Zoe Carroll is a substitute pre-K teacher by day and a furry full-time.
At 24, her life has become completely engulfed by furry fandom. Carroll’s home, where she lives in Jacksonsville, Florida, with her grandparents, is cluttered with fur fabric, sewing kits, and furry artwork. Her water bottle, which she takes to school, is decorated in furry stickers.
“I always have a laundry list of furry things to do,” she said.
Creating costumes for her six furry-personas keeps Carroll busy. She could be Robin (a coyote), Vivian (a zebra), Henny (a horse), Katina or Limewire (wolves), or RawrXD (a dachshund).
Aside from being a full-time online student at St. Johns River State College studying criminal justice, Carroll is also a staffer for the North Carolina Anthropomorphic Society, which hosts two annual furry conventions.
On a sunny April weekend, the organization held its fifth-annual Be Whiskered convention at the Durham Convention Center. Carroll made the nearly 500 miles trip to manage disability services and programming and host panels for the 2,138 furries in attendance.
Furries are people united by an interest in animals with human traits—whether literally furry or not (reptile, sea creature and dragon furries exist, too). Often, furries create alternate identities (“fursonas”), for which they will make a costume (known as a “fursuit”). Others make art, engage in roleplay or, in some cases, create furry pornography.
The fandom is primarily online and is steadily gaining popularity, though the total number of furries is fuzzy. Like Carroll, they may attend national conventions or local events, and communicate in online forums and in Telegram group chats.
They are occasionally the victims of fearmongering, such as when a Nebraskan state senator falsely claimed local schools were providing litter boxes for children self-identifying as cats.
There is a strong curiosity about the furry fandom. VICE magazine reported that Americans make over 500,000 furry-related searches online every month. Sometimes Fox News publishes about the growing fandom. (“New York college approves ‘furry’ student club as trend spreads across US campuses;” “Boston College professor assigns students to make their own ‘fursonas,’ has furries come to class.”)
Carroll spent her early teenage years engrossed in the cosplay community—a subculture where people dress up as characters, such as from anime and video games. She had always been drawn to animals and found the furries at cosplay events to be very welcoming. So, when she was about 16, she made a Google query along the lines of “furry groups near me” and then joined the only chapter in Florida that was open to minors: in Gainesville, about an hour from her home.
Carroll’s first persona was Henny, a gold and white horse, which she chose simply because she’d always liked the animal. Unlike the other five personas she made later, which are more like creative expressions of herself, she sees Henny as a direct representation of herself.
“If I transformed into a horse, I’d be Henny,” Carroll said. “There’s no aspect of Henny that isn’t me, and no aspect of me that isn’t Henny.”
As Carroll has developed her interest, Henry has changed with her. Henny has been through five design iterations. At first she was a hybrid horse-pronghorn (an antelope-like creature with horns), but she shed her horns at some point over the past eight years.
Carroll calls herself “eccentric and insane,” and her eclectic personality can be seen in her hair, scarlet with dark, horizontal stripes. She speaks with conviction and carries her six-foot, ex-high school swimmer stature with grace. Carroll’s unconventional fashion taste compliments her bubbliness and her witty jokes. She is quick to acknowledge her autism and is a self-described “recluse.”
Making a Fursuit on a Budget
Crafting the perfect fursuit takes time and creativity. Carroll has created five for herself and is even commissioned by others to make parts for theirs. Furries can spend years changing and upgrading parts of their costumes, adding modifications such as cooling vests and lining foam padding with neoprene.
“Honestly, to make a full suit from scratch, you’re going to be spending potentially more than $500 in materials,” she told a room of about 30 furries at the convention. Her “Making a Fursuit on a Budget” slide show offered tips on how to squeeze the cost, giving recommendations for things such as the best budget clippers for detailed shaving. Another option: purchasing a second-hand suit to modify, as she did with Katina the wolf.
“The shave was rough. She had bald patches. She had blobs of hot glue on her,” Carroll said. “But I didn’t care ‘cause I bought this suit for the hand paws [and] the feet paws…. I took all the fur off.”
After 45 minutes, the panel became a suit supply swap providing attendees with the opportunity to trade their spare faux fur and neoprene for other supplies.
“People bring really rare fur colors,” said Lindsay Wright, who attended Carroll’s panel. “I’m already itching to get home and make another tail.”
