In traditional Mandarin Chinese, 牠 (Pinyin: tā 🔊) is a third-person singular pronoun for animals. So it’s a different “it” from 它 “it”.
牠, just like 他 and 她, is a phono-semantic compound, in this case of semantic 牜, a radical form of 牛 “ox”, “cow” etc., and phonetic 也.
牠 is not found in simplified Chinese. Instead, the same 它 is used for all non-human objects, animate or not.
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‘This, ladies and gentlemen, is the proverbial “it”.’
In Mandarin Chinese, 它 (Pinyin: tā 🔊) is a third-person singular pronoun for inanimate objects; in simplified Chinese, it’s also a third-person singular pronoun for animals. In any case, in English it’s translated as “it”.
According to Wiktionary, its original meaning was “a snake”, which, as we know, now is taken over by 蛇:
The character was later borrowed for the then-homophonous third-person pronoun (“he/she/it”). Today 他 (tā) is used for male or gender-unspecified “he” and 她 (tā) for “she”.
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In Mandarin Chinese, 蛇 (Pinyin: shé 🔊) means “snake”. The Snake is one of the twelve-year cycle of animals which appear in the Chinese zodiac and is associated with the earthly branch 巳.
According to Wiktionary, 蛇 is a phono-semantic compound of “semantic” 虫 (“the character originally represented a type of venomous snake ... 虫 eventually came to represent worms and insects as well”) and “phonetic” 它 (now pronounced tā, so you’d never guess). 它 also originally meant “snake”, so 蛇 is like “snake snake”.
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