gender - Personal pronouns for animals


In my native language German, every animal has an article. This is understandable, if one wants for example to distinguish a male pig (boar) from a female pig (sow). But if one just talks about the animal in genral, the article is basically at random.


But how is it in English, when there may be the same distinction for animal genders, but for the animal a such there are no articles?


So why for example does one say to a meowing cat She's hungry. without knowing if the cat is really a she?



Answer



In very general terms, dogs are thought of as male, and cats as female. Where the sex of an animal is known, it will be referred to by the appropriate pronoun. Where it is not, apart from dogs and cats, and possibly a few others, it will be considered male and referred to as he, or as neither male nor female and referred to as it. These, however, are distinctions of usage, not of grammar.


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