As regards the pronouns used to refer to animals, these generally agree in gender with the nouns denoting those animals, rather than the animals' sex (natural gender). In a language like English, which does not assign grammatical gender to nouns, the pronoun used for referring to objects ("it") is often used for animals also. However, if the sex of the animal is known, and particularly in the case of companion animals, the gendered pronouns ("he" and "she") may be used as they would be for a human.