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Yeah, determining what are instincts, and what are personality traits when it comes to animals is difficult. There's also the rule of relatability. The more a person can relate to the character, no matter how foreign they are, the more they'll connect with them. I think that's why a lot of authors have taken the easy way out and given very human personality traits to an animal. We even do it in real life, just like what VydorScope said. We can't connect with their animal traits and tendencies, so we apply human ones in their place.
Another great example of this is with ships. We call them "he" or more commonly "she" and attribute human traits of love, hate, irritability and more onto a vessel that has no will or life of its own. So there's a careful balance that must be struck between authenticity and relatability, and most lean more towards the latter as it is by far the easier way to go. Even I agree with that.
Now, one way that I did learn to get around this dilemma was to use body language to express some of the character's personality, motivations, and more while keeping them somewhat relatable. For example, I used the ears, eyes and whiskers of the feline races in my books as emotional and mental cues for the characters, as that's how we relate to our own cats. We don't know what they're thinking, but we can draw a number of conclusions simply by watching their body language.
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