.. about the use of pronouns (sometimes he viz. she, sometimes it) for animals.
for instance, in If Only They Could Talk, James Herriot wrote
"I'm in favour of a long range treatment for the dog. He looks like an airedale but he's as big as a donkey and has a moody disposition." Could you also use "it"? is it just a question of feeling?

I don't know whether there is a grammatical rule.

But there's probably a rule of etiquette.

Yesterday, I spent $166 on medicine for our Jack Russel and then took her to the dog park for 3 hours and then gave her a bath and then hand dried her for 15 minutes. My wife brushes her (the dog's) teeth twice a week. Our lives are seriously affect by this silly creature. We do our best not to get delayed getting home, because we know she will hold her pee until she is wimpering and then dribble all the way to the grass.

People love their dogs as if they were humans. It's jarring to them to hear someone refer to them as "its," as if they were just things or possessions. I'm not one of those kooky people who refers to my rough beast as a "fur-kid," but still if someone in the dog park referred to one of them as an "it," I might suspect he was a bit touched.

I haven't read any of Herriot's books, but I've seen them - and I assume he's a vet. Vets, if they want to keep business, will be in the habit of expressing compassion - for the animals and for their keepers.

Coincidence. While I was away a friend left a newspaper article next to my computer about the shift that's going on in the use of pronouns. Where we used to make a difference between male, female and neuter now the tendency is towards changing the neuter to a gender related pronoun.(for as yet mostly in spoken language) "Het meisje (girl), dat..." (neuter) now often is shifted to "Het meisje, die..." (female). This happens mainly with living creatures.
Quote:
"This counts as well for animals that live close to people, like pets and cattle. All other animals are simply, whether they are male of female: 'he'. Plants and countable items (like objects)
are also all 'he'- a 'he' that in fact is not really male, but just neuter. And non-countable items, such as 'rice', 'milk'
and 'pepper', are 'it' - the pronoun that since the old days
already has a neuter meaning."

what i have noticed is that in english people seem to use 'she' for cats and 'he' for dogs if they don't know the gender. In Hindi cat is feminine and dog is masculine but i am not sure if the resaon for the choice is based on grammar or something else in English.

before I knew anything about the birds and the bees, I thought that cats were females and dogs were male. I won't admit how old I was before I realized otherwise....

:¬ P

If people know the actual sex of the animal in question, commonly, but not limited to, pets, they tend to use the appropriate gender pronoun. As has been noted, cats of unknown sex tend to get the feminine pronoun and dogs of unknown sex get the masculine pronoun. For what it's worth, back when grammatical gender meant something in English, cat (catt) was a feminine noun and dog (docga) was masculine, as was hound (hund).

At least you have the sensible rule to have only one def.article: the.
I can't see any sense sense why we f.i. say: the dog, it horse, the cow, it goat, the mug, it glass, the road, it building etc. Absolutely
irrational.

if having one is sensible is having none more sensible or less sensible? Punjabi friends who did not attend english-language medium schools stick 'the' in where it should not be and omit where it should as they struggle with a concept their language (and Hindi)does not have.

Absolutely irrational.

Grammatical gender is a common enough occurrence in languages. Some languages (most famously the Bantu family in Africa) have up to 13 genders (or noun classes, link) and not only is therre concord between nouns and adjectives, but also between complements of the verb.

if having one is sensible is having none more sensible or less sensible

Thats hard to tell. (I would like to see such a sentence where the 'the' is wrongly used.) Anyway it saves a lot of trouble to have only one instead of two like us or three like in French and German. Thirteen, ZM!, that's a nightmare.

Interesting comments have been made, thank you, yet I still miss a direct answer to my question. It does not concern grammatical gender, but the choice between the pronoun "it", which refers to the animal as a thing, and the alternative "he" viz. "she". Would anybody use "he" or "she" for a rat, a mouse, a goldfish or a louse?

Dunno about the louse, but the others I could easily see being called "he" or "she." Depending, of course. If you're looking for a hard and fast, rule-bound answer, I don't think you're going to get one. I do hear "he" quite frequently for insects, even when it is biologically inappropriate, e.g., ants, bees, or blood-sucking mosquitoes.

'Would anybody use "he" or "she" for a rat, a mouse, a goldfish or a louse?'

To the extent that the first three are pets, I think they would be referred to with correct gender if it is known. Wild mice scurrying behind the refrigerator or rats who find their way to the chicken feed are almost always "its." Likewise, a louse is most commonly called an "it," unless it refers to a specimen of the human species, in which case it is also occasionally referred to as an "it" but mostly, in that instance, for emphasis.

Would it not depend on the 'emotional attachment' to whatever creature? I can imagine an isolated prisoner having dear conversations with one or some of his lice. Might even give them gender related proper names.

There used to be an unwritten (?) rule that if the gender (be it of a human or a creature) was either not known or not specified, the masculine was used. AFAIK, Women's Lib changed that, so it's speaker's/writer's choice now.

If you're talking about singular they it goes back to King Alfred (849-899}

singular they

If you want to read a nice history of the usage, here's the MWDEU (link) and a blog entry I just happened to read t'other day (link). The blogger of the latter is a graduate student in linguistics at UCSD. The irony is, how wrong folks usually are about when something started: it's even got a name, the recency fallacy and it's usually blamed on the author's favorite other.

Good read.

I tend to refer to things such as the weather in a feminine sense as well. She's blowin a gale, She's gonna rain today. Even things such as the ocean, the air, space, she's a big old universe out there. It(She) maybe a cultural thing.

For whatever reason, boats are traditionally referred to in the feminine, as are cars often. I don't know if this is exclusive to the US, but suspect it started across the pond. I've always thought it was definitely rooted in sexism. The big powerful boat may be female, but she's nothing without a man to guide her.... that sort of crap. Nowadays boats can guide themselves; at least this boat does!

Goldfish are impossible to sex, as are some birds, but we have some guppies, and they are referred to appropriately.

Coincidentally, the Bible passage last Sunday was James 9:36 "Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them..." I found this very curious. The version is NRSV, which differs from nearly all other versions with its use of the neuter "it". I don't know what research was done to prompt such a change, but I thought it was interesting.

Also interesting to me is that people in the US seem uncomfortable referring to a fetus as "it", and want the mother to either find out ASAP, or guess and use one or the other. To me this indicates the perception of objectification of people, which is apparently unacceptable. I like that. But I still didn't "find out" what sex any of my babies were before they were born. Life these days holds few surprises, and I wanted some! I do ramble on, though.... :0)

I hear it used for babies often, but usually in the question, "Is it a boy or a girl?" In our FWIW Dept. cild, 'child' in Old English was neuter.