I don't consider "furry" to be an addiction for me. I was naturally drawn to it as a child (talking animal films, cartoons, etc.) and just prefer looking at anthros more than humans.

I've certainly allowed real-life socialization opportunities to pass due to online furry stuff, but that's less about the "furry" part of it, and more about having been raised to always put the needs of others over your own, and having internalized that so hard that I feel guilty if I'm doing anything other than working on requests (I spent my break at work today and my dinner afterwards working on requests on my laptop). I also apparently have a problem with run-on sentences.

jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeezus O.O

While I admire your drive to work on something you like to do, I just hope you are not being "used" to your detriment.

Good question. I find nonfurry lit tends to bore me...I just cant seem to find interest inless a story has at least one animal character lol. So does this mean Im addicted hmm

if it makes you feel good, an addiction is about survival and keeping yourself in control. we all need an outlet for our stresses in life.

I think it may vary by person. After all, many furry conventions are a chance to get together face to face with folks you've just known online. For myself, if my friends lived closer I'd be hanging out with them instead of doing online chatting, but since the online chatting facilitates my friendships rather than gets in the way of them, I don't see it as an addiction.

Also, there are many, many people who are interested in furry things long before they find out about furry fandom. In fact, the online furry community, if anything, helps such individuals to feel less alone or strange. If that's an addiction, then it has to be one of the most benign I've ever heard of.

Of course, it's also true there are some folks that do the whole fursuiting 24/7 thing or other activities that are detrimental to mental, physical, or monetary health, but such individuals, I think, are outliers on the fandom as a whole, much as folks like Fred Phelps or the al Qaeda are the outliers of their respective groups.

"furry" is my life, can something which is a person's entire lifestyle be described as an addiction? To me that sounds like people with a different lifestyle, judging someone and telling them how they should live.

So many long answers. It's a simple yes or no question.

Yes.

I think it really can be - but it's so vast an experience that people over invest in different ways. Sometimes it doesn't really affect peoples' professional lives but still damages them socially.

Most online games are designed to be as addictive as possible for as many people as possible, that's the whole point of their existance. Furry stuff may happen to be addictive for some predisposed people but it's not even coming close to that. In my opinion partecipating in the furry community, online relationships etc. can even have therapeutic value for some people, in a way that no game or classical psychological therapy can provide.

Actually someone I know wrote a very big and detailed term paper about addiction. It is some sort of summary.
-> Everything that doesn't involve addictive substances within the body is from a medical point of view not an addiction.
Endogenous substances/substances produced naturally in the body are not relevant for this medical definition.
There isn't even an exception if your reward center in the brain produces far too much and you are drunk by your own neurotransmitters.
In fact many professional scientists who were involved in the main addiction studies of the years 1981 till 2011 (a group of over 400 scientists) suggested that the overzealous search for diseases should be considered as mental illness.

Games, smart phones, model railroads, playing soccer, watching television, reading books, drawing furry artwork and so on are no addictions at all.
They are different forms of activities with alternate life style tendencies, depending on the character/person.
They are activities to show how different characters manage different situations. (Revealing effect of the true character)
So you can be a fan(atic) or someone that is more a superficial character.
So activity X (phoning) or activity Y (playing) shows us in fact which person is very superficial, semi-superficial, non-superficial and which one is an expert and which one is an smartass in this special field of activity.
So if someone is saying: "Hey you play this game all day!" the correct answer would be: "You are to superficial to even understand all nuances of this activity, so don't waste my time with your ignorance/lack of knowledge/monotony."
The correct blaming would be: "Hey with playing this game all day, you won't be able to do other activities anymore: Like earning money or doing your homework! So finish it quickly!"

* that also includes gambling games. So talking about "gambling addiction" is just a bad excuse for being completely irresponsible/reckless. So you can also show that a big mass of people are irrational. But that is not a big surprise that humanity is not rational at all.

I too wrote a paper researching this stuff, haha.

While endogenous/exogenous factors might be a useful distinction in some respects, humans can have the same experience from endogenous factors (reactions to sex, risk/gambling, perhaps some foods) as exogenous ones (drugs, alcohol, etc.). In fact, the only reason exogenous substances can cause addiction is because they are able to co-opt brain circuitry (the dopamine system) which serves to motivate natural, normal human activities: having sex, eating, taking some risks (that rush you get, for example, when you’re on a roller coaster, or when you get a reward out of a slot machine).

