I've got my own theory on this. Came after I heard some older relatives freaking out about a year or two back about the new thing "furries".

Now of course for anyone who spent any time online in the last 30 years to be spared the horror of knowing about furries is laughable, but a lot of these older people basically didn't spend any time online in the last 30 years and only started once the smartphones rolled out. So they get exposed to it and think it's a new thing. Now for course I can't say anything about this other than nod and express surprise or disagreement at it, because dare I go and say "oh yeah those people have been online forever" it's almost always going to be followed up with suspicion and accusations thrown towards you, because naturally how would anyone know about this unless they were a furry?

So more conservative areas like Utah, I think are more susceptible to it for a number of reasons. One, conservative culture tends to be more puritan and sexually repressed, which I think tends to "breed" more crazy people going into dark corners of the internet and finding weird little niches, rather than just being slightly more open and gently nudged away from the weird, the get good at hiding everything and there's no social dynamic to stop their descent into madness unless it hits a point where it can't be hidden anymore and they have no choice but to fully embrace the weird identity publicly as that is now the only social group that will take them.

Second it's basically taboo to discuss these sorts of things at all. At least from any point of intelligence. Anything of any sort of sexual nature in conservative circles is essentially a taboo subject unless it's simply condemning something that the reactionaries have reacted to already and is socially safe to condemn. As such they're almost totally blind to these weird subcultures and potential groups and basically know fuck all nothing about them.

Cue in teenage rebellion, jokesters and the like, who think it's hilarious to watch a bunch of Mormon women freaking out about litter boxes (because it is hilarious) and having nobody in the picture to reign in the hysteria because it's social suicide to say "Oh I know what furries are, they're an Internet subculture that has existed for decades, this is likely a joke".

Conservative Christian groups tend to take the story of Adam and Eve in the garden and glean from it a lesson that obtaining knowledge is itself a sin, instead they value blind Innocence. It's a very stupid position, as man is already a fallen race which has lost its Innocence, one is simply allowing themselves to be blind to existing evil should they choose not to attempt to understand it, or to learn about how it operates, this is one reason why conservative groups often lose out in cultural battles even if they have a strong position on some issues, they prefer to be reactionary and sit around and only take action after some perceived threat has become such a problem that it is visible to them, rather than proactively seek out and learn about as much of the world as they can so that threats can be known and identified, and neutralized before they become problems, often by far less involved and far less unpleasant means than what later interventions require. It's one of the reasons I'm very critical of soft language. It allows for the problematically innocent to participate in government and decision making to the disadvantage of larger society. If you get offended at words like "lame" instead of "mobility challenged" then you really should have no fucking place in adult circles. We can't discuss the actual problem without dancing around a bunch of dumb holdups, meaning we can't actually discuss how we are going to help people who are lame get as full of access to society as possible.

And we can't discuss furries often dressing up as children's characters and creating sexually suggestive content as a potential threat to children or their own development because some overly sensitive hag is going to shut that down and insist we only talk about nice things. Leaving the threat unknown, undiscussed, and present, with a newfound confidence that it can persist safe from criticism.

This then leaves the only people who knows about it on the fringes, and gives way to the extremes. And no intelligent conversation can be had.

I think it's more likely the consequence of unlimited unsupervised internet access vis smart devices.

Furries have an interesting history as a subculture and you can trace their history back as a group pretty far. It's a pre-internet phenomenon actually. And it seems like they've always had a lot of infighting between the more innocent "I like cute animals" wing and the more sexually lurid elements. I don't think these elements are naturally the same either.

I think that probably the rise of film as a medium likely triggered some kind of paraphilic response in some portion of the population that later became furries, this was likely increased in the 80's and 90's due to the prevalence of home video. The development of the internet allowed the more lurid elements space to spread. And I think the problematic issue of having cute animal characters engaged in sexual situations is going to mean that children are going to inevitably stumble across it. I don't think many are getting these ideas directly from the parents.

I think basically anyone born before the 1980's had no clue what the fuck was on the internet and didn't realize this shit was out there until very recently. It will be interesting to see how the people who grew up with this sort of unlimited internet access will raise their own kids. I suspect that they'll be more aware of the kind of content that can exist and be a lot smarter about how they let their kids access the internet.