Personality in non-human animals has previously been frequently overlooked partly due to the early assumptions that personality was a subjective phenomenon related to the dynamic organization, character and psyche within the individual (King and Figueredo, 1997). Human personality descriptors formed the lexical hypothesis, which described how all individual human personality differences that are salient or relevant eventually become encoded in a single personality word or descriptor (King & Figueredo, 1997). By first creating a strong rationale for describing human personality taxonomy using either self-report inventory methods or third party ratings, adjectival descriptors can be found, and these models can then be adapted to suit non-human