If endogenous “addictions” were wholly a matter of responsibility or willpower, as you suggest, they would not share so many traits with exogenous ones. For instance, Parkinson’s disease patients who take dopamine treatments to allay their symptoms sometimes spontaneously develop addictions to sex or gambling that disappear when their treatments are halted. On the flipside, medications (such as naltrexone) designed to help substance addicts recover from their addictions have been demonstrated to mitigate or even eliminate even severe sex and gambling addictions in multiple patients.

If you recognize these similarities, then the distinction between exogenous/addiction and its endogenous variant is just a matter of semantics: you define “addiction” as being necessarily exogenous. I question whether the exogenous/endogenous distinction is a useful one in this case.

Of course, this article isn’t considering a clinical definition of “addiction”; it’s using the more colloquial usage as “dependency” or “compulsion.” To show that video games, for instance, could cause addiction, they would have to establish first that those who cannot (for some reason or another) resist video games do so because, for example, their playing video games released such a superfluity of dopamine into their brains that their receptors adjusted to a higher baseline dopamine level that only playing video games could relieve. Then you could describe it as an addiction on par with sex or gambling.

I repeated the definition that is used in science.

Your statement is not an antithesis.
Person A who has Parkinson's disease for example or person B,who has better feelings with playing soccer for example,have just another brain architecture than person C or D.
So you compare the brain architecture/the characters A with B in the end when there are no exogenous factors.
"Hans was always prone to sensory overload" -
"Irmgard was much less susceptible" -
"Jörg was completely immune to all the seductions of this world."
To compare the character itself with other characters has no base at all, because there is no "standard person X" or generalization how a character has to be. And we don't judge. We just "observe" and we try to help if someone is irresponsible or irrational if he/she wants that help.

And I'm just saying that the definition is being questioned (yes, even by scientists) and that I feel that it is being questioned quite justifiably ;)

Well actually it was since the 1950s a continuous burner, especially in psychology and other "hen parties" to find a new "addiciton" just in time for every day's afternoon coffee. *chuckles*
Today this debate isn't a sure-fire success anymore,because it denies the complexity of character diversity and it isn't as easy to earn money with all these therapy tales -> hypochondria.
Back to the original question:
Surely Hans for example can be a fanatic with all the fur and he can make the statement: "Yeah see all these colors, gotta catch'em all!" But his girlfriend can come up with the statement: "What is all this fuzz? And why are they jumping around?" O_o Like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dIu8gHkzEs
Same situation/activity two separate perceptual worlds/impressions. *chuckles*

The use of the word 'addiction' is difficult for me, honestly. Is it the idea that going to furry sites too often as a compulsion could be considered an addiction? I understand that a lot of people in the fandom make very real and substantial connections within the community that can sometimes become the most significant relationships in their lives. I think making that human connection, no matter the means, is far too vital and important to a persons overall happiness to question the engine of that bond. However, I think that a certain consummation is vital to making those bonds truly lasting ones, in the sense of simply meeting that person in real life at some point. A whole and healthy relationship is one where you know both the good and the bad of a person, and love them regardless. It's too easy to pull away from someone in difficult times, or for someone to present the best version of themselves online, for a relationship made only online to be as powerful as the one you could have with someone you see on a regular basis. I won't diminish online relationships at all, the guy I'm married to I met online, but it only truly became the love of my life when we finally met. :)


There is certainly an element of escapism inherent in all things furry, and there is a real human need to indulge in the fantastic and the impossible as a means of leaving behind the stress of our modern world.

Can it be possible to overindulge? I'd say there are very few things indeed that don't reach a point of diminishing returns at some point, and that can cause real harm if they become the only reason for a person to get out of bed. Enjoying furry things falls into that category as anything else would. I see nothing inherently misguided about the fandom at all. I've been a lifelong fan and love it, but I do worry when people give up other aspects of their life to accommodate this, as I would if a sports fan decided to go on a tour of all the stadiums in baseball for a year at the expense of the family they left back home that can't afford that trip.

A loving committed life-long relationship between two people, who decide to forge a bond and adhere to that bond in all scenarios, is likely the most profound relationship possible in our lives, outside of a deep relationship with a higher power, whatever that power might be. Yet even there a moderation is necessary for it to work. I think if someone makes the furry fandom the most important consideration in their life then that is grand, because they have found something that is important enough to them to make it the focal point of their life, and that kind of passion is to be applauded in my opinion. But if it's the only thing that matters, then it's a problem. There has to be a balance, as in all things.