What might take some getting used to is that in Russian you have to refer to animals as "he" and "she" - not "it." For animals that we humans deal a lot with, like cats and dogs, Russian has even come up with different words for male and female. Those are featured in the first half of this audio. Most other animals have a "default" gender - for example a зебра (zebra) is feminine and will be referred to as "she," while a тигр (tiger) is masculine and will be referred to as "he." (There are ways of working around this if you have to talk about a male zebra or a female tiger, but you don't need them right now!) Like with all Russian nouns, you can usually guess the gender just by looking at the word's ending.
