Animal Avatars: Why we choose to be animals online

What motivates people to masquerade as animals online? By adopting an animal avatar on the Internet, one's gender, race and personal appearance are masked and replaced, for the most part, with the classic anthropomorphized traits embodied by certain animals - lovable, loyal, caring, etc. Animal avatars offer a freedom of identity normally constrained in real life and become vehicles through which humans can author identities, project those identities to others, and ultimately benefit emotionally from them. This short essay aims to raise questions about how humans construct identity online.