Hard vore is less common than soft vore in the furry community, but the bestial qualities of furries lend themselves to it, so the number of practitioners isn't insignificant in the fandom.

Hard vore involves dismembering and often killing prey before devouring it.  While prey may still be alive when finally swallowed, their death is inevitable.  Chewing, ripping, shredding, and tearing are all verbs applicable to this style of vore.  Graphic descriptions of blood, internal organs, and bones are to be expected for a hard vore experience.

The realism of hard vore versus the absurdity of soft vore may be a draw for some.  How can one creature roughly the size of another be devoured without reducing him/her to bite-sized chunks?  Soft vore practitioners have many ways to get around this, but hard vore enthusiasts embrace the realistic mode.

Many things could motivate a hard vore predator, including sadism, a fetish for inflicting fear, a fondness for bloodsports, and the need to dominate.  Those with very close ties to their characters may feel the need to emulate their real-world inspirations as closely as possible, and that would include killing and eating prey piecemeal.  Prey interested in hard vore may be masochists, victim fetishists, slave characters, or hold such close ties to their prey-animal inspirations that they too feel they must be eaten realistically.

Hard vore is not always a violent act.  Through the use of drugs, hypnosis, magic, or some other means a predator may subdue his/her prey to the point that they remain immobile despite pain or fear.  The predator could eat at their leisure in such a situation, even using conventional cutlery and dishes.  This may be more horrific for the prey character than being ripped apart by a savage predator, because of the leisurely pace and retained consciousness as their body is patiently and methodically devoured.

Cannibalism, when used in the context of vore, generally refers to human-on-human hard vore.  Cooking falls under the hard vore umbrella, and often involves extreme pain and suffering before the victim dies.  Impaling prey on a spit for roasting, placing them in oversized ovens or cauldrons, and stuffing them (from either end) with conventional foodstuffs are all common themes in cooking scenes.  Sometimes the prey survives the cooking process, but dies during the following display of hard vore.

Digestion and scat may follow hard vore more frequently than after soft vore, to keep the realism level up.  Hairballs, carrion breath, and other 'unappealing' aftereffects may be part of a hard vore scene, whereas a soft vore scene would often gloss those elements over.

[There are as of yet no authoritative publications from academics on the subject of vore as we know it, only on the loosely-related subject of cannibalism, so I rely on my identity as a vore fetishist for over a decade, author of many erotic vore stories, and frequent vore-scene roleplayer to lend authority to my definitions.]