Dogpatch Press

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, and a lot of the extent was hidden before, but some complicit members did and still do. 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.

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 that only their friends know.

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 proportion doesn’t measure influence and 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. 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. They only belatedly throw token “real abusers” under the bus to shed liability, after making opportunity and access for them. Now think, do you see pedophiles organizing on this level? Changing this isn’t asking for a lot.

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.

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.

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.)