There are practical uses for ASCII animals. When I built a command-line tool to let the developers sign out for a 15 minute break at my last job (because doing it via the AS/400 interface was a big hassle), I used a big, yellow elephant [1]. This made it easy to remember to hit the enter key to go back on the clock when they got back to their computer.<p>[1]: I think it was this one: <a href="http://thesteve.org/up/elephant.txt" rel="nofollow">http://thesteve.org/up/elephant.txt</a>