Fur has been flying within the Colorado furry community. As Denver’s annual furry convention drew to a close, the beloved event began facing big obstacles as allegations of neo-Nazism came face to face with the convention’s chairmen.

Tragically, battling fuzzy bigots and planning an intricate furry-con became too much to manage, so the CEO decided to cancel the convention.

Colorado has a somewhat sizeable furry population, most of which are up in arms about the convention’s cancelation. The group highly values their frequent “furmeets,” most recently coming together for an Arvada trail run, a Fort Collins St. Patty’s Day celebration, and a Boulder meet-up called Paws at Pearl. The next event in line was the 10th annual Rocky Mountain Fur Con, set to be held at the Denver Tech Center Marriot, August 11th through the 13th.

But complications arose shortly after a subset of the community — commonly called the “Furry Raiders” — began donning armbands featuring the symbol of a black paw on a red background. The image reportedly reminded other furries of the Nazi swastika. When they raised objections to their furry armband advocates, tensions escalated quickly.

Convention chairman Zachary Brooks claims, “People overreacted. As it got more and more heated, people started talking about beating up [other] people wearing the symbol. They said ‘We’ve got a right to protect ourselves and we are going to bring weapons.'”

In response, the assembly’s organizers had little choice but to invest in extra event security or call off the meet-up altogether. Eventually, “our security cost increased to the point that we couldn’t sustain the convention,” Brooks says.

Before abandoning the gathering, the Fur-con board had attempted to  subdue the group’s apparent white supremacist emblems. It issued a ban on articles of clothing, including arm bands, that “display offensive messages or symbols.” Apparently, this wasn’t the first occasion of a bigoted subculture within the furry community. In the dark pockets of the Internet, a number of people who love anti-semitism and animal suits have found friendship in their shared fascism.

A prominent voice in this alt-right subdivision is Furry Raiders leader “Foxler,” (a probable combination of Fox and Hitler, according to many in the furry community), photographed below making a Nazi salute.

Foxler has maintained his innocence in the convention’s unraveling, and claims that he won’t allow the angered attendees of Rocky Mountain Fur Con to bring him down.

Things have certainly gotten hairy within the niche community, but we’re hopeful that its members will soon smooth things out. If our furries can simply focus on the humanity at their core, they can finally reconcile, convene in Colorado, and peacefully party like animals once again.