(The Epoch Times)—As I sat at the Christmas dinner table, my fork poised over a baked potato crisped to perfection, I found myself enrolled in an impromptu seminar on the curious world of “furries,” courtesy of my teenage relatives.
These bright-eyed purveyors of contemporary oddities regaled tales from a Sydney satellite city’s school, a veritable hotbed of furry fandom. I’d heard whispers of this subculture—apparently false reports of cat litter being offered up in schools—but the depth and fervour of this phenomenon had previously eluded my grasp.
So, what in the Dickensian landscape of modern subcultures are “furries”?
The term defies a neat, one-size-fits-all definition. But if one were to ask Kathleen Gerbasi—a scholar armed with a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Rochester in New York—a “furry” is an individual who finds themselves spiritually aligned with, or even adopting the traits of, a specific animal species.
Ms. Gerbasi isn’t a mere casual observer in the furry fray; she was the pioneering mind behind a 2008 scholarly paper that delved into the intricacies of “fursonas.”
This revelation at the dinner table, nestled between the gravy boat and the cranberry sauce, left me bewildered and bemused, with a forkful of potato suspended in mid-air as I pondered the depths of human identity and expression.
As I ventured further into this festive feast of absurdity, my youthful informants—let’s affectionately label them Hannah, Olivia, and Izzy—served up a narrative far more peculiar than the conventional understanding of “furries.”
In their academic jungle, a peculiar breed flourished: students who, in the early wilderness of years 7 to 9, donned their furry personas with the fervour of a Shakespearean actor in a sold-out show.
But, as the curtain fell on Year 9, these fur-clad thespians seemed to vanish into thin air.
Had they retreated to more domestic pursuits, like purring on the laps of doting mothers or honing their mousing skills?
The trio couldn’t say.
Dedication to Stay in Character
The truly baffling aspect, as relayed by my earnest narrators, was the unwavering commitment these furries had to their roles.
Not once did they break character within the hallowed halls of school.
Speech was forsaken for meows and barks; answers to teachers’ questions were met with stoic silence. These furry aficionados, eschewing the drab garb of school uniforms, adorned themselves with sewn-on tails and headbands crowned with furry ears.
Hannah recounted a tale that bordered on the Kafkaesque: a non-furry lad from Year 9 dared to bark at a furry and found himself chastised by the teacher, who sternly reminded him to respect the feline identity of the student.
“The teachers just let them do their thing,” Olivia chimed in, while Izzy added that this furry phenomenon was not exclusive to their school, although was conspicuously absent from the city’s private education where the girls were now enrolled.
Izzy shared a surreal episode about a girl who, perched atop a tree during lunch, refused to descend until the principal’s arrival. Upon alighting, she flapped her arms bird-like, then barked—a furry identity crisis if ever there was one.
According to this teenage trio, the furry hierarchy at their school was dominated by cats, dogs, and, intriguingly, lorikeets.
As I digested this feast of the bizarre, alongside my impeccably baked potato, I found myself marvelling at the ever-evolving teenage expression, a world where the lines between human and animal, reality and fantasy, were not just blurred, but enthusiastically erased.
It’s Everywhere
This furry frenzy isn’t just an Aussie fad. It’s a global epidemic, spreading faster than a kangaroo on a hot tin roof.
It started in the United States but now even the Brits are hopping on the bandwagon.
The Sun splashed across its pages that the UK’s “Safer Schools” group was telling teachers and parents to keep their eyes peeled for kids prancing about as furries.
The advice? Don’t mock or make a fuss.
Easy for them to say—they don’t have a kid in a cat costume purring on their dining table!
Meanwhile, in Wollongong, another satellite city outside Sydney, a state school has become a veritable zoo.
As reported in the Herald Sun, kids are crawling on tables, meowing in packs, and grooming each other like it’s a feline beauty parlour.
Over in the world of social platform X, UAP Senator Ralph Babet has been sounding the alarm. He reckons this is what happens when the “radical left” runs amok, unchecked, and untamed.
He wrote, “Can we just put a stop to this garbage right now? You go to school to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic.”
Then there’s Michael Carr-Greg, a child psychologist who’s seen it all, except, apparently, an abundance of these fur-clad youngsters.
As reported in the Herald Sun, he says it’s a rare spectacle. These furry fellows, he observes, are leading pretty normal lives, apart from the occasional meow.
The big question, he muses, is whether this is a passing cloud or a full-blown storm of mental illness.
The jury’s still out, but Mr. Carr-Greg’s got his eye on the impact on the trifecta of life: friendships, school, and family. If these get muddled up by the furry business, then, and only then, does he start to worry.
Bridging this concern with the broader cultural spectacle, it’s evident that while experts like Mr. Carr-Greg ponder the psychological ramifications, the wider world is grappling with its own perceptions and reactions.
As the fur flies in this increasingly barmy debate, one thing’s clear: in the world of fursonas, it’s a jungle out there, and everyone’s just trying to find their way—on foot, paw, or claws.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
Monty Python was prescient, again, with a pseudo-documentary “The Mouse Problem” broadcast in 1969. Bwahaha.