Furry is driven by fantasy. The furry community in the modern day is notably a place where many people tend to explore their unrealistic/outrageous kinks. You got anything from vore (which itself can range from soft vore all the way to digestion/death, or to more obscure forms of vore like anal/cock/nasal vore), to inflation, transformations (which can range from lycanthropy to inanimate objects), to full-on body flattening, and so on. Furry is a creative outlet in which people are encouraged/enabled to explore their outlandish fantasies and kinks where they otherwise couldn't.
Ferals in furry are still quite heavily anthropomorphized, and this is how furries tend to justify drawing feral art. Something I notice fairly often when looking at artist pages on FA and I come across a feral artist, may have disclaimers such as "all characters involved have human minds/conscience". It's heavily entrenched in the idea that at their core, the ferals are intellectually/emotionally human despite their physical appearance. It's small things too, like human-centric forms of gender/self expression. The human touch is what differentiates it from artistic depictions of bestiality, of which even those exist in the fandom if you know where to look.
It sounds hypocritical at first, but it's not much different than other forms of fantasy in media. Like others have mentioned, liking war movies/shows/games doesn't mean you want to go fight in a war. Liking media with tons of violence and gore doesn't mean you want to go outside and disembowel your neighbor's cat. Having a feral sona and getting NSFW feral art doesn't mean you wanna bang an animal in real life. Fantasy is mentally stimulating, and it can allow us to experience things we never would otherwise in real life. That's the whole point.
