry convention Free Fur All that was ruined by its own membership.

Now, after 7 wasted years, Casey finally admits defeat in the Youtube video quoted below: “I’m done with political furry groups, they’re not what people want, they’re a joke.”

“It was a mistake to build communities for that, all I was doing was radicalizing mentally unstable people, you can take a wild guess how that ends.” 

Casey saw it end with his kindred spirits swatting each other. Still, his nazi-remorse is unrepentant. He’s sad because he failed, not because he grew and changed.

Background of culture war in fandom: The nature of hate groups inside and why they always fail. 

How did furries experience the rise of the alt-right? When a tide rises in the main culture, a bubble of subculture floats with it, but it can also have some independence. Furries have it when creative expression aligns with queer expression on an emotional level. Devoted members grow shared interest, and a lot of them happen to be LGBT. That’s not politics creating difference from the mainstream; it comes from organic feeling, like creative people have in their hearts. They feel who gets along and who doesn’t. This filters out those who don’t.

A fringe of people end up outside the bubble because they don’t get along. That still isn’t politics. It comes from nuisance behavior that tells other people to avoid them until they grow and change, or they choose a new hobby or place to go from the endless choices we all have.

That’s freedom… but some who have it can’t be satisfied, because they lack ability to contribute positively, and envy those who do. This boils down the remaining fringe to malice and grudges, which ferments into trolling and sabotage. That’s how Altfurries exist as enemies to what they consider “politics” against them. Again, this isn’t politics. Nobody asks how you vote to join a fandom. Altfurry is about being creeps and assholes to people who have each other’s backs on an emotional level, and altfurries reek of bad intentions, so people avoid them no matter how they vote.

This isn’t opinion. It’s tested and proven over and over by Altfurry behavior to each other in their own spaces.

Hateful trolls are incapable of getting along or identifying as anything more than enemies to something. Their reason to exist negates any peaceful co-existence they can ever have. It makes a giant blind spot: they are the thing they hate the most. They spend a lot of time complaining about being “canceled,” when they do it to each other in factions full of infighting. They expect loyalty, but don’t give it, because each one is out for themselves.

You can hear about it from one of the people most responsible.

Text notes of Casey Hoerth’s Youtube video — Or watch the video archived in a Telegram channel for receipts of Casey’s Altfurry background.

Quick points to get up to speed on inside topics:

• Casey’s Altfurry faction was for overt alt-right politics, but covertly enabling sex predators — only pretending to oppose them for optics.
• The Furry Raiders faction with Foxler is known for nazi armbands. It’s more covertly alt-right, but overtly pro-predator, vexing Casey’s quest for influence.
• Breaking point: Casey backed Foxler until his support of predator Kero The Wolf finally made Casey disown him long after his predator nature was clear.
• Other competing factions have varying sliders of beliefs, but behind their infighting, it all boils down to malicious intentions.
• “Let Furdom Ring” is another faction run by Viktor, who carried out swatting on a fellow Altfurry, MightyRed.
• Casey and Foxler’s factions were the main rivals for control of the Free Fur All Altfurry convention that died by infighting.
• Magnus Diridian is a Furry Raider, the “Confederate flag fursuiter” at Free Fur All, and the main FBI suspect for the Midwest Furfest chemical attack.

(These notes keep Casey’s Altfurry handle “Len Gilbert”, and were speed-transcribed. Reference video for more detail.)

6:00 Interview starts with the host and Len, and some watchers who comment in chat.

9:00 Len calls himself founder of Altfurry in 2016. He gathered “canceled” people to the group, who chased negative attention as kind of a psy-op.

11:00 Len met Magnus Diridian as one of the “canceled”, then met at Free Fur All (FFA) with all those people for the first time.

12:00 Len says it taught him how to behave properly, and realize he was doing things wrong. Now he doesn’t have anything in common with canceled people who are emotionally disturbed, malformed, cranks, in it for negativity and offending. He thinks it wasn’t even political, they were clinging to that to trigger people. Magnus was top of the offender list, with Foxler, as well as Foxler’s toadie Aeveirra, Crusader Cat, etc.

13:00 Len was going to be Magnus’ fursuit handler, but Magnus ditched him at FFA for Furry Raiders. It hurt him.

14:00 Praising Magnus’ fursuit making, Len used to be a big fan; but Magnus used the suits to piss people off and wasted the talent. “Never meet your heroes”.

15:30 All the other Altfurries ditched their “debate” video, it was supposed to be about the Altfurry fighting for control and the potential of unity.

17:00 Host asks about Furred Reich book. Len: “It was a bit embarrassing, I pulled it and it only exists on Kiwifarms and Dogpatch Press, so if people ask, I assume that’s where they get their info”.

19:00 “It’s no longer a nazi furry erotica book”. Magnus was going to join the video, but couldn’t except for leaving a few comments in chat now.

20:00 Talking about other Altfurries (Riled and Viktor), who hate Len. Viktor runs another Altfurry chat. Len calls him out of control. He obsesses with grudges.

They want to do nothing but to hurt the "other side". They have no reason for being, no purpose, and no goals: only pain.

— Fen (@chemicalcrux) November 6, 2020

23:00 Len blocked Viktor. Host says they want to work with him, but Len says he was bullied, and they have bad policies about canceling people and being vengeful. He says Viktor rants with giant walls of text and it’s a constantly cycling ride. Len got off the ride.

26:00 Len says he’s still upset about Magnus for ditching him at FFA and he’s basically a Furry Raider. He knows Magnus loves hanging out with them because of Foxler’s trolling, both of them live off negative attention, and Foxler toadie Aeveirra is another “sleaze bag”.

27:00 Magnus says he isn’t a Raider, but Len says YES YOU ARE because you hang out with them. Magnus comments: “No they hang out with me”. Len brings up Magnus’ troll fursuit of Lemonade Coyote, a deceased furry who was loved in the fandom, whose character was copied without permission by Magnus, showing how “sick in the head” he is. Len at first believed his excuse that it was an homage. Then Magnus boasted about how much attention he could get with it, if he hung out with Foxler and wore an armband on it.

29:00 Foxler’s toadie Aeveirra posted a photo of Magnus doing that. Len says it was scummy and fuck you.

30:00 Magnus comments “Len didn’t see the other 90% of stuff I did that was positive”.

31:00 Talking about Foxler being a pedo and zoophile – it’s not rumors. Len says he was misguided and excused that stuff before. Len realized what the Raiders really were because of the Kero the Wolf thing. Foxler tried to get Kero into the Raiders. Raiders are a network of pedos and zoos and mentally sick people, and it’s all about offending and not political.

34:00 Another Altfurry, MightyRedWolf in Hawaii, comments in chat with a claim about false charges. Len says “Don’t you think crime records would be posted in public? Bullshit.” Oh wait… Viktor did organize attempted swatting on MightyRedWolf, using a patsy to carry out the scheme.

37:00 He admits Viktor paid the patsy $80 to get dox and call a swat on MightyRedWolf. A cop showed up at Red’s door with a gun drawn, and there’s a video of the swatting somewhere.

39:00 Magnus shares a list of good deeds: Fursuit skit, easter egg hunt, music video.

40:00 Playing Magnus’ FFA performance as “Zombie Lemonade Coyote” and Aeveirra trolling. Len: that was a scumbag thing to do.

43:00 Mocking Magnus for not coming on audio because he can’t explain himself. MightyRed is still rambling about Viktor, and says the swatting was under Len’s watch. Stupid comments about Aeveirra. MightyRed is still accusing Len about dodging the swatting topic. More mocking Magnus.

48:00 Going over the Free Fur All controversy with FFA runners Peacewolf, her ex-husband Foxglove, and Jasonafex who she cucked him with. Len apologized to Peacewolf for trolling her and inflaming her divorce from Foxglove, to split control of the con and grab it back for his faction. The control scheme “devolved” into terrorizing her emotionally. Host calls Peacewolf a whore and sympathizes with Foxglove. In chat comment, Altfurry Astral praises Len for apologizing. Len says to read the Google doc about it.

