To be honest, before these surveys are undertaken I would question the validity of "why" to begin with. Okay, it's something to do in spare time, a bit of a project, but if I were to write rebuttals on the frankly ignorant (there's no other way of saying it) posts regarding gender identity, I'd be writing it for the next month solid. The connotations of "fantasy" left a very bad taste in my mouth, and I found the conflation between indulging in a subculture and what for many people is a distressing condition requiring medical intervention severely misguided.

Or maybe it's because I don't consider the fur fandom to be a subculture in the first place that trying to analyse it as such seems to be the ultimate exercise in futility. A subculture generally has a unifying principle that underlies it as a foundation. What that principle is in the fandom continues to allude me.