I'm old enough to remember even the 2005-2010 furry-zoophilia internet battles and feral was seldom an element in furry zoophilia back then.
It was quite common for imageboards to post furry content alongside zoophilic content, many of these posters were 14-17 year olds who genuinely thought zoophilia was a sexuality and made it into some kind of furry identity.
I don't remember these people ever really focusing much on feral porn, in fact feral was pretty SFW back then.
There used to be a zoophile site called BeastForum with 1-2million users and the furry section was 80% of the posts on the site. Many of those zoophile furries were curious about zoophilia and saw anthro as somehow "better" in how it helped them avoid their urges. This resulted in the "non-performing" zoophile identity, but it's very hard to say how often these people consume zoophile porn or actually find themselves actually committing bestiality. It does seem like these people were exposed to it at a young age and somehow feel like they're "fighting" against their zoophilic urges.
So there's definitely some kind of idea in a lot of furries' heads that they feel afraid they or the fandom will regress to actually accepting bestiality. A lot of this conception comes from ex-zoophile type furries to begin with, it's just reactionaries have picked up on the idea that it is a slippery slope.
Now there's certainly a majority of Discord and Telegram groups that even claim to police against real life bestiality content while having zoophile-identified moderators and users. So naturally seeing this openness people question feral furs' connection to bestiality. But the active zoophile-identified members of those groups are a vocal minority as far as I've investigated. It's just zoophiles are trying to use feral as a vehicle to create a zoo-friendly topic place in the fandom.
Now sites like Zooville focus upon feral but also the emphasis on furry is far less because being into anthro furry porn is so generic these days, no doubt. Zooville is a much smaller site and a much smaller sample, though. Just as I said prior, BeastForum was far bigger, had a huge anthro-emphasis and focused on anthros rather than ferals, seeing "anthro fursonas" as if a reflection of themselves. This upholds the idea that zoophile furries are more likely to have an anthro-fursona with an interest in feral porn rather than feral-fursona users with an interest in feral porn. So it's really anthro-on-feral that's the zooey porn not feral on feral for example.
As such, the majority of furry zoophiles are in fact with anthro fursonas and tend to prefer actual ferals to human-minded ferals. Though of course there are a few psychotic ones that can't tell the difference between human-minded ferals and actual animals, those people tend to live on the porn boorus or social media and consume feral and anthro equally as visual content. You can see this also massively on social media like Twitter and Facebook where anthro-fursona furry accounts use the zeta symbol or Z letter to flag that they are zoophiles. Some even try apologism to say that "zoophilia" and "bestiality" is different, either that one is loving sex or one is only attraction. The words zoophilia and bestiality is used so interchangeably that by saying zoophilia is attraction-only, they are enabling those who see zoophilia as the practice to advertise and promote bestiality.
Ferals are a minority who are unfortunately caught up in this stereotype, since a majority of feral furs pursuit human-like behaviours in ferals while zoophiles tend to pursuit just porn of animals. Feral was more used in SFW contexts than NSFW ones, e.g. on deviantArt young furries in the sparkledog era expressing their "feral" version of their fursona. So the feral NSFW movement was something that was easy to miscontrue and warp by the zoophile movement. This has created a split of particularly non-zoo cute-centric disney-ish rp-oriented "feral" art/porn and the contamination of bestial-centric zooey corruptions of the idea of what feral is. The negative consequence of this is ordinary feral artists drawing more neotenic and semianthro art to distance themselves from the zoophile movement, tending to more cub/chibi-like proportions (e.g. mlp, eeveelutions and disney). Since the fandom already has a fascination with neoteny, the cub-ification of the feral movement has become more rewarding than the zooey invasion of it, and apparently hyping canon makes such cub-likeness acceptable. It's so canonical now that often we don't even need to post it outside of anti-cub sites or use such tags because it's not even seen as cub anymore, but rather "cute critters" even if when we literally are referencing fetuses.
So now feral is a soup of mostly-canonical cub/cub-like porn and the occasional beast porn, with sparkledogs managing to not get cancelled through their expressive clearly-unrealistic use of colours on slightly less cubby feral art. So not only has the zoophile movement managed to get people to cancel the majority of adult feral artists, but has made it into pedo-fodder. Don't believe me? Browse the popular furry boorus like e621 for "feral" (without blacklists enabled) and see how the content suddenly changed around 2019 during the initial mass-cancelling of feral artists. I'm an artist myself and I'm literally doing this myself, like many friends, because we'd rather draw neotenic feral than be cancelled and lose business for the negative association of being classed a zoophile. The fandom has safeplaces and economy for cub and cub feral, but for feral it's dwindling. I can blame zoophiles as much as zoo-cancellers mistargeting ferals.
From what I've seen a majority of zoos and their sites define "feral" as "a non-anthropomorphic animal character".
Whereas the average non-zoo feral tends to say that a feral is "an animal character that is less overall anthropomorphic but has the expressions and/or mental sapience of a human being". On e621, searching "feral" brings up mostly this, but on occasion you will see less sapient-looking animals, much of which is anthro x feral or human x feral. I recall non-sapient animals being called "beast" not "feral" in the early times of the furry fandom, yet these days beast and feral characters are thrown into the same bag which is very bad for innocent feral fans.
So the concept of feral is a stolen one when it comes to zoophilia. For zoos the emphasis is more on drawing an animal in porn rather than specifically expressing a higher order of character that is more than just an animal. Being interested in sapient animals does not make you a zoophile, it makes you more like an anthro-zoophile, which is essentially what all furries are. Ferals are not supposed to be animals per se, they're zoomorphised humans and are equally anthro (human) as they are zoo (animal). The distinction between feral and a normal animal must be separated, especially since ferals often have modified or transformative anatomy, especially in animated/cartoon art styles.
