Is your dog an "it" or a "he"?

The confusingly complex rules of animal pronouns

After working way through the latest round of edits for my new book on anthropomorphism (Humanish), I was left confused about a topic I was sure I understood. Throughout the book, I used the pronouns he/she/they when referring to the animals I was discussing, but my copyeditor changed the pronouns to “it” in a few cases. For example, this sentence:

Dog play bouts often begin with the play bow posture; , with their the dog’s haunches up in the air, their its front paws splayed out to the side, and their its head dropped down to the floor.

In both of those cases, I changed the pronoun back to “their”. The copyeditor was completely correct to want to use “its”, however. Many style books (like the Associated Press Stylebook or the Chicago Manual of Style) would only allow the use of a gendered pronoun (he/she) if the sex of the animal was known or if the animal had a (gendered) name . A gender-neutral pronoun (they) can also be used if there was a personal relationship with the animal but the sex was otherwise unknown.¹ In all other cases, the default is supposed to be “it”. Since the dog in my example was just a hypothetical animal (not a real dog I had a relationship with), then “it” was technically the correct pronoun.

But since I am writing a book where I argue that anthropomorphism is actually a good thing (if done thoughtfully), I have opted to use he/she/they for all animal pronouns in the book. But it was this stance of mine that lead me down a blackhole of confusion when it came to the subject of animal pronouns. Even though I am an advocate of not using “it” when referring to any animal (even insects), the reality is that in real life, I 100% use the word “it” very often to refer to animals. The question of how and why and when, however, is based more on a feeling than some sort of linguistic pronoun rule that I can actually articulate.

Allow me to give you some examples of animal pronouns to see how you feel about them. Which sentence do you think fits best after the following statement (feel free to answer the poll so we get an indication of how everyone is feeling about this):

For me, the correct answer feels like “and it just pooped on our lawn!”. Why? Because I am annoyed with the dog. I might even know the dog’s name, but in this scenario, I would purposely not use a gendered pronoun or even “they” to refer to the dog because I am angry with it.

The smug look of a dog that has just pooped on your lawn.

This is where you start to see that a pronoun is so much more than just a boring grammatical rule. It has moral weight. The “it” pronoun is typically used for objects or concepts or things that are not alive. There is a long history in science of using the “it” pronoun when writing about animals to purposely put some distance between the human observer and the animal subject. I write extensively about the history of this practice in Humanish. These days, you will find many scientists happy to refer to their animal study subjects using he/she/they instead of it.

By using the “it” pronoun, you create objectivity by erasing the possibility that the animal in question has human-like properties that would generate a moral obligation to treat that animal with the same kind of respect we’d reserve for a fellow human. The animal becomes an object of study, allowing us to conduct experiments on it that would not be allowed if it had moral standing equivalent to a human.

In the example of the dog pooping on my lawn, my anger with the dog would subconsciously cause me to slip into stripping the dog of some its humanish moral worth through the use of the “it” pronoun. If I had a moment to reflect on my behavior, I would probably reprimand myself. But my point is that animal pronoun usage is baked into my mind and its hard to know what my brain will decide feels right in the moment.

Try the following example.

I think most of us would go with “isn’t he adorable”, no? It feels very strange to call a cat with a gendered name “it”. But what about this?

For me, I could go either way on this one. Referring to a bumblebee as “it” doesn’t feel wrong to me. Even though this bumblebee has a female name (and is almost surely a female worker bee), it still feels OK to call her “it”. Why? Because insects are so distinctly non-human-like in appearance and behavior that anthropomorphizing them is much harder. Even for me, someone who emphatically decided to refer to all insects as “they” in my new book, I am probably going to call insects “it” in the real world - unless I stop myself.

And finally, what about this scenario.

For me, I could go either way with this one as well. Referring to a rat as “it” is nowhere near as strange to me as referring to a cat named Sebastian as “it”. That’s because, like insects, rats have a negative reputation in our culture. We are used to thinking of them as vermin that we can exterminate with impunity for health reasons or whatnot. And even though I advocate for not using the “it” pronoun for rats in real life, and enthusiastically changed every pronoun back to “they” in my book, it still feels OK (from a linguistic perspective) to refer to Chester the rat as “it” in the above scenario. Again, that’s because my brain developed in this North American culture of rat-hatred, so it’s easy for my subconscious to un-anthropomorphize a rat. Which is a shame because rats are amazing. Please watch this video of a rat driving a tiny rat-car as proof.

Anyhow, a lot has been written about animal pronoun usage in both scientific writing and the press, and here are a couple articles worth reading if you’d like to dive deeper:

Opinion: Animals Deserve Gender Pronouns, Too

Why Writers Fight Style Guides Over Animal Pronouns

In the meantime, it’s worth thinking about when and why you use certain pronouns for animals. It’s nowhere near as straightforward as I thought. If you’ve noticed anything peculiar about your own animal pronoun usage, feel free to mention it in the comments!

1. Note that, unlike for humans, sex and gender are conflated for non-human animals in this context. Sex, for animals, is usually thought of as male/female (although it’s far more diverse that that as you can read about here). Gender is a term that only applies to humans insofar as it “refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviours, expressions and identities of girls, women, boys, men, and gender diverse people.” And since animals cannot speak and thus cannot convey any gender identity nuance through the medium of language, we can only really rely on “sex” when describing non-human animals. Thus, animals are usually given the “he/she” pronoun based on their observable genitals or “they” if we don’t know what’s going on with their genitals. For example, we could use “they” or “it” for species with hermaphroditism (like flatworms which are all hermaphroditic), or harvester ants of the genus Pogonomyrmex, which have three sexes.