(Separate post in case this shit needs to get split later.)
Well you're judging an entire culture by the extreme, but yes there are a lot of those people out there. The majority of so-called furries are probably more along the lines of otaku who just really like animals, though.
This. I dabbled in Sonic the Hedgehog fandom over a decade ago, and in those days, yeah, there was furry porn and there were MUDs where people role-played as furries fucking each other, but "furry" itself didn't really connote the sexual fetish side of things, or dressing up, or any of that stuff. It was a general term for fans of fiction involving anthropomorphic animals -- Watership Down, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, etc. The fringe fetishists have kind of turned it into a dirty word; my recollection (itself from probably 10 years ago) is that a splinter group calling itself Burned Furs split off trying to dissociate themselves with the crazies, but were somewhat unsuccessful based largely on the fact that they were themselves equally fucking crazy. (I haven't read the Burned Fur Manifesto in ages but distinctly remember that it ranked vegetarianism above bestiality in terms of annoying furry habits.)
(A tangent: The Thundercats are not anthropomorphic animals. They're not cats with human attributes, they're humans with cat attributes.)
(I fucking need to go to bed.)