Excerpt from OpenMind Article (claim bolded):
But scientists have been criticized for misattributing human traits to animals in their research. Barbara King, an anthropologist at William & Mary, says she has been accused of anthropomorphizing in her studies of animal grief and love. When King described an orca named Tahlequah swimming for 17 days with her dead calf as a whale in mourning, she was rebuffed by some colleagues who felt she was taking the comparison to humans too far. Although King supports careful research on animal emotions, she counters that the anthropomorphism criticism is often leveled unfairly. She says that many times, the accusation comes from other scientists who worry that using emotional terms like “grief” dilutes the rigor of the science.
“Largely in my work, I have felt that [the charge of] anthropomorphism is weaponized as a dismissal,” King says.
Accusing people of anthropomorphism is also sometimes used to deny the existence of emotions that animals genuinely seem to have. Valli Fraser-Celin, an animal welfare consultant who previously studied African wild dogs, argues that researchers need to find a balance—recognizing animals as individuals, yet ones we can’t fully know. Although humans and other animals have many similarities, “they do have their own capacities and their own lived experiences and their own ways of living in the world,” he says.
