It ensures case-insensitivity:

"Alligator" != "alligator"

Forcing the animal to lower case means it will always match properly.

Ignore - having looked at it for longer I get it now. Brilliant solution.

Wow...how does that work mathematically? I mean, I get what is happening but my brain kind of fried that this works every time...

Confusing - sort out the names of the variables. This is not in any way helpful (or challenging, for that matter).

Hmm..."squash the bugs" or "refactor completely"..

I agree - this isn't fixing the bugs. If the challenge was to refactor the code this would be a winner, but that's not the case.

Absolutely not the ideal way of doing this but kudos for thinking outside the box.

Took me a while to figure this out - very clever stuff.

Beautifully simple.

Haha - this is the kind of thing you'd see on thedailywtf