I'm not referring to the actual animals. To clarify what I meant: both Orwell and the ideas we have about civil rights tend to focus too much on the individual human's perspective of seeing rights evolve or the moral and emotional rejection of totalitarianism at an individual scale. It is the systems that are being anthropomorphized. You kind of see this habit unfold in his essays where he talks about pacifists or his disappointment with socialists. This is what makes his work so compelling to read, however, so I don't blame him at all.

Perhaps 1984 itself is amusingly the best example to explain this argument. The main character's travails and the lessons therein are too anthropomorphic, but the initial insight Orwell had that would lead to the book's premise is much more interesting: the idea that nuclear weapons would either favor large authoritarian states or small groups depending on their ease of production.[0]

Maybe anthropomorphically is the wrong word to use here, and I should simply have said thinking of systems vs. thinking of stories. You can see the difference by reading Orwell's theoretical vs. more human scale essays and books, but it's his human scale that is almost exclusively remembered by most people in his case. Although I love that book, Homage to Catalonia is no less a children's story than Animal Farm.

[0] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...