THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY

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"there are some forum threads about me and what i do in my spare time."
-Allison Reed

There really is a need to go back and re-think the standards for scandal in the furry community. Most of what we hear about is inconsequential idiocy - people acting childish, people getting scammed, petty backstabbery. But this is changing. For reasons possibly related to the growth of the subculture in the past few years, the standard for furry drama has finally been raised to that of true crime. The Javachickn Incident is just one of many - witness the longtime artist getting busted with real child pornography, or the panda-costumed republican aide trying to pick up teenaged boys.

This new era of scandal continued when one of furry's more popular artists and costume makers was found to be having sex with her dog. Obviously she wasn't the first, and certainly not the last. But given that there were a couple of other similar incidents at the time that did result in an arrest and conviction, the hope was that this would end the same way.

It did not. The entire thing progressed almost entirely out in the open and revealed a massive deficiency in California's widely-praised animal cruelty laws. Reed was able to successfully infiltrate the shelter system and use this connection to obtain a dog for the express purpose of grooming it for sexual exploitation. To our knowledge, she has yet to face criminal charges for this. It is one of the worst bestiality cases in California since Marjorie Knoller, and nobody knows much about it outside of a few isolated internet communities.

Reed at an art installation.

Allison Reed is an artist living in the rural community of Arcata, California. She is highly prolific in several fields- she competes in art contests, flogs her wares at the local farmer's market, and generally does her best to participate in the local art community.

In addition to her above-ground exploits, she's also a furry, and has been probably since the beginning. She's just self-conscious enough to keep the furry stuff separate from the regular stuff. She doesn't go too far out of her way to hide it, which probably makes sense as going much further gives diminishing returns in this day and age.

Reed's furry output (current known psuedonyms are java, javachickn, texaschampion, birds, nesting, inkmutt, asil and there may be more) was pretty typical in a lot of ways. Lots of porn, lots of mild stuff, all of it in her unmistakable watercolory scribbly style. Thing is, there was an increasing amount of bestiality in that porn.

In furryland, this is ignored because it's, well, not real. Much like with "cub" porn, it's assumed that if an artist draws an illegal sexual act, it doesn't necessarily mean that he or she is interested in committing that act in real life. After all, just fantasizing about it doesn't actually hurt anyone so long as it remains a fantasy. There's no sense in punishing that person for what is, essentially, a thought crime.

The problem is that bestiality isn't illegal in many parts of the country, and in others (as we're about to find out), the laws against it are worse than useless. It is a national disgrace that bestiality is a felony in only 17 states. As a consequence, dogfuckers are quite bold. They've got countless advocates and support groups, and as long as they live in a shitty enough state or are careful enough with their personal details, they will probably never have to worry about a knock on the door from the cops. It's sick, it's sad, and the situation is not liable to get any better anytime soon.

One of the most infamous of these support groups is beastforum, which has been around for a good long time now. It was first noticed that something was well and truly wrong when Reed's Beastforum account was found back in 2006. Together with the content of her furry porn it should have been a gigantic red flag, but everyone wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt.

This was a huge mistake. Photos of her molesting her dog Sam were probably posted to the site around late 2006, and the videos date back to early 2008. The evidence is overwhelming; it's something of a mystery why they didn't garner attention any sooner. It's as if people just assumed that nothing that could be conclusively traced back to her would come out of the whole deal. Most animal molesters are usually a lot more clever about hiding direct evidence than Reed ever was.

Late last year, however, something changed. Something made people start to notice, and that something was a post on the now-defunct imageboard known as Dramachan. These days, most tips regarding abhorrent behavior in prominent community figures are done Anonymously on imageboard-type forums. This was certainly the case for Reed. None of these boards are particularly reputable (they're all basically clones of /b/ for chrissakes), but in this case it was a non-issue - the thread on Dramachan contained direct links to evidence.

What was revealed was fairly shocking. Years ago she had volunteered at an animal shelter. She adopted her first victim from the facility, and through some amount of bureaucratic trickery managed to get the dog a vasectomy. This is a rare procedure; it's typically only used if it's medically necessary or if the dog is going to be used for obedience training. It's considered a serious red flag if someone lobbies hard enough for it when adopting a dog, as this is a favorite tactic among zoophiles for getting a hold of animals that are legally "fixed", but still "intact" for their purposes. Apparently her shelter didn't get the memo until it was too late, as she claims to have called up around 30 veterinarians before finding one who was willing to do the procedure.

Over the next few years, she sexually abused the dog, often on camera. The gory details were posted to Beastforum. The number of times this happened over the years is not known. After keeping the dog for a few years, she was forced to get rid of it as he was showing signs of aggression and was becoming difficult to control. Her boyfriend at the time threatened to have the dog put down, and she responded by dumping him and giving the dog away. It's not exactly clear who she gave the dog away to, and it's even less clear where she got her new dog.

