You know what Toby, I'll let you check every animals genitals when you meet them so you know their gender.
(i'll call you Toby, theonethatshallnotb, I've been on a The Office [US] marathon)
Afaik english people usually refer to pets by their sex, at least when they have given names. Livestock and wild animals are distinguished by sex (boar/sow, cow/bull) and status (calf, steer, heifer etc), but not referred to as he or he. Least thats what an english friend told me.
It's not the object itself which is feminine or masculine , it's just the word. Makes no sense for you but it's natural for many other languages, for exemple there's not even a neutral pronoun in french like "it"
Sure it makes no sense to you, you grew up with English. A fluent German speaker would likely say that a lack of a categorized article system doesn't make any sense. As the comment above reads, the categorization of nouns into M and F (German also has N) isn't literally saying "this noun is male" or whatever, it's just saying "hey we're gonna only use this kind of article with this noun" and it can make for some wonderful poetry. Heck, even just regular speech sounds nice in languages with gendered articles. So keep an open mind :)
(i'll call you Toby, theonethatshallnotb, I've been on a The Office [US] marathon)