The swap was a courteous affair. The supplies’ owners were politely asked for permission before being handled. Most displayed their pronouns on name tags (anything from “she/her” to “pup/pupself”), and many had tags that indicated acceptable behavior. “Please hug me,” one said. “Nervous bean,” another noted.
The social scene
Most of the time, furries only talk to each other online, so conventions like the one in Durham are a rare opportunity to don their full suits. Carroll only wears hers four or five times a year. (She attends local events such as raves from time to time, but she’ll only wear a furry head.)
Carroll saves her most special suit, Henny, for the annual Anthrocon in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which she describes as “my con that I horse it up at.” (Anthrocon is one of the biggest U.S. conventions, alongside Midwest Furfest in Rosemont, Illinois. Each attracts about 16,000 to 18,000 people annually.)
On paper, furries are pretty homogeneous. According to Furscience, a platform where researchers publish their findings about the fandom, 84% of furries identify as male, 83% are white, two thirds are queer and more than 75% are under 25.
Carroll finds people in the fandom to be passionate and “unapologetically themselves.” Most of her friends are furries.
Carroll met her best friends at the Midwest FurFest convention where the three roomed together. (It’s not uncommon for furries to room together at conventions to save money.) Her friend Ellery, 26, is a middle school teacher in upstate South Carolina. Carroll is invited to Ellery’s wedding.
Carroll loves the furry community. Without them, she said, “I’d probably be way more depressed than I already am.”
The Night Market
A common belief about the furry fandom is that it’s all about a sexual fetish. Furries say this element is blown out of proportion, but it’s not completely untrue—as in many subcultures, adult content exists.
After 9 p.m., the convention in Durham began to switch gears. Sessions such as “Kink 101,” “Pup Play,” the “Night Market,” and “BDSM 101” populated the schedule long into the nights, each marked with an “Adult 18+” tag. (Some conventions are strictly 18+ anyways, but this one was open to minors if accompanied by an adult—unless sessions indicated otherwise.)
There is an appetite for online furry pornography, Carroll said. She became an Only Fans creator when she turned 18 and made money from sexual furry content requests—enough to put herself through three years of college.
“I got beaucoup bucks through it,” she said. “Furries be spending hella money on porn.” (Carroll made about $2,000 per month. She knows creators who make $40,000 a month.)
But the sexual aspect of the fandom is accompanied by a social hierarchy fuelled by race and beauty standards, Carroll said. She didn’t enjoy it.
Since then, Carroll has deleted all of her online sexual content and became “buddy-buddy with all of the other outcasts.”
“There’s a miracle downtown”
Picking up people from the convention downtown, an Uber driver named Josiah Kurgat inquired about the furries. “There’s a miracle downtown,” Kurgat said. He’d spent the weekend carting them from hotels to bars to the convention and was curious to hear what the fandom was all about.
“They’re very peaceful,” he said. “They seem to be really passionate about what they do. They are in-sync [with themselves]…. Could they be the normal ones?”
But Kurgat’s welcoming attitude is not universal. Furries face anything from judgmental stares to harassment and threats. In 2022, Georgia gubernatorial Republican candidate Kandiss Taylor tweeted “The furry days are over when I’m governor.” In 2025, ABC4 news reported that Utah furry groups received threats after rumours that Charlie Kirk’s shooter was part of their community. In 2014, a chlorine gas leak disrupted the Midwest Furfest convention, which police suspected was “an intentional act,” though no one was ever charged.
As a result, some furries are careful what information they share. Ellery asked her last name not to be disclosed for fear of retaliation at the middle school where she teaches. Carroll doesn’t mention it to the children in her class.
Being a furry is not something Carroll is ashamed of, though. Her colleagues know, and so her grandparents. (“They are so invested in me being a furry,” she said.)
Both Carroll and Ellery find their community empowering. The suits provide a mask, a barrier, a sense of safety—as if they were “wrapped up in a nice blanket,” Carroll said. It’s a way to control people’s perceptions because they only see what you present to them.
“They’re not thinking about the person underneath, which is what I want,” Carroll said.
Her life is wrapped up in the community: her friends, her hobbies, her identity—and maybe one day, her life partner.
“I’m also open to converting a normie,” she said.
Photo at top: Zoe Carroll in costume as Henny the horse. Photo courtesy of Zoe Carroll
Paige Stevens