Tulsa's Free Fur All Fashcon failed because it was made for Nazis, Nazis are toxic to everything including EACH OTHER, and that's NOT POLITICS. New proof: admission of instigating toxicity from inside by Casey "Len Gilbert" Hoerth, the nazi hiding behind @/furryrespector. pic.twitter.com/RDSvOU4bzJ

— Nazifur Receipts (@NazifurReceipts) April 17, 2024

52:30 Len Gilbert and Magnus made a video together in 2018 about Magnus’ ban from Midwest Furfest. Len says he did it to defend Magnus from leftists “framing” Magnus for chlorine bombing the convention in 2014 (he admitted being the FBI’s main suspect). Magnus says he was banned for his Confederate flag fursuit, and Len praises it. Magnus comments: he made the suit because the flag was banned. Magnus pokes Len again about previously condoning his Lemonade Coyote ripoff fursuit. Len says he realized it was trolling when he wore it with Raiders at FFA.

55:00 Comments whining about politics making fandom toxic. MightyRed sent audio of swatting claims, but it’s stupid. A bunch of stupid repetitive comments.

102:00 Viktor Markov’s real name is “Eric.”

105:00 Len thinks Magnus is canceled for seeking attention, but “Magnus hasn’t done anything illegal” (despite admitting he was the FBI’s main suspect in a chemical terror attack.)

107:00 Len thought Altfurries were kindred spirits, but they were anything but and he needed to cut them out of his life. “Bye Magnus”. Other Altfurries want to join forces again to be a “powerhouse”. Len says “we already have worked together”, and it ended with Viktor being vengeful, he doesn’t want a “bathhouse powerhouse.”

112:00 Len: Swatting MightyRed was organized inside Viktor’s chat admin channel. Comment: all the Altfurry drama is a “feedback loop of shit flinging”. Magnus blames Len for having a grudge. Len repeats accusations about Furry Raider pedos and trolling. They play the video Len made with Magnus in 2018 to defend him from being “framed” for the Midwest Furfest attack. Magnus denies seeing anything wrong with the Raiders, after Len denied there could be anything illegal about Magnus.

117:00 Altfurry Astral challenges Len to prove the Raiders are all pedos. Len says “he’s peeing on my leg and telling me it’s raining.” Magnus repeats more defenses.

120:00 They want Altfurry Dojo Dingo back. A comment complains about Dojo being bullied out of fandom. Astral denies being a Raider. Len calls them cockroaches and says they all deny it while rooming together, fucking each other, and playing semantics games.

122:00 FFA is dead. Len will never go again. He will go to other conventions like TFF in Texas.

123:00 Astral denies getting pedophilic cub art. Len mocks all of them for hanging out with Raiders cub lovers and being disgusting, and mocks Astral and Magnus for excusing it. “Fuckers, what’s the matter with these people?” Magnus complains about guilt by association. Len: “They cling to it, play games, it’s a cub porn zoophile group, you’re gross and nasty and stupid to be in it”. Magnus comments “You can’t tell me who I hang out with, I even roomed with Carpet Sample, and had Kage at my house.” Astral says cub porn is everywhere, Len mocks him for excusing it.

129:00 Chat comment by Panda of FFA: “It’s not guilt by association. It just shows you’re a gross person with poor standards.” Len: “Thank you.”

130:00 Len: “I don’t really hang out in political chats any more, I’m not interested in working with political channels, it was a mistake to build communities for that. All I was doing was radicalizing mentally unstable people, you can take a wild guess how that ends. I moved on after Viktor wanted to call relatives of mine, like he did to MightyRed. I want to move on with life and be a normal person.” – Now Len goes to real events and runs his drama channel and “wholesome hangout”. He tells Magnus to use his fursuit making talent, and stop being a mental case out for attention. Final word to Viktor: “I know who you are and where you live, do not ever talk to me again.” “I admire anyone who gets off their ass and makes content, a lot of furries on this side of the fandom just bitch and complain.” He complains about people calling his relatives and siblings.

135:00 Len: “I’m done with political furry groups, they’re not what people want, they’re a joke.”

From the horse’s mouth

Have you ever seen such cognitive dissonance from creepy nuisances judging each other’s offenses? They’re so close, but so far from self-realization.

Casey Hoerth hates how his constant nuisance behavior dragged his family into the drama he started. Actually, time and again, that’s the #1 way to neutralize malicious schemers. Often it doesn’t even require getting the attention of uninvolved people. It’s built in to their relationships. The last straw for Free Fur All was a divorce and cheating/cuckolding breakup. They always kneecap themselves… always.

You never, ever have to tolerate malicious people. Let their own words seal the permanent truth behind the phrase “nazifurs fuck off!”

Casey is now pushing the umpteenth iteration of Altfurry by baiting followers with drama stories and sugar coating his activity as “wholesome”.

I don’t expect the above article to go far not because it’s not deserved or well written but because outside of the current group he’s fused to like a needy lamprey desperate for validation he’s just a middle aged nobody. (And as a middle aged nobody game recognize game.)

— holding leftovers (@technicolorpie) June 5, 2024

Beware of scheming Nazis who are constantly rebranding and seeking new ways to grab clout and recruits. If you see Casey's Nazi agenda laundered through his 1000th rebrands as "wholesome" or "furry drama news", refer to this thread or the long trail of receipts to see through it. pic.twitter.com/l4VmGl67C0

— Nazifur Receipts (@NazifurReceipts) April 17, 2024

Like the article? These take hard work. For more free furry news, follow on Twitter or support not-for-profit Dogpatch Press on Patreon.Want to get involved? Try these subreddits: r/furrydiscuss for news or r/waginheaven for the best of the community. Or send guest writing here. (Content Policy.)

COMING SOON: Exclusive Q&A with show host Nicky Woolf. Message @patchofurr on Telegram to join.

May 20, 2024: The third episode of Fur and Loathing is HERE (six episodes are coming out weekly.)

This Furry True Crime podcast series is a lavishly produced investigation into the unsolved 2014 chemical attack on Midwest Furfest. Episodes 1 and 2 covered the crime and scene. It promised exclusive never-reported news. Here it is in episode 3. Names are named.

Changa listened to the new episode of Fur & Loathing podcast out today https://t.co/nSjMSHUBHV pic.twitter.com/w0UmIDU9QX

— Dogpatch Press (@DogpatchPress) May 20, 2024

A furry listener commented today:

The show is getting wide notice with high ratings and reviews:

• Variety: Project Brazen Launches ‘Fur & Loathing’ Podcast Investigating Unsolved 2014 Gas Attack on Furry Convention
• The Times: Fur and Loathing review — this dive into the attack on furries has me hooked
• The Guardian: The week in audio: Fur & Loathing; Dead Man Running; About the Boys; Vanessa Feltz – review
• Financial Times: Fur & Loathing podcast probes the mysterious poisoning of people in animal costumes — review
• New Statesman: Inside the strange story of the Midwest FurFest attack

The show launch announcement had an exclusive interview (and transcript) with Patch O’Furr and journalist Nicky Woolf. Coming soon: an after-show Q&A with Nicky just for furry listeners — message @patchofurr on Telegram to join the group.

Like the article? These take hard work. For more free furry news, follow on Twitter or support not-for-profit Dogpatch Press on Patreon.Want to get involved? Try these subreddits: r/furrydiscuss for news or r/waginheaven for the best of the community. Or send guest writing here. (Content Policy.)

RSVP HERE to join the Norcal Furries in the 54th Annual San Francisco Pride Beacon of Love Parade.

On Sunday, June 30th, 2024, supporters for queer history and liberation will pack the city. It will be an amazing day for street fursuiting with a roaring crowd. Furries have over 20 years of fierceness in the parade, and last year we were runners-up for the Best Contingent award. This year we’re reaching even higher.

