A friend of mine... hell, a roommate, attended a university seminar the other day (shocking in itself but that's hardly the point) on videogame culture, and, somehow, the topic sprung up. Y'know what topic I mean. THAT topic. The fandom.
Now, being as informed as he is (living with me helps the situation no end with my array of posters homaging Cleo from 'Heathcliff and the Catillac Cats' fawnicating the walls), brought it up, and was in turn the only person there to be fully aware of what he was on about. No one in that room of 15-18 20-somethings had a shiny shit of a clue about what a furry was apart from my somewhat embarrassed friend, who's had not one, but two furries as best friends for the past five years (though one denied it, despite being a regular user of FurryMUCK).
I was stunned. I myself had only discovered the art of the furry and alike whilst sitting my GCSEs, but was still summarily shocked by it's lack of outside knowledge in the land of 'Milk and Honey' (or whatever the blue hell you wanna call it.)
It's the same throughout the UK (certainly England at the very least). No one has a bloody clue what it is to be a 'furry', nor what to think of it (even slight mentions here and there define fandomers as merely 'folk who dress up as animals as a fetish', cringeworthy in it's lack of research).