It can be a lot of fun to watch and interact with fursuiters, but remembering a few simple guidelines can help both you and the fursuiters to have an enjoyable furry convention experience.
1. Interacting With Fursuiters
2. Suiters Moving Around the Con (and Moving Around Them)
3. The Fursuiter Headless Lounge
4. Assisting Fursuiters Who are In Trouble
Interacting With Fursuiters
- When it comes to touch, treat fursuiters like you would any other fur: if you don't know the suiter, ask first before hugging, scritching or touching the suiter in any way. If you are given an okay to scritch a fursuiter, be gentle - it's not polite to pull out clumps of fur while scritching a suiter, and unlike with a real animal, that fur will not grow back in.
- Wearing a fursuit is NOT an open invitation to get unduly personal and intimate with the person in the fursuit! Absolutely do not touch any fursuiter whom you do not know in any inappropriate places - even if a person is wearing a suit that looks "hot", that does not mean that the person inside the costume is wanting to be hit on. If you do know the person in a fursuit and the two of you do want to get unusually friendly, take it to a hotel room, please!
- Suiters may appear larger than life and thus indestructible, but remember that there are real people inside those costumes. Please don't tackle suiters, run across the room and pounce on them, or engage in rough horseplay with them. The worst thing for a suiter is to get injured and be unable to suit for the rest of a con.
- Please be gentle with ears, noses, tails, etc - remember that fursuits are fairly expensive items, and damages are not going to be cheap for the fursuiter to repair. Petting and stroking is fine - yanking and tugging is not. If you have children with you, please restrain them from yanking and tugging on costumes as well.
- Don't go hugging or cuddling a fursuiter if you haven't bathed in the past twenty-four hours, please! Also please stay away from fursuiters if you are smoking or have just been smoking recently. Ventilation in fursuits is limited enough, and unpleasant odors do have a way of lingering on fabrics. Also, if you've just had that greasy pizza or chilidog, or been muching potato chips or powdered donuts or the like, please remember to wash your hands before interacting with the fursuiters. Leaving your pawprints on a new fursuit is not a nice way to thank a fursuiter for taking the time to greet you.
- When photographing suiters, please make sure that your camera is ready before asking the suiter to pose. When you've taken your picture, please give some kind of signal (thumbs-up, OK sign, nod of the head, etc.) to let the suiter know you are done. It is very hard at times for a suiter to know that a picture has been taken, and one of the hardest things for a suiter to do is to maintain a pose.
Fursuiter Etiquette, Page Two