NEW private club party for furries!

For the first time, we have an entire club reserved for our own afterparty! The club can hold 400 and is walkable from the start and end of the parade.

Volunteers urgently needed, can you help? 

The NorCal Furries bring 100-200 members led by a small team of volunteers. We can’t do it without you. Volunteering is a good introduction for newcomers, and it’s low effort and just as fun in the parade. We need to keep asking until enough heroes raise their paws, and it has to happen early. Contacts below, PLEASE REACH OUT!

Can you help another way? DONATING IS LOVE.

Please be generous for the crowdfund. We make a great experience at low cost, with donations matched to go twice as far.

What this pays for: Party and more.

Our reserved club is 2 blocks from the Powell BART station. It’s a perfect location to meet and suit up before proceeding to the start of the parade, and a great place to meet afterward to desuit, eat, drink, relax and party. We’ll provide food, drinks, chill space and play space. We’ll need extra help to run it with doorkeepers, party monitors and DJ’s. Laws limit the club space to age 21+ with guests listed in advance, so reach out to get on the guest list or volunteer.

Stay tuned for more info, and look forward to being furry on TV!

Join the Telegram announcement channel and look for more directions here on the week of the parade. Also don’t forget to RSVP. All are welcome to march, under-21’s can join with alternate plans for starting. Main event info is at SFpride.org and the parade will be on TV and streaming with ABC-7 News Bayarea.

CONTACTS AND CHAT GROUP

Want to join our chat group of 370+ members? Message @patchofurr or @zorenmanray or email here with any other questions.

Why we do it

Many furries are queer, and we come out to show love and pride, and our wonderful diversity in orientations and gender identities. We come out in memory of those who can’t join us anymore such as furry founder Mark Merlino who passed away this year and is survived by his partner and friends. We come out in defiance of those who wish to oppress our individuality and self expression. (The US Government is advising caution about threats to Pride events that deserve support more than ever.) Organizers include Relay, Spottacus, Zoren, Super Jay, Zain, Groggy, Didge, and Patch at your service. See the Pride tag for news from years past.

Like the article? These take hard work. For more free furry news, follow on Twitter or support not-for-profit Dogpatch Press on Patreon.Want to get involved? Try these subreddits: r/furrydiscuss for news or r/waginheaven for the best of the community. Or send guest writing here. (Content Policy.)

May 13, 2024: The second episode of Fur and Loathing is HERE (six episodes are coming out weekly.)

The 2014 chemical attack on Midwest Furfest was one of the largest in American history. 19 people were hospitalized. Nobody was charged and the case went cold. 10 years later, never-before-reported findings are here in this Furry True Crime podcast with journalist Nicky Woolf.

In the new Episode 2, Nicky visits Midwest Furfest and traces events in the 2014 police report, gaining unexpected insight. He gets immersed in furry culture with an insider guide, then introduces a complication that stalled the case. Until now.

Last week’s launch announcement had an exclusive interview for Dogpatch Press with Nicky and Patch O’Furr. A reader requested the transcript below. Come back for surprising developments in upcoming episodes.

TRANSCRIPT: EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW – lightly edited for clarity from the video

Nicky Woolf

(Nicky): Patch O’Furr in full regalia, looking beautiful with the glasses and all!

(Patch): Nicky, why don’t you tell the readers who you who you are and what the project is?

I’m Nicky Woolf, and for the last 7 months intensively, and the last 10 years, I’ve been obsessed with investigating the chlorine gas incident at Midwest Furfest 2014.

Before we get into it, let me ask you what’s your favorite thing about furries?

You know honestly, you’re starting me off with a difficult one. Because this is going to sound super weird… it’s the earnestness. The level of no one is pretending, by definition it’s a space where you no longer have to pretend. Which is ironic, considering the level of artistry that goes in, that leads you to a place where you don’t have to pretend, and I think that’s beautiful.

I love your vision.

(Puts on sunglasses)

What have you uncovered in the story that has never been reported before? You don’t have to give us spoilers, but some hints.

The things that really surprised us, the more we dug into this story, is how much was going on behind the scenes in terms of police and FBI investigation. Now it’s known, and a lot of it’s known through through your fantastic reporting, that there were some colossal mistakes made. By the police department — by the FBI in the general investigation — and obviously there were no arrests made. They never got over the line.

What we discovered, and we’ll get into this later in the series and what this means, but there was a lot of investigation going on as recently as 2019. Chasing down suspects, getting warrants, getting on planes, and going to find people for at least five years following… the word that’s used is controversial, we’ve been saying attack. Because I think it’s very clear that this was an attack. But the police and FBI were doing a lot more than has previously been known in the public domain.

From the public point of view, take me through what kind of life have you seen for this story. When it came out, when it died down, what’s your sense?

In the immediate aftermath — and I think anyone who’s familiar with this story who’s followed it either from within the community or outside of it as an interested viewer will know — the immediate reaction was the media did not cover itself with glory. The famous example of that is MSNBC where Mika Brzezinski cracks up laughing and is trying to get out words like, “19 people hospitalized” through laughter, which is a single piece of media that sums up the way the mainstream media has approached this community.

I think that’s the perfect one, that’s where we’re at in terms of the way the media and… I’m not within the community, so maybe I throw it to you, do you blame Mika specifically for that, or do you think she didn’t know what the hell was was going on there? Because I think that’s an interesting question. What’s your read as someone in the community of what happened on that MSNBC set?

I would say it was a brief human mistake. I can look at that from outside as a nonhuman, but I’m glad you’re here and doing the work you do, the amazing work that’s going to bring this story forward. Why should we listen, what are the good points of the story that really stand out?

It’s funny, when we were scripting, one of the notes early on that I got was that there needs to be — and this is something you get in every narrative podcast, in every piece of journalism, you have to do the “why should you listen, why should you care” and I found myself thinking to myself, the story doesn’t need selling. This is a vibrant and fascinating community about which very little is known, who were attacked in a way that no one has.

Shout out to the couple of places that have done good work investigating this before, specifically Vice and Robert Evans, and obviously you. I’m talking about mainstream media outlets here, but Vice and and Worst Year Ever deserve props having got the story to at least fighting the fight of having mainstream media pay attention to it. Not I think successfully, but the thing that really got me about this story is that it’s a sign of what was happening in the wider internet at the time, that’s only got more powerful since then.

Of the two big previous shows I’ve done, one of them was on Qanon. So I’m familiar with the way in which the dynamics of an internet community, or a primarily digital community, can have huge repercussions and teach us an enormous amount about what’s going on in the world as a whole. I think what this attack represents is a microcosm, of lessons that we can learn about how we deal with — trying to find a way of saying this which which doesn’t end up with spoilers — but I think I can safely say with rising extremism. And the way that extremism isn’t something that’s… like there aren’t the Nazis and other people.  There is a rising alt-right tide, and even furry, even the community is not safe from these forces of global change that are taking place. It’s something that we all deal with, no matter what community we have.

Let’s back up. Where do you think this fits into your previous work?

I’ve been covering the internet for a very long time. I was just a general news reporter at The Guardian a long while, and when you’re a general news reporter you need to carve out a little niche for yourself. I was an internet kid, I grew up in the Livejournal era, early in an era where everything was earnest, and it was a level of earnestness that I otherwise came to miss when the next step of internet development became the anonymous boards, like 4Chan. Which then became the power centers, and furry to me ended up representing a kind of alternate counterweight to a power center like especially /Pol…

Internet communities to me take on lives of their own, as life forms in their own, and I think that’s the same with any community historically, but the internet turbocharges the evolution of those kind of groups. I think the furry community has been a fascinating example of this, the way a culture develops and I think far right and trolling culture and something like Qanon is another example of that.

I’ve come to consider myself over my career as almost like a anthropologist of this new kind of life form that is the digital community, and the power that a digital community can wield and represent, to be a good thing for the world and its participants, or a bad thing for the world and its participants. For covering Qanon, that was the first time I got to do a story in yearlong investigative detail. I was covering — and I think it’s not a controversial way of describing it — a fundamentally evil new life form.

