Preview The Furry Detectives docuseries, and learn how reporting emerged against backlash
by Patch O'Furr
Full series out July 17. The first 12 minutes of the first episode:
The Furry Detectives docuseries — The story they don’t want told, emerging against 7 years of backlash and interference.
Coming on AMC+: this 4-episode series introduces furries who investigated the 2018 zoosadist leaks. (More summary of the leaks.)
The leaks exposed evidence of deep-rooted, ongoing animal abuse networks in the community. They use furry as a cover, for organizing that isn’t easily dismissed with “anyone can be a furry, we can’t gatekeep it” disclaimers. Half of the truth is that abuse happens in any community — and internet tech and platforms are big factors not fully in our power — but the whole truth is that this behavior is uniquely among us in real-life organized ways seen nowhere else. It’s nobody else’s problem when our groups are run by and for us.
Making our own destiny is how fandom works at its best. However before the show releases, it’s catching some backlash for airing problems that the community didn’t properly deal with for 7 years. It’s like some people want things brushed under the rug so ignoring it can make it worse. That behavior was always holding back investigation over 7 years while publishing tens of thousands of words of reporting at Dogpatch Press.
There was a lot of generous team work as well, but some of the most counterproductive behavior was not just from incuriosity and denialism, putting optics over solutions, or random bad actors… Most alarmingly, there’s also corruption from influence at the top.
Bad leadership and suppression
Not everyone gives permission to abusers, but some complicit members did and still do, and a lot of the extent of the abuse has stayed deliberately hidden for decades. This community has a faction of long-time members, who tacitly or even openly treat zoophilia as a harmless sexual identity, instead of a vector for abuse where there is no safe place for it. This situation existed since the 1990’s, before furry was in mainstream media at all.
Some names are named at bottom. Example: the fandom’s longest sitting con chair since the 1990’s is a zoophile sympathizer who repeats their talking points, lies about it, drives attacks at people who dare criticize it, and has done it as a group co-runner with a zoosadist from the leaks.
Sympathizers with influence may use it insidiously in private channels. That’s hidden from the superficial level of social media, that can distort any info you learn about anything. This behavior from closed crony spaces is the shadow side of online bewares, that often get dismissed in those same spaces. Even organizers with good intentions want to dismiss these stories for being hard to handle. Ignorance is exploitable: some of the worst abusers use trust and privilege to access victims and protect what they do, and get dark social credit over others that keeps them from talking. The result is underreporting and only superficial public awareness, even when a few high profile individuals get notice (like Kero the Wolf, who is investigated in the docuseries.)
Backlash started before a word was reported here, from the day the leaks tagged the site without warning in 2018. Later in the show, you can see how Dogpatch Press was a target of suspicious, coordinated and pre-emptive messages to throw off looking at the leaks. There was also furry con organizer pressure to cover up, discredit reporting, or gain silence with threats. It didn’t succeed. Dogpatch Press stands by reporting all the way to winning lawsuits, and will face down threats all the way to exposing what they hide on TV.
Secret work and the tip of an iceberg
The backlash, and untrustworthiness of groups with guilty people inside, forced an initial year of investigation by Dogpatch Press to happen in secret. A 5-part series published by surprise in 2019 on the 1-year anniversary of the leaks. This reporting reached the producers of The Furry Detectives and made the show happen. Nothing was pitched to them to get deals, they were brought here by pro-bono public service reporting.
As a rule, documentary doesn’t pay sources for interviews.
Secret investigation, done for free, is very time consuming and thankless. A lot of it in 2018-2019 went into an exhaustively researched evidence channel with multi-source analysis of chat logs, like no other investigation did. This was hundreds of hours of unpaid work, including much still-unpublished sensitive evidence that most of the world is completely unaware of and gets dismissed by attacking the source.
The Furry Detectives is coming out against the same old interference. People with influence want to keep the lid on. They often do it with rhetoric against “cancel culture”, even while they know what they’re hiding. Many zoosadists outed 7 years ago got away, and are still here under new names only known by their friends, who will aggressively protect them by attacking and suppressing attention.
This story isn’t old or fully told. You can see the tip of an iceberg by number of arrests vs. number of ring members in the leaks who had no consequences. The total of people in abuse networks may be a small fraction of the community, but this is beside the point. The proportion doesn’t measure their influence and the impact on victims while they persist.
Propaganda and chaos holding back solutions
Zoosadists are here now, and aided by organized zoophile groups on the level of thousands of members. They feel safe to use furry as cover with podcasts and magazines for propaganda. Very little of their open content is about physical behavior because it exists to justify. They tend to claim “trust me, we’re against abuse” while using deceptive hairsplitting to re-define abuse as some animals can consent, and coercing our victims isn’t real abuse. These mental gymnastics blur the fact that zoophiles and zoosadists are the same spectrum of crossing the line of consent. They only belatedly throw token “real abusers” under the bus to shed liability, after making opportunity and access for the most extreme abusers to establish roots and network with each other while their victims can’t tell.
