At best it’s encouraging sexual attraction to something that doesn’t exist

Which is literally xenophilia. People want to bonk with weird shit all the time - look at all the cases of people needing to be cut out of exhaust pipes or objects stuck in ass or vagina. Deviancy is normal, even if we all have different levels of it. That was the main part that made the xenophilia explanation work for me. Is xenophilia bad? Honestly not for me to judge, as it hurts no one and is pretty much unexplored when it comes to morality as we, kinda, never met any aliens in the first place. At least not en masse, if we try to keep open mind to conspiracy theories ;p

People want to bonk Transformers and we just give them weird look and carry on. People want to frick Cthulu and again, get weird look and carry on. I am of opinion furries also qualify there - they want to bonk something that doesn’t exist. Give a weird look and carry on.

and at worst those things that don’t exist look like a cross between humans who do exist and animals who do exist and that could cause people to fall on the wrong size of that actual animals part.

Yeah, I get ya there. But also there is a well documented thing of furries staying vigilant and hunting down actual zoophiliacs in the fandom. If someone gets too close to actual animal sex art, even if said animal is suggested to be sentient, fandom tends to implode on them and report them, which supports the idea they draw a very clean line between themselves and zoophilia. Which again supports the xenophilia claim.

About the guy you mentioned, I’m actually willing to bet he had nothing to do with furries. If furries were connected to zoophiliacs it would be mentioned more - people love attacking associated stuff and furries already have a huge target on their back. But almost every single time I saw an article about caught zoophiliac, it was a case of peanut butter and deviant curiosity with no moral brakes.

Heck, I have a furry friend, and while teasing him for shit and giggles once I wrangled the topic into more serious rails and it pretty much resulted in him saying he is still fully attracted to humans (and as dude is hetero, specifically women), it’s just that he likes the aesthetic. Similiar to catgirls, basically, just taken into full alien mode. I believe it’s safe to assume this applies to most furries - they are still attracted to humans rather than animals, they just like said humans having weird traits, basically not being vanilla. Which makes these furrsonas actual xenos rather than animals. Which supports xenophilia claim.

Which is still weird but not morally wrong, so there’s nothing wrong with letting them be. Althought they could actually try to minimalize the porn overflow T-T