Whereas with this show it’s been joyous to be on the opposite side of that, and cover what I think is a fundamentally beautiful community, beautiful life form, even if I’m covering it from the perspective of… it came under attack and this is what happened after that. It’s a true crime show, so we’re looking a lot at the attack itself, but it’s been great to be able to do a little bit of that anthropology.

What’s it like to enter furry spaces as a guest, as someone who hasn’t been intimately invited in before, and earn some trust and have the insider view?

It’s been I think rightfully difficult, the mainstream media has not been great in terms of covering this community before, so we’ve really had to work very hard. As the show will keep going, I hope to work hard in terms of getting people in the community to trust us. We have to prove from the very first episode that we’re not looking to make a joke of the community the way a lot of people have. We’re not looking to paint the community as in some way deviant in the way that a lot of coverage has.

More literally we’re not looking to — we address this in in the first episode — we’re not looking to out anyone who doesn’t want to be outed. We’re not using anybody’s name until we get to the actual suspects in the attack. The line I use in the show is, unless there’s a journalistic reason not to, we address and refer to everyone in the community we speak to, the way they choose.

That gave us a kind of starting point, we made some contacts in the community we were able to say I’m coming into this with some experience. I’ve known furries, I’ve been aware and adjacent to the community while remaining a guest in these spaces, and I’m honored to have been invited into these spaces and these communications. It’s really a privilege to have been able to be at Midwest Furfest last year, to speak with members of the community, and it’s been a joy.

I think you had some interesting experience visiting Midwest Furfest. I don’t think we need to get into parts that are already in the show, but was there anything you saw that wasn’t able to make it into the show?

I’m so glad you asked that, because there is something that just didn’t make it into the show which I’ve been really pulling for, but couldn’t… I want to give a shout out to Atmos Deer, photographer Tommy Bruce, who has been a real helpful guiding light for me as I’m navigating this. We went to see on the Saturday afternoon, a review, an hour and a half long of lots and lots of little VR made films.

It was truly one of the most beautiful — there were lots of them that were… apologies to any of the makers who I say this about — slightly janky, but in this kind of beautiful raw emotional way. Some of them were in-jokes, some of them were truly hilarious, some of them were unintentionally hilarious and neither me nor Atmos had any idea what was going on. Then some of them just blindsided you by being heart-rending goodbyes and tributes to somebody that had been lost, or tributes to someone who lives a long way away and you don’t get to see very often, and they’d be these beautiful little vignettes. I loved it, I’m almost emotional just describing it, I thought it was one of the most beautiful experiences I’ve ever had.

This was obviously a story that was stalled, it was a cold case. What factors helped you to move this forward when nobody else was getting progress?

It’s worth saying that we don’t actually know! We did a lot of the standard things you do when you start this kind of investigation. One of those things is a big Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) request for output… which, it’s worth saying, that the Vice team had done. Previous journalists have sent out FOIA requests regarding this story. What we got back — and I hope when people listen to the show they’ll see this — was very different in terms of the sheer scale of the documents that we got back. We don’t know for sure exactly why that is.

One of the things that — and we’ve spoken to legal experts — all we can do is an informed speculation that what had happened in 2019 was the five year standard statute of limitations had run out now. It was mind-blowing to me that something that was a terroristic offense, in reality, could have a statute of limitations. You can just not get found.

I think if that is the case, at this point we don’t know for sure because a lot of this was kept secret within the FBI and within the local police department, so we’re not 100% sure that’s why we had a different document response to FOIA requests, but whatever the reason, we did.

That gave us a starting foundational point of more information than has ever been made public before. There were just enough clues, like they heavily redacted lots of these documents, but there were just enough clues that could start us off on a investigation that could find something genuinely new.

When I’ve been working on stories like this one, or maybe negative topics, I tend to encounter friction inside the community. For example in this story a lot of people would tend to dismiss the attack, or memory hole it, or excuse it as “oh that must have been an accident” when you know there was always evidence that it was deliberate from the start. The police said it was deliberate, but people still ran with the idea that it was just a “mistake.”

Still to this day we had spoken to people who were fairly sure that that a latex chlorination accident was ultimately what had happened, and a lot more on top of that who were saying “oh it’s just a prank.”

It’s very striking to me — I don’t want to project a kind of a psychology onto what’s going on — to me it seemed like there was an element of trauma response going on, so that it’s easier to say “it’s not a big deal”.

I think there’s an element of an event like Midwest Furfest, a convention is such a sacred space, where you go to be free… that admitting that there’s a vulnerability there itself breaks some kind of spell. I’m hesitating to even say — because even thinking about that paradox some people are going to not love — in and of itself that’s looking this kind of spell directly on and undermining the magic.

I think that’s got to be balanced against, this is the real world, and not just the real world / the internet world, which to me is this kind of hyper reality and there are dangers looking.

I think it’s worth admitting, and investigating, and I’m just going to go ahead and say fighting, those forces that have emerged on the internet and represent real dangers for communities like furries and for the world in in general.

Where the weapon was deployed at MFF 2014.

I’m glad you used the term breaking the magic, that’s a meaningful term. We’re dealing with a subculture, to some people a very important one in their life, it’s the way that they express their identity. But a subculture can be marginal, isolated, it can be contained, and there’s a lot of alternative communities, sometimes I think they encounter problems that are wider scale than their reach. Do you have any ideas, thoughts or advice about how to solve problems that are wider than the scale of a small community like this?

That’s a ginormous question. A lot smarter people than me have have tried and failed to to answer that. All I can say is that in my experience, a start is solving it within the community before saving the world. Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.

Let’s take journalism for example… that’s a terrible example because journalism’s work is to talk about other people’s problems.

Journalists are the worst.

Barely more than a loose confederation of warring tribes.

Let’s take the local WhatsApp group around here to organize what day to take the trash out. If someone’s in there that’s been being an asshole, it is outside of the scope of this trash-collection WhatsApp group to solve whatever’s going on in this dude’s life that’s taken him there.

What is within the scope of a community is to look at itself, and say what help are we offering to people who may be experiencing something in their lives that’s taking them down this route.

How can we think of ourselves as a community while remaining open, while not breaking the magic, while also stop the Nazis… how do you deal with an asshole? Do you ostracize them, do you reach out to them? Those are the kind of questions that every community asks, and asking those questions is a good first step.

I think it’s good to be aware that you don’t necessarily want to be a doormat, by handling things the nice way, or just letting them go. This story opens a lot of questions about how we handle crime and policing — it’s one of those stories that we’ll continue to feed questions about, and it’s a great dialogue to have. We’re working in the True Crime genre here, and we’ve actually worked together and made Furry True Crime. I don’t know if there are any other examples like this, and I’m pretty happy about that.

This is a good point to really say thank you to everything you’ve done to make this happen with your reporting in the past.  You’ve been fighting a very lonely battle — I don’t know if it’s felt lonely to you — but as the voice doing the real solid journalistic work on this, none of this show would have happened without the hard work that you’ve put in, and without your incredible generosity in opening up to us and talking to us, and helping us on this journey. So thank you so much for that, we owe you basically everything of this show.

Let’s remember the reason for this community, it’s a fandom, we love what we do, and a lot of us are fans of other movies, music, writing, whatever… do you have any other media that inspires you? Anything you might want to share?

Are you getting at what fandoms, what inspires me… does Ska count? I’ve seen Reel Big Fish live 16 times, I’ve seen The Cat Empire live 18 times. I’m a ska kid by instinct. I was a Warhammer kid growing up, that was my first experience… the closest experience I’ve had to going to a con like MFF, and I’ve been to Comic-Con, I’ve been to the dumb commercial video game E3 which doesn’t even really count as a corporate thing. There was a Warhammer tournament that I entered and did all right in when I must have been 13-14, the time where a steam tank… It was fantastic, like that’s my finest work was the steam tank had a dragon head. Actually I think Warhammer is an interesting comparison to furries because it’s also a self-contained fandom.

