Speakers and writers of English can choose whether to mark a high level of sentience in a nonhuman animal by selecting the human and gendered terms (he, she, who) rather than the inanimate and ungendered terms (it, which). This paper reports an investigation of the Anglo-American literature to explore the extent to which speakers and writers use gendered pronouns ‘he’ and ‘she’ where the antecedent is a nonhuman animal. We also attempt to identify pragmatic factors and metaphoric associations that trigger personalizing of animals in literature and everyday conversations.