Since I've seen people post several times in the last few pages, "what's poodling and how is that different from fursuiting?" let me take a moment to explain it to the non-furries here with some visual examples I grabbed off Google. There are generally four accepted tiers of fursuiting:
Fullsuit, (Semi)Partial, Poodling, and
Fetish.
Fullsuits are what most people assume of when they think furry: A head-to-toe outfit covered in fur.
Partials consist of a head, tail, coverings for the hands and feet, but no bodysuit. Since this doesn't cover the whole body, most suiters in this tier cover up their skin with long sleeves and pants.
There's also
Semipartial (sometimes referred to as
Minipartial), which is the same thing as a partial, just without any furry shoes/paws for the feet.
Poodling is a Partial Suiter, but they're intentionally not covering up their arms or legs. It's not an issue of their sleeves being a little too short and accidentally letting a little bit of skin show, but a more blatant attempt to not even pretend they're committing to the character. It's not uncommon to see people in this tier admit to intentionally not covering up because they want to show off their bodies.
Fetish is a suiter in any of the three mentioned tiers who is ALSO wearing anything that would automatically be inappropriate fetish gear in a general setting. Things like pup hoods, latex bdsm gear, diaper stuff, etc. It automatically classifies as fetish tier even if you're wearing other fursuit gear (or wearing too little, like only wearing skimpy shorts and no shirt).
While fursuiting in itself is a fetish, not every fursuit is automatically a Fetish suit, though there are extremely obvious sexualized suits.
(I'll save my fellow Kiwis' eyes. Look that shit up for yourself if you really must see it for some reason)
So basically, with Anthrocon's new policy, they're telling furries "If you want to participate in this year's fursuit parade, you need to be in the Semipartial tier or better, because we're explicitly going to refuse to let Poodle or Fetish Tier suits into the parade. We want a bare minimum on what's acceptable for a parade open to the general public." And again, this policy ONLY affects the parade, you're free to wear your suit however you want the rest of the convention. But because this is furries we're talking about, being told to cover up for the general public is RACIST and ABLEIST and PHOBIC and the Anthrocon staff want to murder immunocompromised indigenous transgender people of color or whatever the fuck it is they're screaming about today.