I knew you’re a nerd, that’s amazing, I didn’t know all that. One more thing before we close: do you have any good animal jokes?

I have a terrible memory so anytime I ask to remember a joke my memory goes completely blank, I’ve never been able to successfully memorize a joke.

Hold that thought and come back to me later with it but thank you Nicky.

I’ll start messaging you animal jokes from now on.

It’s your job, deal. I’m actually on the way out, I’m going to World Goth Day. I’m going to see some goth bands in my fursuit. It’s so exciting, it’s happening on a battleship.

Where is this battleship?

Alameda, California, a World War II battleship hosting a goth day.

Send me some pictures, I’ll send you some animal jokes, you got to send me some pictures from this party.

You got it, thank you we’ll talk later.

With Charun, being a rat on ship at the @USSHornetMuseum in Alameda CA for #worldgothday 2024, seeing @Covenant_Sweden and https://t.co/nfnPCv5oSC. What a weekend! There was just 5 hours to sleep after the show, then I biked 100 miles with the #grizzlypeakcyclists century ride. pic.twitter.com/s03GzHhiSS

— Dogpatch Press (@DogpatchPress) May 7, 2024

I had so much fun at The Anual Goth Day Festival this past weekend

Thank you so much @DogpatchPress for bringing me with pic.twitter.com/wCYrq6j9tD

— Harper BLFC’24 (@2ManyStripes) May 9, 2024

Like the article? These take hard work. For more free furry news, follow on Twitter or support not-for-profit Dogpatch Press on Patreon.Want to get involved? Try these subreddits: r/furrydiscuss for news or r/waginheaven for the best of the community. Or send guest writing here. (Content Policy.)

Zero (white) and partner Siro_Kami (blue)

A misunderstood person moves to a new place, and faces more misunderstanding, but uses creativity to stand proud and reach people who do understand.

It’s a tale told a million times, known by a million furries worldwide (and subcultures of every stripe.) It’s the tale of Frankenstein’s rejected creature, who finds kindness from a blind person, but has to run from the prejudice and torches of angry villagers.

It’s a tale that wasn’t told by a local CBS channel who only reported the villager’s side, “Furries” with satanic symbols spotted near Sacramento County elementary school, parents say. They didn’t talk to any furries they reported about, or mention resources about them for the media like Furscience, or the history of Satanic Panic spreading prejudice and harming schools and communities like theirs.

Antelope, CA is 15 miles from Sacramento. Attitudes about order there may be influenced by history: In 1973 the town was blown away when trains full of bombs for Viet Nam exploded. It was rebuilt as a planned community where “most homes are new and the area is well planned out”. It’s rated safer than average for crime among 45,000 residents, and is unincorporated with policing by the County Sheriff, and nearby town departments under contract for schools and parks.

Natural Elements

Zero The HellHound is an 18-year old trans furry facing the villagers’ wrath. He recently moved to Antelope, where he doesn’t have a job or car, but you have to drive to get anywhere. On maps, the neighborhood doesn’t have a restaurant for hanging out within a 2-3 mile walk, and he also might have to fear going alone. So for about 2 weeks, Zero has been visiting Firestone Park (a name almost made for this story.) It’s a public park in sight of the family home that recently took him in. At the park he’s been chilling in nature, and practicing fursuit dancing for a Tiktok audience of over 14K followers. Instead of hiding inside with depression, it helps him to be confident to dance where anyone can see.

Zero won the dance competition at Golden State Fur Con, but at Firestone Park, he got eggs thrown at him by middle school kids who came to hassle him. Angry adults think he’s there to be Satanic, or target little kids next door at the Olive Grove Elementary school, but he says those kids only show positive notice. He also made two new friends who came up and complimented his fursuit. His reaction was “Wow, you know what a fursuit is?”

Many people confront him about the fursuit. Zero is a fursuit maker who plays a Skulldog, like a spooky creature from Ghostbusters or shows like Hazbin Hotel. It represents the story of a character who was originally a human with one abusive parent, which led to suicide, earning God’s judgement of going to hell. There he transforms and gets symbols burned on him, but has his own place to live. Many teens find catharsis in stories about overcoming trauma and asserting “it’s ok to be weird”. Some symbols on his character are trans scars and LGBT Pride colors (which have been targets of pedophilia accusation at the park). There’s also pentagrams, but Zero claims he’s not religious and they aren’t Satanic (pointing down), they are the kind that points up to represent natural elements.

Finger Guns

The story doesn’t communicate to the lady who confronts him one day to say, “do you think it’s OK to be in costume at this park?” She claims it’s scaring kids. As far as Zero knows, no kids have been scared. Only parents… although groups of many kids harass this 18-year old even when he’s not in fursuit. One adult was threatening almost to the point of punching him. But Zero isn’t leaving Firestone Park just because they’re mad. It’s public property and he has a right to be there. He also denies that he times visits for when kids get out of school, and says the park generally isn’t busy. Should he only go when nobody can see him or there’s no light for videos?

In one of Zero’s Tiktok videos, he and his friend sit on a park bench while people crowd up to take video and complain that kids can’t play there. “We’re minding our own business”, they tell an adult who isn’t holding back kids from bouncing a basketball at them and lining up aggressively like stereotypical jock bullies in a movie. Another adult demands to get Zero’s face in their video, and threatens to call police on him for legally wearing a mask.

Lacking real crime to complain about, they reach to accuse his Tiktok videos of being a school shooting threat. Zero exasperatedly explains that they went digging for a “very very old” (2022) video made in his house with a finger-guns meme that went around, or a “pope dance” meme with pointing. This came out in the CBS article, with a parent complaining about the school ignoring his complaints about someone legally using a park off school property.

Under this pressure, Zero tried going to the principal of Olive Grove Elementary to talk, and she said she just wants to keep kids safe. After the CBS story, Dogpatch Press called the school and emailed the principal to request contact with security or adults involved for comment, but there was no reply.

Collateral Damage

Then there was the incident with Mudpuppy. Zero wants support from friends, and gets a few to come sometimes for making videos. Mudpuppy is a 23-year old furry from Woodland, CA with autism and ADHD, and he was the only one who came on May 2. He was unfamiliar with the area: “I was actually attending an audio/visual workshop in Sacramento before going to the park. It was my first time meeting Zero.” He was wearing a tail but no mask.

With instructions to find a basketball court, Mudpuppy accidentally wandered towards the wrong one on school grounds next to the park. He didn’t realize it until seeing kids playing. Before being able to leave, angry parents got in the way, including one from the CBS article, Kris Williams.

“Kris and one other guy confronted and interrogated me about why I was there. They told me I wasn’t going anywhere and proceeded to call the police. One of them aggressively pulled my camera bag off me. When they asked me who I was meeting, I pulled out my phone so I could tell them. But one of them ripped it out of my hand. They treated me like I was an actual school shooter.”

Mudpuppy found the treatment and reporting hard to understand. “The whole situation was so terrifying that my mind blocked out what they said… I was told CBS was at the school about 20 minutes before I came.” The story was decided before Mudpuppy even became part of it.

Local news features Kris Williams complaining that the school is ignoring complaints that aren’t about school property.

Dancing Around the Issue

It’s easy to prejudge and terrify a lost and needful person who wanders in with a tail making them a target, even when schools are supposed to specially care about autism and bullying. Mudpuppy had to go through all this just to find Zero to give the support that furries do for each other.

That wasn’t all. After he found Zero and started taking pictures, Mudpuppy echoes that they became targets of egg throwing, neighbors yelling that they weren’t welcome and labeling them “pedophile”, and threats of more assault.

Ironically, angry parents were the ones calling police and guns to these scenes with hostility, making a threat of innocent people getting shot. Autism and communication complication has led to wrongful police use of force incidents.

