I use “they/them” for any animal/sentient being (whether or not they’re human) rather than “it” in order to avoid objectifying them, but I recognise this is not standard English. I also use “who” instead of “which” (A monkey/dolphin/dog/goat who (…) rather than a monkey which (…), etc) and basically any of the personal pronouns or words you would use for a human rather than an object (or I guess typically nonhuman animals). It’s a deliberate deviation from grammatical rules/traditional language for the sake of aligning with my personal beliefs & ethics about animal rights/vegan stuff. You can just ignore that part though because it’s just a force of habit, I actually forgot that would seem weird since it’s normal to me, the real confusion I had was with the overall sentence structure & how to phrase it; it still doesn’t sound right to me whether you use “it” or “they”.