Members of the furry fandom on the social media site Twitter (or X if you're feeling mean) have chosen Pawbert Lynxley of Zootopia 2 as the recipient of the 2025 Furry of the Year Award. However, the choice has not been without some contreversy, as there is a strong contingent of fans of the bat character Sonar from the episodic video game Dispatch are also claiming the prize.

Meanwhile, other Twitter furries, noting a lack of a similar "award" for female characters, have offered up their take on the last nine years for the other gender. Though the 2025 pick, Kitty Kat of The Bad Guys 2, is much less contreversial than the male pick, there has been much less agreement on who the previous years' recipients should be.

Now, let's back up a minute, and point out that there is no such thing as the Furry of the Year Award. The male version started out as sort of joke response to the popularity of the character Nick Wilde from the original Zootopia, but didn't really take off until two years later, when the character of Haida from the anime Aggretsuko became popular enough that even the American dub's voice actor for the character, Ben Diskin, took notice. Since then, various people have offered up their choice for "furry of the year", and eventually a consensus has been more or less reached, despite no vote taking place or jury meeting to decide.

"Star Wars: The Phantom Menace was the most disappointing thing since my son."
- Mr. Plinkett

"Zootopia is definitely better than one of the most despised movies of the last decade!"
-some guy

Since we only had five reviews of the first Zootopia movie, you think not much else could be said about it, but, actually, it's been almost a decade, and Disney movies collect bad faith readings like Flayrah collects Zootopia reviews, and I'd like to address a few of those.

First, starting small, there's the "what do the predators eat?" thing which for some reason you still see bandied about like that's a clever observation, despite the movie's climax hinging the main predator character carrying a snack with him. Turns out, they eat food. Moving on, people like to complain about "copaganda", but, honestly, even if you accept all cops are bad, they have jobs that put them in dramatic situations regularly, so people are going to tell stories about them. That, and I've recently seen complaints that the Godfather parody glorifies criminals, so tie goes to the movie. The big one is the assertion that the main metaphor equates specific races (usually African American or black) with predatory species, when the metaphor is about minorities in general, and the movie does not specifically code most characters racially (though you could possibly argue the lead characters are pretty white-coded). An ironically bad faith defense here is that, when Disney racially codes an animal character, it's very noticeable, though they've mostly cut that out (mostly). Which brings me to the final complaint against Zootopia, which is that it is a Disney movie, and to that, all I can say is, well, nobody's perfect.

Zootopia 2 is the sequel to Zootopia, which makes sense. (The movies are also known as Zootropolis in certain regions, which makes less sense.)

BBC Online reports that the British Big Cats Society has compiled evidences which seems to corroborate the growing number of sightings of lynx, leopards, and pumas in the South West of England, and has called for a serious study of the problem by appropriate public agencies.

Though lynx populations have dropped from about 600 in 1996 to no more than 350 now, the annual lynx hunt is still set at 85 animals, including females and cubs. Norway's hunting tactics need to change, says the WWF, noting that the annual wolf cull in 2001 halved the living wolf population in the country, and the lynx hunt is getting close to the same numbers, making extinction in the region inevitable.

More attention is being focused on the Iberian Lynx, topic of a previous Flayrah article. Europe's "last big cat" needs more than just good intentions, says the IUCN, the World Conservation Union's, cat specialist group. It needs the rabbits it feeds on to be protected as well. Myxomatosis was introduced to control rabbits, and a later viral haemorrhagic fever almost whiped out the regional population. Now habitat must be returned to its wild state, and that includes reintroducing rabbits along with cats in the near future.

Ironically enough, the mistaken desire for 'environmentally friendly' replacements for cork, a crop that doesn't harm the tree and encouranges people to leave old growth forests be, is causing the extinction of the Iberian lynx. Though it's not the first feline extinction of the modern age, as the article mistakenly claims, it is still a catastrophic loss. The cork forests which were the home of this highly endangered cat are being cut down to plant crops as the livelyhood of the local farmers shifts from cork as synthetics reduce the market for the real thing.

Some random animal news now: NOAA embarks on a mission to rescue an injured right whale despite the weather and difficulties involved; and two lynx kittens found in a clear cut forest in Maine. The latter article is especially interesting in its mention of how humans can plan how they're going to use the resources of nature in such a way that it can actually provide more opportunities for wildlife than would have occurred naturally. This is similar to the premise of a book I finished reading by a naturalist, Eco-Geography (link to Amazon). Worth the read for those of you interested in sustainable living in a way that neither insists that all human life is inimical to the pristine and perfect natural world nor assumes that we're hell-bent on destroying everything in our selfish quest for material wealth.