A dog by any other name

There's this little thing that has been bugging me. I come across it a lot lately. There's this trend in children's books where animals have been anthropomorphized... but the dog hasn't. The dog is still a dog. So not okay. I understand anthropomorphizing animals for children's books. It works. But then there cannot be pets. If you want there to be pets, you have to use humans as the main characters. It's just really weirding me out. I'm disturbed by the whole thing.