There's no reason to think animals can't have complex emotional lives, of course. But anthropomorphizing is a real thing that people do. It's definitely import

There's no reason to think animals can't have complex emotional lives, of course. But anthropomorphizing is a real thing that people do. It's definitely important that dog owners don't have unrealistic human ideas about dog behavior for example. It's really not fair to give the use of the phrase a negative association necessarily. Also, what economic ideologues do you have in mind? Academics generally understand the difference between a model of how things could work and the real world pretty well, and populists with economic agendas usually thought of as making the opposite mistake.