As one set of adults who didn’t fail in this story, police protected the targets. At one point an officer went as far as staying with Zero for an hour at Firestone Park. One officer advised Zero to bring a lot of Sacramento furries there for a big event with security provided by police. It would be a way to assert right to use public space, and show that furries aren’t afraid and aren’t a threat.

Together or alone, Zero keeps doing what he loves. Despite accusations of preying on kids by making videos (of himself), his Tiktok followers are rising a lot. He says he isn’t trying to influence people with pentagrams, but with dancing. For example, one day a group of kids wanted to mock him, but he reacted with dance moves, and one of them actually started defending him. Why don’t mad parents learn from kids like that?

Followup notes

A post about this on r/Sacramento has surprisingly understanding comments with some local insight.

Like the article? These take hard work. For more free furry news, follow on Twitter or support not-for-profit Dogpatch Press on Patreon.Want to get involved? Try these subreddits: r/furrydiscuss for news or r/waginheaven for the best of the community. Or send guest writing here. (Content Policy.)

May 6, 2024: The first episode of Fur and Loathing is HERE. 

Think you’ve heard everything about the 2014 chemical attack on Midwest Furfest? Wait until you hear this.

The intentional release of chlorine gas sent 19 people to the hospital. It was one of the largest chemical weapons terrorist attacks in American history.

Who did it? And… why?

The targets deserve to know, because they were lucky to survive. The weapon’s deadly potential was only avoided by fast response. The level of crime fell just behind the 2001 anthrax attacks, but strangely, nobody was ever charged for it. The story faded into underreporting, disrespect towards the community, murky rumors, and hopes that it won’t happen again. There’s pride in resilience — but 10 years later, justice wasn’t served. It’s the biggest cold case in furry fandom.

The case revived when investigation by Dogpatch Press drew journalist Nicky Woolf and Project Brazen to seek FBI records, identify suspects, and fly across America to interview sources. Nicky is a journalist who reports on internet culture, with stories in The Guardian, and his original podcast series Finding Q and The Sound: Mystery of the Havana Syndrome. Nicky and Brazen’s series Fur And Loathing delivers never-before reported findings to empower the community.

EXCLUSIVE: Nicky Woolf’s introduction for Dogpatch Press

We discuss what was uncovered, Nicky’s work, earning trust among furries, and more. (This is off the cuff and unedited.)

Fur and Loathing is a Furry True Crime podcast of six episodes, releasing weekly.

Thank you to Nicky for his dulcet tones, and Brazen’s super pro team with Max, Lucy, and all who supported investigation that other media didn’t do (besides Vice and the Worst Year Ever podcast.) It was incredible to get first look at their progress, such as matching FOIA document releases with open-source findings.

FYI… we know the title was taken for a TV show episode a long time ago. Nothing else fit so well, so we’re taking it back.

Announcement at Variety and Trailer:

Like the article? These take hard work. For more free furry news, follow on Twitter or support not-for-profit Dogpatch Press on Patreon.Want to get involved? Try these subreddits: r/furrydiscuss for news or r/waginheaven for the best of the community. Or send guest writing here. (Content Policy.)

Are you one of the masses with a crush on Disney’s Robin Hood?

That fox may have created more furries than any other beloved character, and they create huge amounts of fan art. Sexy, sexy fan art.

Artists: Sandblastcoyote and Paintfox34

The weirdos who search the net for Sexy Robin Hood, like this author, mostly get still illustrations or very small bits of animation that can barely quench their burning desire. Until now.

A secret work group of furries have been pushing the limits of AI technology to deliver the worst nightmare for Disney’s Family Moral Standards department. It’s the long anticipated full movie fan edit where Robin Hood is as bare as he leaves the King’s treasury, and he’s showing off all his jewels.

To explain how this technological breakthrough was achieved, let’s start with a conceptual creation by Changa Husky. He lives at the Prancing Skiltaire house in California, a long-time haven for pioneers of fandom. Changa used to make effects for 1990’s science fiction TV shows and now works with Furality, the VR convention. Around 2018, Changa was inspired to make a bootleg VHS release of Disney’s Zootopia featuring period-authentic pan-and-scan formatting, trailers for other fan works, and vintage marketing materials in a clamshell box. It was Mandela Effect prank art from an alternate universe. Yes, it’s real.

Changa’s unique Zootopia VHS release only went to a few special furries. Some of them were inspired to take the concept farther, and now Robin Nood is here.

How hard was it to generate a fan edit to feature Robin Hood’s full-frontal anatomical correctness, like his fluffy but well-toned abs that invite nuzzling, not to mention the rogueish fox’s muscular buttocks that you could only imagine under his forest bandit tunic before?

It’s hard to ask the secret work group behind Robin Nood, who refused to comment while they avoid Disney lawyers behind a cloak of anonymity. Some questions were sent to the artist Wizardhead (Brendan Baldwin) because he was in a previous Dogpatch Press article about AI. How did they do it?

Baldwin replied:

The length of the render is mostly relevant in that the proliferation of angles and different kinds of shots involved might need tweaking for whatever algorithm is applied. I’m not familiar with any approach to targeted rendering of character bodies in a consistent way and to date I’ve seen no examples of this which lead me to believe it is either cheap or easy. Most of what I do is fairly transformative but intrinsically chaotic and somewhat visually incoherent, which is very different than what the deepfake videos do by creating very exacting targeted replacement of video subjects. If quality and coherence were not relevant, then after maybe a day of experimenting one could arrive at an appropriate model to apply to the spectrum of scenes in the target film and the only real work there would be chopping up the work into manageable bites, dishing them out to the rendering machines and compiling them all together at the end. Long form video tends to require the chopping-up treatment when running it frame by frame through these systems because per-frame storage even at 1280×768 for example runs about 1.8MB and that adds up crazy quick. For reference, if I took Zootopia and ran the whole thing through the model I used for my Slimefeld video, it would probably cost me about $400 in computer rentals and about 8 hours of time chopping and midwifing through the systems and recompiling. Just to cost it out conceptually, if I was to use my approach as a model for your friend, my break even costs for doing something like that would run $1200 (@100/hr labor/opportunity) and if I was going to do a job like that for someone I’d probably charge about $2500 so I could double my out-of-pocket costs to make a profit. Now as for making the characters naked (I assume just with matching animal fur etc) I don’t honestly know how one would coherently achieve that via the AI tools out right now in a low-labor or cost-effective way, but I’m sure someone smarter than me with a lot of time could figure it out.

Furries pushed the technology farther than even a seasoned expert knew how to do it. Wow!

Like the VHS bootleg of Zootopia that really exists, this recreation of a Disney movie only exists as limited edition physical media. You have to know someone to get a copy. Good luck everybody!

Note: Dogpatch Press doesn’t endorse using AI images because the systems that make them are unethical. Memes and conceptual projects with no commercial purpose may be less harmful but the systems also burn up energy that hurts the planet. Their misuse is toxic and their overuse dilutes real art. The feeling of seeing a bunch of AI images can be like enjoying pretty gift wrap, which lasts a minute until you rip it up and throw it away and never think about it again. If you care about art and want it to last, hire a real artist who puts thought and care into what they make, not just math to put other art in a blender and barf it back out. This applies most to replacing human artists for certain jobs, but one like Wizardhead still displays inventive use of absurd juxtaposition and editing prowess no matter what the tools are. And of course, the artists who animated Robin Hood weren’t allowed to give his fans the extra-sexy version we all long for, so it was meant to be willed into existence somehow. 

Like the article? These take hard work. For more free furry news, follow on Twitter or support not-for-profit Dogpatch Press on Patreon.Want to get involved? Try these subreddits: r/furrydiscuss for news or r/waginheaven for the best of the community. Or send guest writing here. (Content Policy.)

Ursa art by Foxenawolf.

Go HERE to vote, and don’t wait, the deadline is TODAY March 24! 