They push this propaganda because it works, at least long enough to not get caught, but private tips to this site say that some furry organizers who covered for zoophiles are finally catching heat for it now, 7 years late. It’s catching up to people who hid things, like uncovering church or school abusers who got moved around to keep their influence. They’re worried about what’s going to be in this show, after they made it everyone’s problem and are desperate to point fingers elsewhere about what they let go for so long. Their go-to recrimination is usually about “cancel culture”, as if they’re the real victims of having secrets exposed.
On top of that, there has been long time interference from the Kiwifarms website. It complicates investigation by spoiling evidence and adding outside backlash to the kind inside. Kiwifarms was created for smear tactics, not justice. Boiled down to simple structure, such websites can shield anonymous whistleblowing when furry and corporate sites don’t, but the upside of identifying zoosadists is a side effect, and often driven by bigotry towards LGBT people who did nothing wrong. The result is lack of rigor and vision from many directions, that holds back organized solutions about organized abuse.
This chaos helps organized abuse groups thrive here like nowhere else. Can you name any other group that zoophiles use as cover for coming out by the thousands? Now think, do you see pedophiles organizing on this level? Changing this isn’t asking for a lot. It’s been done before within gay culture who faced similar coattail-riding, and had to overcome internal resistance that lingered due to the challenge of coming out for gay rights. We’ve been here before.
Cutting through the noise
The show producers came to this mess, read reporting against interference, picked committed sources to work with, and applied good intentioned and well resourced production. They got sensitivity advice from furries over several years of making it, all before the most recent election.
Positive image is actively created, not selected from only the parts you want told. If we forget the root of a problem and only worry about how it looks, it will never go away. Either this gets told, or it gets brushed under and guilty people continue using your spaces. Then it gets worse, and next time, outsiders will tell the story for you with even less agency in how you are seen.
When the show trailer released, notice how optics-based suppression was some people’s priority before even seeing much of anything. Now the more notice it’s getting, the more comments there are about “actually it looks good”.
From seeing the theater premiere at the Tribeca Festival in New York on June 10, it is good and there’s nothing to regret. The question is, can it do enough? It does what a TV show is for and tells a watchable story with a beginning and end, but it’s really just a start. Let’s see what happens for Season 2.
Sources for informed viewing
- Soatok’s blog – Furries Need To Learn That Sunlight Is The Best Disinfectant
- Coverup from con staff in 2018 – Investigation blocked: Safety concerns meet a wall of silence at furry conventions.
- A con chair’s grievance – “Banning known actual zoophiles was a step too far for some members of exec and the board and people threatened to walk out.”
- Naming names at the top – Cheetah, the chair of Eurofurence, the fandom’s longest sitting con chair since the 1990’s, has been a zoophile apologist for decades, who lies about it and uses influence to backlash. (Scroll down half way to Corruption.)
- Naming names of influence – Furry party house runner Quentin “Coyote” Mohos, a zeta-tattoo zoophile, approached Dogpatch Press to try manipulating reporting with pro-zoophile propaganda.
- Abusive organizer was reported for years – Bad leadership surrounds sex crime case with Party Animals West (PAW) owner in San Francisco
- Analysis of online community – How to love the freedom of leaderless fandom, and fight the flipside of organized abuse
- How to identify and handle bad actors – Community Organizing Notes
Even more info behind the scenes
There was no pitching or pay for being a documentary interview subject, after 7 years of hard reporting work. Extra, personal non-news stories (such as a trip report and a show review) may post here: https://www.patreon.com/c/dogpatchpress
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.)
I was initially expecting this to completely whitewash the whole saga as “all furries are completely wholesome smol beans and Kero was the sole exception” but I commend the refreshingly blunt honesty about the fandom’s foul undercurrent that you’re bringing here, regardless of any cries of “what will the normies think if they find out!?”. This shit deserves to be exposed and torn out whenever it’s discovered, instead of buried because of the “optics”.
I’m really looking forward to watching this now
Thank you. I’m going to say that learning about this stuff is a process.
It starts with knowing that society is shitty to different people, and you can find a safe space with other nerds/gay people etc. That’s real and loveable.
It’s very easy to see real hate from outside, and dismiss every criticism as untrue, including when true info has been handed to haters by our own inaction and failing to tell the whole truth ourselves.
Reporting for many years makes a rare level of knowing where skeletons are buried and seeing what’s been held back.
