What was the first time you realized you were a furry?

Nightweaver20xx
Birthday Fur - Joined within the first year of the site operation and has had significant amount of activity as of June 1, 2021.
Astra - Helped choose the name for our mascot - Astra.
Passing of the Eclipse - Joined within the first month of public opening and has had at least some activity as of August 3, 2020.
Artist -

Ah sh*t here we go again
It was 1997. I had just gotten on the Internet a week or so ago, for the first time. I was searching for Sonic the Hedgehog SatAM art (yeah this dates me), and I found a site called the Squeaky Clean Furry Archive (SCFA). Literally nobody here will know what that is because nobody here is as old as I am. But that day when I found those first Sonic fan comics by artist John MacFarlane, it was then I knew I was a “furry.” In 1998 and ’99 I went to Anthrocon, then never went again.
 
And here I am. Your stories.
DerpyFast
Astra - Helped choose the name for our mascot - Astra.
Passing of the Eclipse - Joined within the first month of public opening and has had at least some activity as of August 3, 2020.

High Tail Hall on Newgrounds. Newgrounds is how I eventually found 4chan, which led me down the furry rabbithole. It’s also how I found Paheal.
 
I’ve been around.
Bexar Bandito
Astra - Helped choose the name for our mascot - Astra.
Passing of the Eclipse - Joined within the first month of public opening and has had at least some activity as of August 3, 2020.

gahd dang it bobbeh
my story goes all the way back to the mid-2000s, roughly 2005 or so. back when my older sister was in high school she was really into anime/chibi stuff and a lot of the art she drew had characters that she called “furries”, although they were really more like regular humans with animal ears and stuff. that was the first time i’d heard the term “furry”, although it would be another year or so before i’d really start getting into wider internet culture. i think i discovered the actual furry fandom through, of all things, encyclopedia dramatica, which unsurprisingly left a poor impression on me. it wasn’t until around 2008 when i got really into somethingawful.com that i began to have a change of heart and start thinking “hey, these guys seem harmless enough, i don’t know why they get so much hate” - undoubtedly the fact that i had just turned 13 and was on a voyage of “self-discovery” almost certainly had a bearing on that. on that point, through encyclopedia dramatica i discovered the crazy hyper/macro art of gideon, which led me to discover vcl and paheal and all the semi-old-school artists on there like roary, e.k. goya, ayame emaya, even some of nightweaver’s old stuff. i was already hooked but kinda in denial about it, then in 2009 i discovered e621 and that completely sealed the deal for me.
 
funnily enough, e621 is also where i first discovered mlp, all the way back in early january of 2011 when someone uploaded a bunch of mlp memes. my initial reaction was incredulity that they’d reboot something as uninspired as the my little pony franchise, followed by curiosity once i saw that people were actually praising the show and that it was created by the lady who did powerpuff girls and foster’s home; a year later i got fully into the show, all thanks to the furries.
PwnyPony
Even Worse Kobold -
Birthday Fur - Joined within the first year of the site operation and has had significant amount of activity as of June 1, 2021.
Derpy Fur - Prevented Furbooru's terrible fate in April of 2021.
Seedling - Gave the site life with many uploads during its first months
Astra - Helped choose the name for our mascot - Astra.
Passing of the Eclipse - Joined within the first month of public opening and has had at least some activity as of August 3, 2020.

Shy Fur
May have started with looney tunes and Tom & Jerry some time in 1998/99 and then solidified in the early PS2 Era 2002ish. Blame Sly and Rachet. Started looking for stuff like that since then.
 
Didn’t know being a furry was a thing until 2008 when we went from dialup to DSL. It was then I could start using the internet for pictures and not text. Then found out there was a fandom dedicated to drawing animal people. OwO
dream
The 1% - Hit 1% of Uploads Milestone for a year
Birthday Fur - Joined within the first year of the site operation and has had significant amount of activity as of June 1, 2021.
Seedling - Gave the site life with many uploads during its first months
Heavy Lifter -
Astra - Helped choose the name for our mascot - Astra.
Tag Lover - Good and Proficient Tagger
Passing of the Eclipse - Joined within the first month of public opening and has had at least some activity as of August 3, 2020.
Artist -

TAKING A BREAK
warrior cats + various early 2000s cartoons about animals made me a furry. i’ve been into anthro animals for a veery long time. like. most of my life
ThomasDaWererat

I kept making animal-themed characters before I knew what a furry was, and was watching shows like Beast Wars and Disney’s Robin Hood. I’m not sure I’m full owo yet, I’ll need a second opinion.
DMFurion
Birthday Fur - Joined within the first year of the site operation and has had significant amount of activity as of June 1, 2021.

Femme Buck Too
I think it started pretty young for me. I had always kind of felt like I didn’t fit in and fantasized about being something other than human. I was and still am big into media featuring transformation, and I think I first heard about furries around the time The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess came out, back when I was in middle school. I didn’t really start dabbling in it until high school, though, when I set up an account on DeviantArt and started browsing anthro art in my free time. Early in my senior year I got involved in the MLP:FiM fandom and that became my outlet for a while, but around about 2016 I started getting back into furry culture and seriously thinking about designing a fursona, which I finally got around to actually doing earlier this year.
 
And that’s how I became a femme-ass deerboi. :P
Anonymous #D4D2
My first wet dream when I was 12, I have a huge transformation kink and I had a dream about me turning into a tiger man on an island and then fucking one of the natives. I also remember having dreams about turning into animals long before that too, and I blame the donkey transformation scene from Pinocchio for putting this idea in my head.
One morning I looked up “werefox” just wondering if werefoxes were an actual thing back when I was like 13 or so, and I found some really hot stuff and that’s when I realized that I wasn’t alone. I looked at more furry transformation art than normal porn, and I don’t know why. Like sex still interests me and all, but the thought of a long, soft, or strong tail ripping out of my pants and swinging back in forth just makes me so extremely weak for some reason.
When I was 18 (last year) I stumbled upon this guy on Tumblr named Francis Lion,and this was the first time I told someone about this weird fetish of mine, well because we have the same thing. I told him some very dirty things anonymously, and he said dirty things back, but too bad it doesn’t let me message him anymore :(. And now that I have discovered Furbooru now all of you must witness the weird porn I like 😈
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