As a business owner, one of the biggest challenges you will face is finding an employee who will do a great job for you. When you find one, you should do what you can to keep them working for you.

What would you do if you had a great employee, but you discovered that outside of work, she made furry art for people online?

That is what the business owner in this story discovered, so she fired the employee even though she was doing great work. Many people, however, have told her that this was the wrong thing to do.

Personally, I think she made a mistake too. Almost nobody would have ever found out about her ‘hobby,’ so it wouldn’t have ever hurt the business.

AITA for firing someone because they are a furry artist?

I own a small business and hired a young women last year.

Finding a great employee can be difficult.

She has been a great addition to our team and actually has helped us improve substantially.

I honestly never thought twice about her, she seems completely normal.

Ok, this is definitely weird. But as long as she doesn’t do it at work, who cares?

I knew she enjoyed drawing but I suppose the only thing “off” about her was that she wasn’t open about showing us her work (I should’ve seen this as a red flag).

Anyway, recently I received an email informing me of her inappropriate online presence. It was an online page full of NSFW furry art.

It took quite a bit of digging to link these drawings to her. I doubt any customers would ever make the connection.

I honestly did not believe it at first but after finding her art Instagram I managed to dig up a few selfies from 2 years ago, confirming that it was indeed her.

Of course I had to take action at this point. While I understand she kept her online accounts separated, I cannot deny that this behavior is unacceptable.

Wow, she is firing her for this?

It’s very important that I don’t allow that sort of “stuff” to be associated with my business. I don’t want to be given a bad name.

Yesterday morning I called her to my office and informed her that she will not be working with us any longer.

She is absolutely right.

She asked why and I explained my reasoning, which I assumed she would understand.

Instead she went off about how she doesn’t deserve this and how I’m a jerk for firing her for this, and I wouldn’t have known if I didn’t go dig up her identity.

I can’t imagine how this would ever hurt the business.

I told her anyone could’ve done that and if they found her and found out she works for us it could mean bad things for my business.

Long story short she ended up storming out clearly not happy about what just went down.

AITA?

It would be one thing if she were very well known as an artist in that community, but that is not the case. This person had to do some digging to even find it. She was wrong to fire her.

If you enjoyed this post, check out this post about a hardworking employee whose management refuses to give them one single break.

Let’s see what the people in the comments have to say about this.

This is how many artists make their money.

It isn’t even like her work was easy to find.

I agree with this commenter.

Here is someone who thinks she might get sued.

This commenter thinks she was way out of line.

If she had to go digging this deep just to find out what her employee was doing, nobody else would have figured it out. She is losing a great employee because she doesn’t like what she was doing outside of work. That is just terrible.

Business owners need to realize that people have personal lives. It is really none of her business what she does in her free time.