It leads to realizing that trust is both more implicit in safe spaces, and easily abused anywhere. No kind of people are exempt from being abusive to each other, or targeted to gain access to victims/power. Minority groups, churches, schools, Boy Scouts, all have it. Add a structure of disconnected bubbles that make exploitable security, where the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, and it’s always nobody’s job to do better.
The time comes to set incuriosity aside and see deeply beyond the surface. That was 7 years ago with these leaks. There has been zero coordinated solution, just loose surface level reflex. Meanwhile the zoo-underworld is more active than ever.
People want to claim fair-weather community/identity. They are furries when proud of it, but don’t know people organizing in their spaces when they aren’t proud of those people. In year zero maybe that was more fair. After 7 years of freely available evidence the only real solution is to go higher and partner with organized resources outside to act on it.
The fair-weather community builds a wall of denial with toxic reaction about traitors who say the emperor has no clothes. They want to accuse people of taking pay (docs don’t pay), seeking fame (7 years of unpaid hard work), corporate sellout (this unmarketable oddball subject is a major risk to produce), not enough permission (being legally seen in public, without being able to suppress what has been suppressed up to now.) It’s all excuses for failing to do better.
In many cases, they actively refuse to do better and throw individuals under the bus who expect better.
Let the record show, regarding the SF Pride furry group I founded in 2012.
In May, BEFORE release of a trailer for this show, there was failure of leadership by an organizer who took control of the group. (I had lost an account from a bricked phone and had to rejoin it.) This organizer, John “Zoren” Merris-Miche, was cronies with another group organizer, Mark “Zarafa” Willett, who I had confronted about allowing a 14 year old into another group he runs AFTER being warned that the child was at risk. Two other men in the group were later arrested for targeting this child, DOCUMENTED: https://dogpatch.press/2024/11/04/sex-crime-party-animals-west/. Organizer negligence let a child in with the arrested men. It was one of a series of such failures and yes I have receipts. Merris-Miche sided with his crony Willett to shield him and I left the group in May. The rot was obvious for a long time and required acting securely and above their heads. (The rot was also in their selfish partytime “no pawlitics” arguments — with organizers being a handful of cis males around age 40, no trans, no women — and piss-poor understanding of organizing public vs private space which they are now mad they didn’t understand.) This ended action to keep zoos out of the group by the only person watching. Some of these zoos specifically included zoosadist ring members who attended before being leaked and identified, and Quentin “Coyote” Mohos before he was outed. All of this went down in May before the crony-shielding organizers had any issue about a show trailer released in June, which they are now using for backlash while omitting what happened to a child after organizers overruled warning.
NOBODY has taken responsibility about that child. The community doesn’t have serious people at the top. They all play “we don’t know them” about people they welcomed in under their negligence after being warned, and still do, like their crony Mark “Zarafa” Willett with his chronic red flag behavior documented in forthcoming receipts. (The community already knows one predator kept under his wing.)
This is going to be a show with a beginning and end that has to stick to concrete names and events for people with low context. It’s the tip of an iceberg. There’s so much more than could possibly be shown. They know based on a great deal of active investigation that isn’t public. Watch with media-literacy about what makes a show work, but be assured some people are doing all they can to expose more. Attempted suppression proves why it must come out.
Yeah, great job Patch. Keep up the great work! You’ve been reaching a bit with your narrative threads recently. Good to see you flexing those paws on the keys when you have real things to yap about.
I just tried to watch your docu series
Love furries !
Avid animal keeper !
I started VOMITING within 10 minutes of viewing.
When the word
zoosa*** was introduced, that was it ,uncontrollable vomiting and a ridiculous amount of crying .
58 year old the last of my innocence was lost !
I want to be a trooper and watch the rest in solidarity with the cause ,and you..
I have now watched another 5 minutes
Jeez !
Not that brave can’t even watch cartoon animals get hurt seriously we have a no animals policy when it comes to our viewing content.
I pray to HECATE to protect and punish
Okok
Thank you for bringing these atrocities to light .
Thanks so much and I’m sorry this subject had to be broached at all. I’m glad you didn’t just turn it off and were willing to make contact. Awareness means a lot!
The awful graphic details are kept out of the show while only definitions and context is given. As bad as it is to learn definitions, the real stuff is even worse than imagination can picture. The silence about this from high places inside the community is INSANE and a big reason for going over their heads and getting responsible media to do their job for them. They have themselves to blame for what it does to their precious image.
My own house has 4 rescue dogs including ones nobody else wanted, and one who was probably an unadoptable candidate for being put down for biting – he took a lot of time and care to get comfortable in his forever home and now he is a loveable friend. They deserve it, and people who do the opposite need to be warned about and kept away.