How many furries are zoophiles? Debunking the 46.7% figure.
TL:DR - It's 14.9%.
When it comes to discussions about the prevalence of zoophilia among furries I've seen this number being peddled by some people on this sub and others, and I think it's time to address it since, despite some zoophiles and anti-furries' insistence on clinging to it, it's something one can easily debunk with minimal research and an ounce of critical thinking.
This statistic is originally from a paper by Hsu and Bailey published in 20191 , in which they proposed the concept of "autoanthropomorphozoophillia" (try saying that 10 times fast). I'm going to analyze it in greater detail in a second, but first I want to talk about what seems to have popularized this paper in the first place.
As far as I can tell this study seems to have been given a boost in popularity by an account by the name "ZoosexualAlly", which should already tell everything you need to know about how totally unbiased and trustworthy it is. - He said, sarcastically.
I'll be referring to them as 'Z' from now on for the sake of brevity.
Z is likely the one who brought this study into the spotlight as they've stated that this is their most popular post, and all the posts and comments about this study that I saw here and in other subreddits were posted after Z's tweet.
In their post Z states that "2019 study on furries shows 46.7% have at least some degree of sexual interest in real animals" which, if we read just the title of the study, we can already see is false, as it explicitly states that this paper focuses on male furries. The authors reiterate this again in the abstract and in the 'Participants' section, and considering that Z definitely read at least the abstract they're certainly aware of this fact and simply chose to misrepresent the study.
Why is this relevant? This is important because 1: It already shows that Z is obviously biased, and 2: It means that the ~25% of furries who don't identify as male (based on all the studies linked below, though methodologies vary) are not represented in their sample.
This should already be enough to show that, since the study's sample isn't representative, this 46.7% figure isn't applicable to all furries, and this is a clear case of nitpicking by someone who's obviously biased - but there are other limitations to this study that make this even clearer, which brings me to my second point...
Something that the authors recognize is that the advertisement and questionnaire for the study likely skewed the results:
Furthermore, our recruitment materials emphasized our intention to primarily study the sexuality of male furries, and our questionnaire mostly assessed sexuality. For these reasons, our sample of male furries may have been biased toward those who were sexually motivated and non-heterosexual.
Mind you, this is something that Z seems to recognize, but simply handwaves away in their second tweet, essentially saying that "bisexuality just seems to have risen a lot".
Another problem with this study is where the participants came from. The authors state that the majority of furries who participated in their survey came from forums for furries (77.3%) - they don't specify which forums, though. Only 8.1% and 6.3% came from the advertisements they put up on Dogpatch Press and FurAffinity respectively, and 8.4% were recruited through word of mouth. This is a problem because the vast majority of furries don't participate in forums: The biggest forum for furries that I'm aware of, The Furry Forum, has only 12.5K members, for example, which is nothing compared to the 1.6 million members FurAffinity already had in 2016.*
(*I'd heard this number being mentioned before, but when I went to look for the source of this claim it doesn't seem to be an official estimate. Nonetheless, it's not far-fetched, as in 2016 one of the mods for FurAffinity stated that over 300K new accounts had been made that year alone: https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/8094022/. Regardless, the point is that far more furries frequent FurAffinity than forum pages.)
For another example we can look to the 2011 International Online Furry Survey, in which over 4K furries from all over the internet participated - yet only 6.22% said they came from forums.9 Compare this to Hsu and Bailey's survey and the problem should be clear: Their sample arguably only represents the small portion of furries who were still using forums in 2019 - actually not even that considering how their advertisement and questionnaire may have biased the results, and the fact that they only focused on male furries.
However it is that these factors may intertwine with one another, the fact is that this study is not representative of furries by any stretch of the imagination, so to assert that 46.7% of furries are zoophiles would be shortsighted at best, if not outright disingenuous.
This brings us back to the first question of this post...
Enough rambling, let's get to the point: What's the actual prevalence of zoophilia among furries?
Well, estimates vary quite a lot between surveys for several reasons ranging from methodological flaws, size of the sample, how the sample was acquired, year when the survey was conducted, and difficulties inherent to surveying online communities. Here are all the estimates I could find, ordered from lowest to highest:
2% - Rust, 2001 (350 participants)14
6.9% - Roberts et al., 2019 (827 participants)13
13.3% - Osaki, 2011 (4365 participants)6
13.6% - Osaki, 2010 (4895 participants)5
13.9% - Osaki, 2009 (9024 participants)4
14.3% - fek, 2020* (4790 participants)12
14.9% - Osaki, 2012 (3267 participants)7
17.2% - Evans, 2008 (276 participants)2
18.4% - Osaki, 2008 (7024 participants)3
46.7% - Hsu & Bailey (334 participants)1
(*Results were first published in 2017, and the website is updated as the survey receives more responses. The website wasn't loading for me, so I used the most recent archived version.)
