But that's all response to external stimuli...once my GSD died, my once passive Tervuren became far more assertive in his behavior, stepping up to fill a void...that behavior is, for lack of a better term, programmed.
Nowhere did I deny (in fact, if you look back, I affirm) that individual animals have their own, unique characteristics, and certainly they have learned behaviors with regards to different stimuli...two otherwise identical dogs may respond to a rattling chain entirely differently...for one it may be an indicator that he's about to go for a walk, and for another, it may suggest he's about to get thrashed. That the two dogs react "differently" is not a "personality" trait, but a learned behavior that is entirely consistent with the "dogness" of their being.
Look...I'm done arguing this point. It takes a lot of work and humility to see the world through the eyes of another creature. It's lazy and vain to attribute to them uniquely human characteristics to simplify our interaction with them...it's the Disney approach, and it makes for fine entertainment, but it's not appreciating the animals for the way God made them, but rather the way we as humans wish to engage them on our terms and in the easily understood vocabulary of our uniquely human psychology.
You are perfectly free to choose the latter. IMHO, it's disrespectful to the animal as you're not engaging it on it's terms for all that is simple and complex about the way it was created, but rather you are engaging it with human attributes as you wish to see it....but hey...go for it.
I don’t really think we’re at total odds here, the original deal was about the term used. And yes people can sometimes go too far anthropomorphosizing animals because they aren’t people. But being spirit created beings that, like us, never were intended to die, and capable of relationships, some more complex than others, you have no proof and offered none that ALL their behaviors are simply programmed and instinctual. The bible doesn’t even say that.