To the little meta debate here, which is way more interesting to me than this ghoul from South Dakota, modern society certainly humanizes and deifies animals way, way, way less than ancient or pre-columbian societies do/did. On our own continent in the US, people were named after animals frequently, not the other way around. Many cultures around the world, not even ancient ones, existing cultures today literally worship certain animals, in our own backyard ... the buffalo, on the other side of the planet, the cow. Like... extreme revere for animals over people, even domesticated animals, is not some modern thing. If anything, post-columbian European or American society, and especially industrialized American or European society, reveres animals far less than our predecessors. Tying it back to South Dakota, the biggest city in SOuth Dakota is Sioux City, named after the Big Sioux river, named after the french translation of the Ojibwe word for "little snake," which was applied to the Sioux people (who referred to themselves as Lakota/Dakota, friend).
In terms of humanizing animals, we're not even talking ancient Egypt, we're talking American people, a major part of culture and tradition in the ... very state we're talking about South Dakota is named after the Lakota/Dakota people, who have a foundational believe in anthropomorphizing animals in religious faith, I'm not even any sort of expert or even anything beyond casual observance of native american culture, it's just like so obvious that not being aware of it is a major blindspot.
That said, I'm not really into putting dogs above people. Dogs are dogs to me, pets are pets. I'm sad when my dog died, but yknow, he was my dog, not my child. My dog died, I was sad, I miss him, he was my buddy. My child dies ... I'm not long for this world. I do kinda think modern American society has become so pet obsessed partially because we've become less and less able to have empathy and find common ground or coexistence with other people, we're driven apart by our perceived, genuine, or embellished differences, and so we form tighter bonds with our domesticated pet animals to fill that void... The animal is a canvas that we can paint our own emotions and beliefs onto, in ways that we can't do to other people. We tend to judge each other by our outcomes and them impress bad intentions on that outcome, and we tend not to do that to animals because we rightly kinda understand that they don't really have a concept of "intention" most of the time. If my wife drank the last of our coffee and didn't tell me to buy more and I found out in the morning when I'm headed to work, I'd be pissed, and I'd wrongly kinda think she's so thoughtless for selfishly drinking the last of the coffee without telling me to get more; if my dog ate the last of our ... bread ... that I left out, I'd mostly blame myself for leaving it in a place that he can get it, rather than blame him for having thoughtless intentions. At the same time, though, when my dog succumbed to epilepsy and went into basically epileptic stroke last fall, there was only one decision for me to make, take him to the vet to be put to sleep; if another person who I cared for went into an epileptic episode I'd move heaven and earth for them.