That's right. How could I forget Lucille or Mother Earth, Father sky or all the gender infused images in our lives?
English is unlike many other languages in NOT generally having definite genders for things...so pasta is feminine in Italian, boat is masculine in French, maiden is neuter in German (?), etc. While I can see that "animals have genders and you should use them", you don't generally know which gender they are unless you get up close and personal, so it makes sense to lump them as "it". As far as writing about pets is concerned, I think it makes sense to use the he/she/it/Fido descriptors to define the narrator's relationship to the animal. If it's the owner, it's going to be towards the "referring to them as 'the kids' end of the spectrum", if it's @stevesh, it will be referring to them as 'it' - if he's being polite!
Oh yeah I get so confused when I try to read some simple Czech and I'm like, "what's this 'her' referring to?" And it turns out it's a book... You know, sentences like, "Charlie opened her." It sounds even weirder when they're speaking English but lapse into Czech grammar. Something on the lines of, "So how was she?" (again, referring to the book...)
I'm always polite (OK, at least civil) and I'm going to massage my opinion a little, since the thread has gone somewhere @Mckk didn't seem to intend. If you look at the OP, he/she asked a lot more general question than has been addressed in a lot of replies. In the case of the question that was asked, I'll stand by 'it'. In the case of a pet in the story in question, I can go with 'him' or 'her' since the personal relationship with the human character is known. 'The kids' is still right out, though. '