As you can see we have three obvious outliers - Rust's survey, the 2019 survey by the FurScience team, and Hsu & Bailey's study. The much larger figure found by Hsu & Bailey are due to the reasons I outlined before, and the other, much smaller results were likely influenced by social desirability bias, plus a few other factors.
Rust's estimate of only 2% would be even lower than what's been found for the general population, however this is because 325 of the participants were interviewed face-to-face, and even in the online survey participants had to provide their email, name and "identification" (the author doesn't explain what he means by that, my best guess is that he asked for a picture of the participant's ID), so social desirability undoubtedly played a big role in his survey.
The 6.9% figure found by the FurScience team is the result of an online survey, so social desirability probably didn't have much of an effect - nonetheless the way they reached this estimate likely skewed the results. They explain that they used an open-ended question in which they asked participants to describe their kinks or fetishes, and since some zoophiles don't conceptualize their attraction as a paraphilia or kink, instead thinking of it as their sexuality, it's unlikely that all zoophiles would input their paraphilia into this question.
Discarding these three outliers we're left with 7 estimates which range from 13.3% to 18.4%. If we take the average of all these studies, weighting their estimates according to their sample size, we find that about 14.9% of furries are zoophiles.
So... is this it? Are some 15% of furries zoophiles? Is this the ultimate number?
Maybe... and maybe not. Whilst this 14.9% estimate is the most reasonable we have, it's exactly that, an estimate. Methodologies varies between surveys, some of them are a bit dated, and where the participants came from also matters. Furries who go to conventions are going to be different from furries who don't. Furries who frequent furry-focused websites such as FurAffinity will be different from those who don't. Furries who frequent SFW only websites such as Amino and Tumblr will be different from those who use websites that allow pornographic content.
Something that hinders every survey on furries is the fact that it's extremely difficult to get a truly representative sample of online communities. The characteristics of different websites/apps vary greatly, and with furries being scattered all across the internet it's nearly impossible to get a completely random sample of furries.
Perhaps the only way to get a truly random and representative sample of furries would be to use Google AdWords, as it isn't something exclusive to furry websites and it's been shown to yield a reasonably representative sample of the general population15 . However as is shown in the study this a costly method, so we're probably not gonna see it being used to recruit furries any time soon.
Nonetheless, considering how most of these surveys have thousands of participants and were shared in a variety of websites, and how despite having somewhat different methodologies they all found similar results, we can, indeed, say with a reasonable degree of confidence that around 14.9% of furries are zoophiles.
One final piece of evidence that corroborates this estimate is porn.
Hold on, let me explain.
As of the last time I checked before making this post (10/DEZ), e621 had 2,131,779 posts, of which 338,889 (15.9%) were tagged as 'feral'. Estimates vary, but somewhere between 5% - 20% of furries have no sexual interest in anthropomorphic characters2, 6, 7, 9, 11, 12 - most estimates are around 15% - 20%, but let's go with the lowest estimate for the sake of argument, and so people don't decry that I'm nitpicking a percentage that's too high. The Furry Fiesta 2013 study^11 found that about 93% of their sample viewed pornographic furry artwork. If we multiply 15.9% by 0.93 to account for the furries who aren't interested in furry pornography we get 14.8%, which is almost the exact same as the aforementioned 14.9% estimate.
Of course, this is assuming that artists who draw feral yiff do so at a similar rate to artist who don't, and I'm sure some people will have complaints about using feral yiff as a proxy for interest in actual zoophilia, but again, this is just for the sake of showing that the 14.9% estimate is indeed accurate.
Now that I've made the case for why the 46.7% figure is wrong let's move on to a question that I'm sure many of you are asking yourselves: How does this 14.9% number compare to the general population?
It's very hard to say. I did a lot of research trying to find out if there are any studies assessing the prevalence of zoophilia in the general population, but I quickly found out that, for obvious reasons, zoophilia isn't a particularly popular subject for research. Many of the papers that do meddle in the topic focus on studying only zoophiles, either by contacting them through online communities or through case studies (where they focus on only one person). Nonetheless, even among the studies which did try to estimate the prevalence of zoophilia they were often hindered by small or unrepresentative samples - But alas, here's a review of what I could find.
In his famous 1948 report Kinsey found that 8% of men had had sexual contact with an animal at least once, and in his 1953 report he found that this number was 3.6% for women - nonetheless, Kinsey's survey was criticized for having a significant portion of prison inmates. A 1974 report by Morton Hunt which relied on a community sample found rates of 4.9% for men and 1.9% for women. This difference in prevalence compared to Kinsey's report may also have to do with people moving away from rural areas, as Kinsey had also found that for rural males the rate of bestiality was as high as 40%.16, 17, 18
(Note: I couldn't find links to the original studies by Kinsey and Hunt, so instead I linked to other papers which cite them in reviewing the literature on zoophilia.)