I'm old enough to remember even the 2005-2010 furry-zoophilia internet battles and feral was seldom an element in furry zoophilia back then.
It was quite common for imageboards to post furry content alongside zoophilic content, many of these posters were 14-17 year olds who genuinely thought zoophilia was a sexuality and made it into some kind of furry identity.
I don't remember these people ever really focusing much on feral porn, in fact feral was pretty SFW back then.
There used to be a zoophile site called BeastForum with 1-2million users and the furry section was 80% of the posts on the site. Many of those zoophile furries were curious about zoophilia and saw anthro as somehow "better" in how it helped them avoid their urges. This resulted in the "non-performing" zoophile identity, but it's very hard to say how often these people consume zoophile porn or actually find themselves actually committing bestiality. It does seem like these people were exposed to it at a young age and somehow feel like they're "fighting" against their zoophilic urges.
So there's definitely some kind of idea in a lot of furries' heads that they feel afraid they or the fandom will regress to actually accepting bestiality. A lot of this conception comes from ex-zoophile type furries to begin with, it's just reactionaries have picked up on the idea that it is a slippery slope.
Now there's certainly a majority of Discord and Telegram groups that even claim to police against real life bestiality content while having zoophile-identified moderators and users. So naturally seeing this openness people question feral furs' connection to bestiality. But the active zoophile-identified members of those groups are a vocal minority as far as I've investigated. It's just zoophiles are trying to use feral as a vehicle to create a zoo-friendly topic place in the fandom.
Now sites like Zooville focus upon feral but also the emphasis on furry is far less because being into anthro furry porn is so generic these days, no doubt. Zooville is a much smaller site and a much smaller sample, though. Just as I said prior, BeastForum was far bigger, had a huge anthro-emphasis and focused on anthros rather than ferals, seeing "anthro fursonas" as if a reflection of themselves. This upholds the idea that zoophile furries are more likely to have an anthro-fursona with an interest in feral porn rather than feral-fursona users with an interest in feral porn. So it's really anthro-on-feral that's the zooey porn not feral on feral for example.
As such, the majority of furry zoophiles are in fact with anthro fursonas and tend to prefer actual ferals to human-minded ferals. Though of course there are a few psychotic ones that can't tell the difference between human-minded ferals and actual animals, those people tend to live on the porn boorus or social media and consume feral and anthro equally as visual content. You can see this also massively on social media like Twitter and Facebook where anthro-fursona furry accounts use the zeta symbol or Z letter to flag that they are zoophiles. Some even try apologism to say that "zoophilia" and "bestiality" is different, either that one is loving sex or one is only attraction. The words zoophilia and bestiality is used so interchangeably that by saying zoophilia is attraction-only, they are enabling those who see zoophilia as the practice to advertise and promote bestiality.
Ferals are a minority who are unfortunately caught up in this stereotype, since a majority of feral furs pursuit human-like behaviours in ferals while zoophiles tend to pursuit just porn of animals. Feral was more used in SFW contexts than NSFW ones, e.g. on deviantArt young furries in the sparkledog era expressing their "feral" version of their fursona. So the feral NSFW movement was something that was easy to miscontrue and warp by the zoophile movement. This has created a split of particularly non-zoo cute-centric disney-ish rp-oriented "feral" art/porn and the contamination of bestial-centric zooey corruptions of the idea of what feral is. The negative consequence of this is ordinary feral artists drawing more neotenic and semianthro art to distance themselves from the zoophile movement, tending to more cub/chibi-like proportions (e.g. mlp, eeveelutions and disney). Since the fandom already has a fascination with neoteny, the cub-ification of the feral movement has become more rewarding than the zooey invasion of it, and apparently hyping canon makes such cub-likeness acceptable. It's so canonical now that often we don't even need to post it outside of anti-cub sites or use such tags because it's not even seen as cub anymore, but rather "cute critters" even if when we literally are referencing fetuses.
So now feral is a soup of mostly-canonical cub/cub-like porn and the occasional beast porn, with sparkledogs managing to not get cancelled through their expressive clearly-unrealistic use of colours on slightly less cubby feral art. So not only has the zoophile movement managed to get people to cancel the majority of adult feral artists, but has made it into pedo-fodder. Don't believe me? Browse the popular furry boorus like e621 for "feral" (without blacklists enabled) and see how the content suddenly changed around 2019 during the initial mass-cancelling of feral artists. I'm an artist myself and I'm literally doing this myself, like many friends, because we'd rather draw neotenic feral than be cancelled and lose business for the negative association of being classed a zoophile. The fandom has safeplaces and economy for cub and cub feral, but for feral it's dwindling. I can blame zoophiles as much as zoo-cancellers mistargeting ferals.
From what I've seen a majority of zoos and their sites define "feral" as "a non-anthropomorphic animal character".
Whereas the average non-zoo feral tends to say that a feral is "an animal character that is less overall anthropomorphic but has the expressions and/or mental sapience of a human being". On e621, searching "feral" brings up mostly this, but on occasion you will see less sapient-looking animals, much of which is anthro x feral or human x feral. I recall non-sapient animals being called "beast" not "feral" in the early times of the furry fandom, yet these days beast and feral characters are thrown into the same bag which is very bad for innocent feral fans.
So the concept of feral is a stolen one when it comes to zoophilia. For zoos the emphasis is more on drawing an animal in porn rather than specifically expressing a higher order of character that is more than just an animal. Being interested in sapient animals does not make you a zoophile, it makes you more like an anthro-zoophile, which is essentially what all furries are. Ferals are not supposed to be animals per se, they're zoomorphised humans and are equally anthro (human) as they are zoo (animal). The distinction between feral and a normal animal must be separated, especially since ferals often have modified or transformative anatomy, especially in animated/cartoon art styles.