Animals and Instinct...or not so much.

What makes each individual animal unique? I have often wondered this when I drive down the roads in Alaska and I see rabbits every few hundred feet moving in and out of the trees, or frozen on the edge of the road. They all look the same, and it is said that animals are driven completely by instinct, an innate sense of survival. Then where does the personality kick in? Animals each have their own spirit, they must have their own unique temperament. What makes one animal do one thing and another do a completely different thing?

We had a cat (technically my sisters, that you may have been introduced to on her blog) named Sahara, and during the years that she lived with us before she moved away with my sister, you could tell she definitely had her own personality. Sahara was very independent, which is pretty typical of most cats but she also had a defiant and mischievious personality. There were times when she would do something just to make us mad, or to get her way. One time when she was still pretty young my sister bought her a kitty collar. We began trying to get her used to it by putting it on her for an hour or so every day. Every time we would put it on she would attempt to get it off by pushing it off with her back legs, most of the time she would fail and just tolerate it, and if she did manage to get it off, someone would put it back on her. One day the collar went missing and when we couldnt find it we thought that we had misplaced it. It wasn't until a few days later that we found it. We found it shoved deep underneath one of the kitchen counters in a little tiny space caused by the overhang at the bottom of the face of one counter connecting to the side of another counter where the two counters met at the corner of the wall. It was pushed in very deep and we realized that Sahara had hidden it back there so that we would not be able to put it on her again.

It was also possible to recognize Sahara's moods. In the mornings usually around 6:00 am Sahara would decide that it was breakfast time. Sadly for us, we considered 6:00 to mean that it was at least two hours until it was time to wake up. When she would wake us up you could tell what mood she was in because she had different methods for each mood. If she was in a good mood waking up was always more pleasant, she would come cuddle up by your head, her purr going full throttle and lick your face until you were awake. On days when she was feeling a little more excited or energetic/mischievious she would run in and scratch the carpet or the bed skirt, which she knew was not allowed, and the moment you sat up in bed she would run out before you could catch her. And then there were her grumpy days. On these days she would come park right on your chest and take a paw and bat at your nose. If she was really grumpy or if you continued to ignore her summons for breakfast, you would begin to feel a slight brushing of her claws until you finally had to give in.

She definitely has a unique personality and if there are those that would say that this is all just a result of instinct then wouldnt it be fair to say that all humans survive completely on instinct also? Is that really all personality is? Is it just instinct that varies from person to person? So how far does it go in regards to rabbits and other wild and tame animals? Are animals personalities just not as broadly varied as peoples? Is their innate sense of survival so much more inbred that the personalities between each animal is much more similar?

If I were able to observe wild animals at length in the wild would I discover that a certain rabbit is more pessimistic than others? Maybe its not really survival of the fittest...maybe it is really survival of the most optimistic. Maybe the rabbit that gets caught by the lynx knew it was coming soon anyway so why waste all the energy running. Its now or later. What if it was a Dudley-Do-Right rabbit who took it for the team? "Go on, save yourself!"

As you can tell I really have little solid evidence, and no research to back up my views, but I am curious to know the answers to these questions all the same.