The Ursa Major Awards celebrate and recognize great works that resonate with the furry fandom, whether they are made within, by a member, or are simply favorite creations from the mainstream. Anything goes as long as people like it, and there’s a lot of opportunity to lift things up that people haven’t seen. Vote to spread your personal fandom and help others feature theirs!

Nominees are in 14 categories, and the Ursa Majors site has more details about each one. The newer Music category is removed, but Best Fursuit has re-activated after not enough notice previously.

Volunteers run the Ursa Major Awards. Please support them. Since 2001, these awards have been run with unpaid work. They appreciate support to defray costs for a website, making and mailing awards, and more. Click the button to donate >

The 2023 Nominees (in alphabetical order):

Best Motion Picture
Live-action or animated feature-length movies.

• Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (Directed by James Gunn – May 5)
• Leo (Directed by Robert Marianetti, Robert Smigel and David Wachtenheim – November 21)
• Migration (Directed by Benjamin Renner and Guylo Homsy – December 22)
• Nimona (Directed by Nick Bruno and Troy Quane – June 30)
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (Directed by Jeff Rowe and Kyler Spears – August 2)

Best Dramatic Short Work
One-shots, advertisements or short videos.

• A Fox in Space – Episode Two – Fixing a Hole (Directed by Matthew Gafford – March 25)
• Lackadaisy (Pilot) (Directed by Fable Siegel – March 29)
• Once Upon a Studio (Directed by Dan Abraham and Trent Correy – October 15)
• Tamberlane (Directed by Ashley Nichols and Caytlin Vilbrandt – May 15)
• The Meeps – Love Louder (Official music video. Created in partnership with XIX Entertainment and T&B Media Global.)

Best Dramatic Series
TV or YouTube series videos.

• Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake (Developed by Adam Muto – August 31 to September 28)
• Bluey (Created by Joe Brumm – Season 3)
• Helluva Boss (Created by Vivienne “VivziePop” Medrano – Season 2 Episode 3 to Midseason Special)
• Sonic Prime (Created by Man of Action – Season 2)
• The Owl House – “For the Future” & “Watching and Dreaming” (created by Dana Terrace)

Best Novel
Written works of 40,000 words or more. Serialized novels qualify only for the year that the final chapter is published.

• Family Matters, by Mitch Marmel, Walter D. Reimer, and E.O. Costello. (FurAffinity – December 8)
• Otters In Space 4: First Moustronaut, by Mary E. Lowd. (Deep Sky Anchor Press – December 1)
• Rafts (ebook), by Utunu. (Makapu Village – March 15)
• Wolf of Withervale by Joaquín Baldwin (Paperbear – October 8th)
• You’re Cordially Invited to Crossroads Station, by Mary E. Lowd. (Deep Sky Anchor Press – July)

Best Short Fiction
Stories less than 40,000 words, poetry, and other short Written works.

• Aged Plant Fibers and Ink, by James L. Steele. (Zooscape – April)
• How Pepper Learned Magic, by Renee Carter Hall. (Zooscape – August)
• Of Heart and Stone, by Solomon Harries. (the Voice of Dog – Dec 4)
• On the Difference Between AI Cats and Actual Cats: A Love Story, by Daniel Lowd and Mary E. Lowd. (Deep Sky Anchor – February)
• Rhapsody of Stolen Feathers, by Frank Alvarez. (Androids and Dragons, October)

Best General Literary Work
Story collections, comic collections, graphic novels, non-fiction works, and serialized online stories.

• Commander Annie and Others Adventures, by Mary E. Lowd. (Deep Sky Anchor Press – short story collection – November,)
• Gnoll Tales, by NightEyes DaySpring. (Dancing Jackal Books – short story collection – June)
• Lauren Ipsum, by Charles Brubaker. (Smallbug Press – comic strip collection – February 2)
• Some Words Burn Brightly: An Illuminated Collection of Poetry, by Mary E. Lowd. (Deep Sky Anchor Press – poetry collection – November)
• Zooscape, Volume 1, edited by Mary E. Lowd. (Deep Sky Anchor Press – anthology – September)

Best Non-Fiction Work

• A Guide to Drawing Manga Fantasy Furries: and Other Anthropomorphic Creatures, by Ryo Sumiyoshi. (Tuttle Publishing – Art guidebook – April 25)
• Furry Planet, by Joe Strike. (Apollo Publishers – history – August 29)
• Furscience, by Dr. Courtney N. Plante. (International Anthropomorphic Research Project – research on furry fandom – December)
• On Furries and the Media, by Soatok. (Dhole Moments – blog – June 6)
• TFTuesday Podcast – A Measured Response: Saberspark’s TF Video Essay, by Zilepo and K-Libra. (Youtube – video – August 30)

Best Graphic Story
Includes comic books, and serialized online stories.

• Silverwing: The Graphic Novel, written by Kenneth Opel, Illustrated by Christopher Steininge. (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers – September 19)
• Slightly Damned, by Chu. (Internet – page #1081 to #1111)
• Tamberlane, by Caytlin Vilbrandt and Ari Noble. (Internet – January 11 to December 27)
• Two Kinds, by Thomas Fischbach. (Keenspot – January 3 to December 25)
• Would Have Bit You, by Inanimorphs. (Tumblr – January to July, (also hard copy Issue 1))

Best Comic Strip
Newspaper-style strips, including those with ongoing arcs.

• Carry On, by Kathy Garrison. (Hirezfox – January 2 to December 29)
• Foxes in Love, by Toivo Kaartinen. (Twitter – Jan 1 to December 21)
• Freefall, by Mark Stanley. (Purrsia – January 2 to December 29)
• Lauren Ipsum, by Charles Brubaker. (Internet – January 2 to December 30)
• The Whiteboard, by Doc Nickel. (Internet – January 2 to December 25)

Best Magazine
Edited collections of creative and/or informational works by various people, professional or amateur, published in print or online in written, pictorial or audio-visual form.

• Dhole Moments, edited by Soatok. (Internet – January 6 to December)
• Dogpatch Press, edited by Patch O’Furr. (Internet – February to December)
• Flayrah, edited by GreenReaper. (Internet – January 1 to December 31)
• InFurNation, edited by Rod O’Riley. (Internet – January 1 to December 31)
• Zooscape, edited by Mary E. Lowd (Internet; Issue 17 to 19)

Best Visual Art
Illustrations for books, magazines, convention program books, cover art for such, coffee-table portfolios.

• Market Haul by Squiddy (Twitter – February 22)
• Our Furry City – Anthrocon 2023 by ARVEN92 (Deviant Art – June 1)
• Pines by Glopossum (Fur Affinity – January 6)
• The Record Store by Squiddy (Twitter – February 10)
• Winterrock Oasis by Bubblewolf (Fur Affinity – February 20)

Best Game
Computer or console games, role-playing games, board games.

• Friends vs Friends (Developer:Brainwash Gang – Publisher: Raw Fury – May 30)
• Laika: Aged Through Blood (Developer:Brainwash Gang – Publisher:Thunderful Publishing – October 19)
• Pseudoregalia (Developer/Publisher: rittzler – July 28)
• Super Mario Bros Wonder (Developer: Nintendo EPD – Publisher: Nintendo – October 20)

Best Website
Online collections of art, stories, and other creative and/or informational works. Includes galleries, story archives, directories, blogs, and personal sites.

• e621 – art archive.
• Fur Affinity, Furry art and stories.
• Kemono Café, Furry webcomic hosting.
• Wikifur, Furry wiki.
• Wolfery – roleplay/MUCK.

Best Anthropomorphic Fursuit

• Draco – Maker: The Beastcub. Owner: Draco Deflagro. (Twitter – July 15)
• Forlorn Raven – Maker: Lemonbrat. Owner: Forlorn Raven. (Twitter – February 3)
• Pig in Dress – Maker/Owner/Wearer: Suolaxierr. (Twitter – July 15)
• Sandey – Maker/Owner/Wearer: Misplaced_Spigot. (Vancoufur 2023)
• Vauk – Maker: Kkes and Vauk. Owner: Vauk. (Twitter – August 7)

Go HERE to vote, and don’t wait, the deadline is TODAY March 24! 