Despite Hunt's study having a more representative sample and being somewhat more recent, it's still hindered by the fact that they only assessed bestiality, not zoophilia. Bestiality is the sexual contact with animals, whilst zoophilia pertains to sexual attraction. Not every zoophile has sexual contact with animals, and not everyone who commits bestiality is necessarily a zoophile.
A study from 1991 reported that 12.5% of their control group either had sexual contact or at least one sexual fantasy about an animal - nonetheless, it consisted of only 40 people, so their results aren't really generalizable, and the results for sexual fantasies may have been somewhat inflated since a respondent only needed to have had one such fantasy to be included in this group.11
In 2002 a study of mostly heterosexual German men and women found that 8.3% of respondents seldom had sexual fantasies about animals, and 4.4% said they sometimes had such fantasies, for a total of 12.7%. Interestingly, only 1.7% of participants rated their desire to experience these fantasy in reality between medium to very strong, yet 4.4% said they've actually had sexual contact with an animal.19 While this study does have a more respectable sample size, with only 180 participants its generalizability is still somewhat questionable. Nonetheless, the resuls regarding fantasies are in accordance with Alvarez & Freinhar's 1991 study, and the prevalence of bestiality this study found is similar to what was reported by Hunt. It should also be noted that the fact that most of the respondents were heterosexual likely affected the results at least a bit, as research suggests that most zoophiles are attracted to animals of the same sex or of both sexes.20
More recently a 2015 study analyzed dating questionnaires from an online Czech sadomasochist community and found that 7.9% of their sample was interested in bestiality (They say it was 7.32% for some reason, but if you add up the numbers that's not actually the result? I can only assume it was a mistake). However there were more men than women in their sample, and obviously a sample of sadomasochists is not going to be representative of the general population. Nonetheless, it's interesting to note that they actually found a higher prevalence for women (9%) than for men (7.6%), which goes against Kinsey's and Hunt's findings. One final thing to consider is the fact that these answers were publicly available on the users' profiles, and since some people would likely not feel comfortable sharing this information in a public dating website, social desirability probably also had some effect on their results.21
So, considering all of this, how many people in the general population are actually zoophiles? Again, it's very hard to say for sure. These studies are very heterogeneous, and the size and representativeness of some of the samples limits their generalizability. We also have to consider that most of these surveys examined either fantasies or actual sexual contact with animals, while the surveys on furries asked about sexual attraction or whether participants identified as zoophiles, so it's not clear that a one-to-one comparison would really be that accurate.
I guess the most educated estimate I can give you considering all these factors is that somewhere around 4% - 8% of the general population are zoophiles - it's a big margin of error because again, these studies are very heterogeneous, and have several shortcomings. This would mean that there are around 2-3 times more zoophiles among furries compared to the general population. Ultimately, even if we consider the highest estimate that these studies would suggest - around 12.5% considering Hunt's study and the German study, though in my opinion that would be a stretch - this would still mean that there are at least a few more zoophiles among furries - but let's be honest, does that really surprise anyone?
The ultimate point I want to get at here is not to say "it's fine that X% of furries are zoophiles because Y% of the general population is too!". Sure, zoophilia and bestiality may be more common than most people think, but that doesn't make them justifiable. The point I'm trying to make is that no, it's not 46.7% of furries who are zoophiles, it's 14.9%, or around 1 in 7.
The point I'm trying to make is that everyone should beware of the man of one study, and to not be too quick to trust an obviously biased source without some fact-checking. Truly understanding a topic takes far more than just one study.
The point I'm trying to make is just to not misrepresent furries.
Do you dislike these dunces who defend zoophilia, and their supposed connection to the furry fandom? Good. As furries are becoming more accepted some zoophiles are increasingly attempting to cling to us in the same way that pedos keep trying to cling to the LGBT community, and furry or anti-furry alike, something you can do to help get rid of these parasites is to not spread falsehoods peddled by them.
To truly have a legitimate conversation about furries and the fandom we need to know the real facts, and furries and anti-furries alike ought to avoid falling for and spreading misinformation. Hopefully this post helps with that.
2: The Furry Sociological Survey
8: Furscience: Sex, Gender, and Gender Identity
9: International Online Furry Survey: Winter 2011
10: International Furry Survey: Summer 2011
14: The Sociology of Furry Fandom
16: Bestiality and zoophilia: Associations with violence and sex offending
17: An exploratory study on psychosocial variables of people participating in Zoophilic Blogs/Websites
18: Digital Ethnography of Zoophilia — A Multinational Mixed-Methods Study
20: New insights into bestiality and zoophilia
21: Prevalence of zoophilia in a Czech sado-masochist community
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