Also, to add to your comment, I can imagine that designers will at least test the effect of "dressing" these robots with animal costumes so to speak. Imagine Spot with a dog costume, so it looks more like a dog.

You could study different human reactions. For example, are soldiers more likely to trust their robot companions if they look closer to an animal? or maybe they will trust it more if it doesn't? Putting on an animal costume generates more, or does it generate less fear/terror on the enemy?, etc etc.

And then this will in turn prompt, I'm guessing, the ability to conduct psychological studies about human response to animal cruelty for example, without actually harming an animal, as seen in this thread by a lot of people reporting being angry when the robot was kicked by the staff.

Imagine a robot that behaves like a dog (a lot more than Aibo does), and you program it with "pain" responses, sound, etc. You could maybe even use that (just speculating here of course) as a metric for sociopathy/lack of empathy problems.

I wonder if that would be an effective way to protect an unattended robot. If it quakes and whimpers when people touch it, or yelps and scrambles away when attacked, would people leave it alone? Obviously it wouldn't stop someone determined to cause harm, but it might get the desired response from someone who wants to look with their hands or mess with it for fun.

There is also the possibility that such reactions might actually offend some people, who might interpret it as an attempt by the robot's creators to "play god". To technically inclined people like us, the whole thing is pretty demystified, but I can easily imagine some people who don't understand the mechanism to see it as a sort of "tower of babel" deal.