Like the article? These take hard work. For more free furry news, follow on Twitter or support not-for-profit Dogpatch Press on Patreon. Want to get involved? Try these subreddits: r/furrydiscuss for news or r/waginheaven for the best of the community. Or send guest writing here. (Content Policy.)

Mark (left) and Rod holding their Lifetime Achievement Award — from the 2022 Good Furry Awards

They had a shared vision

Mark Merlino was a founder of both the furry fandom and the North American anime fandom. In 1971, meeting fellow hobbyists at science fiction conventions led to the 1977 formation of the Cartoon/Fantasy Organization (C/FO), using the clubhouse of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society (LASFS). They would screen rare videos of imported Japanese animation for lucky members to see before anyone else, and movies like Animalympics that were first called funny-animal and later furry. In 1989 Mark and his partner Rod O’Riley co-founded the first furry convention, Confurence.

Their vision stood apart from major influences like Star Trek or Star Wars. They would gather fans without elitism or ambitions of an exclusive club, with no central property, brand or owner. It was a vision of collaboration, expressed with sketchbook sharing, convention room parties, and direct fan-to-fan creativity. That’s how love for animal characters turned into being original role-play fursonas. It was shaded by counterculture of 1960’s underground comix, and lit by the sparks of pre-internet fandom circulated by VHS tapes and mail ‘zines.

The flame was tended from Mark’s Southern California house, The Prancing Skiltaire, established in 1980. It was named after a mink-like alien species he created and also a reference to the Prancing Pony Inn in Lord of the Rings. Mark shared the house with Rod and a rotating cast of fellow creative oddballs and luminaries. In the mid-1980’s he created his fursona Sylys Sable and Rod created Vinson Mink with a similar back-story. They supported regular monthly furmeets, con staff meets, furry BBS and MUCK activity and an ISP, animation screenings and mingling with California industry talent, and development of independent zine/APA publishing, animation, games, and costuming. They were at the forefront of an explosion of nearly 200 conventions and worldwide subculture that serves millions today.

Tributes around the world

After 5 decades at the heart of it all, Mark’s elder health problems led to hospitalization at the new year in 2024. He was lovingly supported by friends and partners and a crowdfund until he passed away on February 20. Anime, furry, and brony networks lit up with condolences from around the world while the name Mark Merlino trended on social media next to mainstream celebrities.

He is survived by partners including Rod, and Changa who joined them for 28 years. They were united by love and creativity, but as queer people, their relationship was fundamental to the acceptance and expression that aligns many furries with queer culture. Fandom may be a hobby, but it’s also a way to show identity, and theirs was the soul of what furries are.

• Dozens of convention memorial messages are collected on the Telegram news channel of Grovel Husky.
• History book Furry Nation by Joe Strike (Cleis Press) profiles Mark in Chapter Four (“A Fandom is Born”).
• Mark also features in fellow fandom founder Fred Patten‘s An Illustrated Chronology of Furry Fandom, 1966–1996.
• Documentary movie The Fandom (2020) features Mark and the Skiltaire house and residents.

Mark contributed stories to Dogpatch Press. With eyes on the future, his 2022 look at Furality featured its hugely successful 15,000 attendance. He also wrote 2020’s A brief history of the Cartoon/Fantasy Organization, America’s first anime fan club. Then there were meetings in person.

Patch O’Furr’s memory: generosity and delight

At first contact in 2013, I was a cold caller to Mark. I reached him to write about his furry gallery art show that he called a dream he had for over 30 years. He was super excited to be asked. He was always that generous for convention meetings at his room, where he would tell funny grandpa stories in a Zootopia hat with fuzzy ears. His eyes would light up while he played a fan cut of Animalympics and explained how it was unjustly unseen until being rescued for people like us. It was charming when Rod chimed in with him.

In 2019 my girlfriend planned a trip with time to visit the Skiltaire house. It was packed with memorabilia like Aladdin’s cave, a museum, or a holy shrine for a pilgrimage. We got a tour, watched documentary about them, and had dinner. My girlfriend, not a furry, was very quiet while taking it all in, which turned into delighted writing about the visit later. That means a lot because she has passed away. It’s one of life’s best memories because of their generosity.

The most personal way I got to know Mark was private email where he explained philosphy that I boiled down above, and “lifestyler vs. traditionalist” conflict (a way that rivalry or even homophobia came to furry spaces). From long experience, Mark asked me not to publish unless he could collect it into “things clearly marked as ‘opinion’, ‘recollection’ and verified fact. I am particularly nervous about ‘naming names’. This has bitten me badly in the past.” That included a story about once receiving a dead squirrel in a UPS package!

He added: “I am very proud of what Rod, myself, and our friends have done to help create Furry Fandom.”

How it started: How it’s grown:

RIP Mark Merlino (Sy Sable) pic.twitter.com/kWXpvfSXDP

— David Bookworm Popovich (@Bookworm_Review) February 21, 2024

Our Furry Heritage — by Jack Newhorse
jack@jacknewhorse.com, Telegram: @JackNewhorse 

“My heart has joined the Thousand, for my friend stopped running today.” — Hazel, upon the death of Bigwig; Watership Down, by Richard Adams.

Mark Merlino, half of the couple generally acknowledged as “Fathers of the Furry Fandom”, died today. I’ll leave personal tributes to those who knew him, as I didn’t. But still I said the phrase above to myself, as I do whenever I hear of a furry’s death.

You who are reading this might already know about Mark (and his partner Rod). As creators of seminal furry organizations who have remained active in the fandom, they form an important part of our heritage. Visitors to monthly gatherings at their home in Southern California have had the opportunity to touch its dust: The newsletters, drawings, and other furry ephemera stretching back more than forty years.

Furry heritage of this sort has been getting more attention in the last few years. Fred Patten led the charge in 2016 with his book, Furry Fandom Conventions, 1989-2015, followed by Joe Strike’s Furry Nation and Ash Coyote and Eric Risher’s award-winning documentary, The Fandom. More recently, Gamepopper started the Furry Fandom History Project and has been giving talks at conventions about it; he’s among the contributors to the 250GB Furry History Collection on archive.org. And in academia, the topic is covered by dozens (if not hundreds) of papers. (All of these projects owe a debt of gratitude to Wikifur, a primary source of furry information since 2005.)

I joined the fandom in 1998 and so had a ringside seat to some of this heritage. I promise you: life seemed as banal then as now. You never know what ideas will catch on, and Things require Space. Do I keep this con book? This flyer from a picnic? A supersponsor plushie? As the past recedes, we eliminate minor (and inconvenient) details, we create myths. But if you keep the artifacts, you have a base truth more true than memory.

This becomes more important as our fandom passes through the membrane into mass culture. Hundreds (perhaps thousands) of people now make their living exclusively by catering to us; furry businesses are popping up like spring flowers. Partygoers have discovered our club nights, and celebrities show up at our cons. We offer something compelling: It’s only a matter of time until every family has (or personally knows) furries. And you’ll be able to say to those newcomers, “I was there.”

(My organization, Otterdam Foundation, recognizes this and works to ease integration by “helping non-furry institutions explore anthropomorphic arts”. On this note, we’re planning the public-facing Otterdam Furry Arts Festival in cooperation with local arts organizations for this October.)

Mark will never again tell his stories on a couch in a con lobby, at the Prancing Skiltaire, or to his partner. But he did tell them. He and Rod invited people into their home; they presented at cons. (I was fortunate to be at their talk at what I think was Mark’s last, Midwest Furfest 2023.) They saved their artifacts, allowing those who followed to contextualize it all. To do that they had to first decide that what they were doing was important, even if seemingly banal at the time.

He mattered. This matters. And you, too, matter.

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