Possible Duplicate:
Use of “it” and “its” for people and animals
I’m an Italian working in an English-speaking company. In school here they usually teach us to refer to animals using the it pronoun. Something like (i.e. talking about a dog):
It’s really nice.
I see many people using he or she also for animals. What’s the correct way to use it? Should I use it only for inanimate things?
If you know a creature’s gender, you use he or she. If you don’t, then you use it. Sometimes this is useful for disambiguating.
A cow produces milk for her calf, but people drink it, too.
That rooster’s infernal cockle-doodle-do is going to get him consigned to the soup pot.
A hen won’t lay eggs if she doesn’t have a rooster around.
My garbage was dumped over by a mother bear and her two cubs two nights ago.
The bull moose appeared right in the middle of my path, so I had to go around him.
In all those cases, the gender of the critters is a given, so it makes sense — and is useful — to use a gendered pronoun to refer to them. Notice how in the first sentence, if you replace her with its, things begin to sound weird and ambiguous.
