Take This Quiz to Discover Your Animal Personality– and Learn About Your Love Life in the Process

The Short Version: The Animal in You personality test can teach you about yourself, your partner, and how you both show up in relationships. We talked to the site’s creator, Roy Feinson, about his inspiration for the site, his background in zoology, and all we have to learn from the animal kingdom.

I’m a big proponent of anything that helps you understand yourself on a deeper level. Whether it’s astrology or spirituality, meditating or journaling, any method of getting to know yourself is a worthwhile endeavor.

I think diversifying your sources is another great way to go about understanding yourself more. 

Not all the information you’re going to find in a horoscope or personality test is going to be accurate, but it offers ideas that get you thinking about the important questions, like how your childhood affected you and how you show up in your current relationships.

I was once down bad after a rough breakup and, unlike my usual impulse, turned to a random astrology website and entered my birth info. 

I don’t really remember the specific information my horoscope included, but I distinctly remember the feeling it left me with: I’m going to be OK. My life was going to be fun and exciting and not so heartbreaking again, and probably sooner than I thought.

There are so many ways to learn about ourselves and how we function in love. Having information, like the kind you might find in a personality test, about someone you’re dating is not only an asset in getting to know and date them better but also for deepening your connection.

We talked to Roy Feinson about the laws of animal attraction and how The Animal In You personality quiz can teach you about yourself and your partner. After you answer 10 questions, the free online test assigns you an animal personality portrait and provides information about why you were assigned that animal.

Roy comes from a background in zoology and biology, and through his years of working with animals, he realized that human personalities reflect aspects of different features we can find in the animal kingdom.

Looking at animals can help us more deeply understand ourselves. And while we are humans, it’s important to remember we too are animals– animals who take online quizzes and fall in love. 

“It’s definitely whimsical and a little tongue-in-cheek here and there, but it really has helped people,” Roy told us. “It has a core relevance to biology, and was based on that and then morphed throughout the years.”

Roy’s background in zoology meant he was always paying attention to the fauna of the locations he visited and how these complex ecosystems of animals worked together in different ways, based on where they were. 

And he realized that while animals were different in each place, their organization was often similar.

“It struck me that no matter where you went in the world, whether you were in the States or Africa or Australia, the animals were different,” Roy said. “But no matter where you went, you’d always find a top predator, a secondary predator, the burrowing animals, the insectivores, and a range of birds.”

Within these animal groups, smaller hierarchies exist, like the order between different species of birds and the delineations between prey and predator birds. These patterns of organization inspired Roy and prompted him to think about the patterns we can find all around us in nature.

As humans, we tend to think of ourselves as distinct from other animals. In some ways, we are, but in most ways, we’re hairless apes who organize ourselves similarly in these hierarchies.

“In our society, whether it’s a school or workplace, there is also a pattern of types of people,” Roy said. “There’s a big strong jock, a shy guy, a flighty girl– a whole range of personalities.”

We use language related to animals all the time to describe people. Ever call somebody who’s sneaky a snake? Refer to a slobby person as a pig? Describe a petite person as mousy? 

Whether we realize it or not, we notice these characteristics in animals and understand them in a way that allows us to assign them to humans. 

“Human beings are an ecosystem unto themselves,” Roy told us. “Each of us subconsciously adapts our personalities to fit the environment we find ourselves in. Your personality may emerge based on your background, who you’re surrounded by, and the system you’re in.”

When Roy started creating the different animal personalities, he identified the main categories of animals, herbivores, carnivores, birds, insectivores, and even reptiles. The personality test was born from Roy’s books, “The Animal in You” and “Animal Attraction,” respectively.

These books cover the ways humans, like animals, adapt in an organizational web of relationships and dynamics based on the environment they’re in. “Animal Attraction” specifically attends to the ways humans of different animal personality types interact and connect with each other.

“Personalities are so complex, and when it comes to finding a partner, it’s the age-old question of looking for someone similar to you, or opposite of you,” Roy said. “It’s a much more complicated question because personalities are very multifaceted.”

I went ahead and took The Animal in You test. The quiz is simple and brings you through 10 questions about yourself, your habits, your desires, and how you show up in relationships. The quiz wants to know everything about you that may inform your animal personality.

You’ll answer questions about your physical size, how you react to conflict, how social (or antisocial) you are, and how you gauge your own levels of attractiveness, creativity, and intelligence. Each question comes with three to four responses, and you choose the one that resonates most with you.

My animal personality is a penguin. Described as “aggressive yet gentle, outgoing but shy, stable yet slightly,” I resonated with the penguin as a Gemini and a generally all-over-the-place person. The Animal in You gives you a full breakdown of your type’s personality, career, hobbies, and relationships.

As it turns out, here’s what the test has to say about a penguin personality’s aptitude for writing:

“With their misunderstood personality, penguins find writing an ideal tool for expressing their true feelings. They have a natural aptitude for languages and penguin personalities dominate the world of publishing as writers, editors, and journalists.”

That definitely rings true!

It also shows you which other animal personalities you may be compatible with. As a penguin, I’m super compatible with dolphins, otters, and peacocks. 

“We look at how that animal in the wild would coexist with a different animal,” Roy explained. “Some animals get along extremely well even though they’re completely different. I saw a video of a badger and fox recently, and they were hunting together, despite having different hunting techniques.”

The insights The Animal in You test gives you can help you understand how you show up in the world, and how the way you show up changes based on who you’re surrounded by. 

We often see our personalities as unmoveable or unchanging, but the truth is that we morph according to our environments, just like our non-human counterparts.

Unlike many personality tests, The Animal in You points to how important your surroundings are to the development of your personality. In dating, being able to adjust to your situation is a useful skill. I’m not talking about changing your personality to get people to like you or go on more dates– not at all.

I’m talking about being able to thrive no matter where life places you. Roy gave us an example to help us understand how your personality can function differently depending on the situation you’re in.

“Let’s say you’re a wolf personality,” Roy started. “There’s three kinds of canine personalities– dogs, wolves, and foxes. Although they’re all canine and share a lot of similarities in their characteristics, they’re all very different in the way they survive.”

Let’s say a star high school football player has a wolf personality. Roy said he would be very strong, very self-assured, and very athletic, and people around him in school admire him for that. 

But, once he graduates high school and goes to college, where he’s surrounded by men who are very similar in personality to him, the way the former high school sports star used to show up may not work for him anymore.

It’s about adapting to your surroundings and being able to find your place in your community. “That athlete may start behaving more like a fox than a wolf, or maybe more like a dog,” Roy said. “We’re always subconsciously looking for reassurance, resources, and friends.”

In dating, it’s easy to get caught up in an idea of who you are. We might be too rigid with ourselves in saying what works for us, what doesn’t, who we’re looking for in a partner, and who we’re not.

We need to know ourselves and our goals when we’re dating, but we also need to remember that who we are has a lot to do with who we surround ourselves with.

The Animal in You personality test can get you thinking about how your personality has changed in different relationships, and which expression of your personality feels most congruent with your goals and desires. 

“Sometimes people will ask me what the best animal is, or what the best way to live is,” Roy said. “There is no best way. The best way is dependent on your environment, the people around you, what you’re born with, the way you look, and on and on. You are who you are– and everyone fits in somewhere.”