Her new dog.

What she has made clear is what she plans to do with her new dog once it's old enough. After this, things get really sketchy as it was at this point her exploits were "discovered". All furry-related galleries and identities were purged, with new ones set up a few months later. As far as we can tell, the Beastforum account was abandoned.

The police were notified by several individuals, both locally and out-of-state. This revealed that the authorities had been notified several times before. It was also revealed that the animal shelter had become suspicious long ago after doing some digging of their own. It's a safe bet that she was banned from the shelter shortly thereafter.

To date, there has been no action on the part of law enforcement or animal control. Why? It's complicated. Bestiality is only a misdemeanor in California. It doesn't appear to be classified as animal cruelty, either. This could mean that even if she was arrested, fined a thousand dollars and/or sent to prison, nothing would be done to rescue her dogs.

The thing about bestiality is that nobody actually takes it seriously. Kind of like prison rape. Everyone thinks it's just a big joke. And like prison rape, lawmakers have done fuckall to keep it under any sort of control. There's a couple of reasons for this. First and foremost, the police have an impossible enough job keeping up with real crimes against actual people as it is. Second is that the very nature of the crime is too icky for people to even want to acknowledge. For example, it is believed that the Florida state legislature voted down a proposal to criminalize bestiality simply because it was considered too "out there" for discussion.

The only time in recent memory that serious action was taken on this front was the infamous "Mr. Hands" incident; that means that it literally took someone being fucked to death by a horse for anyone to give a shit. And that only fixed Washington's laws; the rest of the country hasn't really followed suit.

So if the cops didn't care, did her fellow furries care? After all, conventions have donated money to animal rescue groups in the past, and if anyone would feel strongly about animal cruelty it would, well, be people who feel strongly about animals in general, right?

You can stop laughing now.

One reason Allison's gotten off scot-free is because there's a widely-held misconception that sexual abuse is somehow less wrong if a woman does it. Countless imageboard shitheads will whine that since "she let the dog fuck HER", it somehow isn't as bad as when a guy does it. Is this fair? No. Does it make any sense? No on that too.

Of course, Allison's defenders don't really need to make shit like that up. They just need to say that what she does in her own home with her own property is her own business. It's ironclad, and it misses the point completely. But it's ok, because internet arguments are a total farce anyway.

Allison is also able to escape most other consequences within furrydumb because she's a big-name artist. It seems that if someone draws enough porn for everyone, they can get away with all sorts of nasty shit. I spent months trying to convince Dragoneer (the FurAffinity Dear Leader) to ban her from the site, which is as slap-on-the-wrist as you can possibly get. He responded by throwing the rules at me, saying that if someone doesn't talk about molesting animals on the site itself, then there's nothing he can do. Anyone familiar with FurAffinity and it's history of gross incompetence and cronyism can see just how bullshit (and how typical) this is. I'd ask the local convention chairpeople about banning her next, but seeing as how they can't be fucked to even check the sex offender registry once in a while, that's completely pointless too.

The message is clear: Expecting the furries to police themselves is a colossal fucking waste of time. Furry is so thoroughly infiltrated by practicing zoophiles that outing them all is pointless. Furry's greatest problem is the tendency of it's participants to avoid confrontation, even when it is absolutely necessary to keep a bad situation from worsening. It leads to some truly horrible people flaunting their horribleness around and fuck-all being done about them.

So in the end, if the law doesn't care, nobody cares. And the law doesn't care. Nobody outside of ~20 people on the internet care about what Allison Reed has done. Over a year has passed since the incident, and what happened will probably be forgotten.

I suppose if you live in California you can write to your state representative and bring the problem to his or her attention. Maybe there'll be an opportunity to fix things next time the animal cruelty laws are revised. Too bad I haven't figured out a way of doing so that doesn't come off as utterly crazy. You can try writing the media, but since this all went down more than a year ago, I'm not sure they'd care. And again, I haven't figured out a way of doing this that won't come off as completely nuts.

Allison Reed should have spent time in prison for what she did. Her dogs should have been rehomed. Both of these would have happened if she'd pulled the exact same stunt in a state with functioning bestiality laws. The fact that she abused her dog on camera and paraded this fact around consequence-free is as depressing as it is disgusting.

There is no shortage of public outrage every time some stupid kid manhandles the family cat on camera, or every time some Lithuanian shithead tosses some old dude's dog off a bridge. But the horrors of places like Beastforum go ignored because what happens there is just too icky. Well, fuck that.

Unfortunately, with no forthcoming consequences for her actions in both the real world and furrydumb, it looks like she's won. Congratulations Allison, you're the one that got away.

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