Naming an animal as a witch's accomplice was standard practice. It didn't end with the animal.
A familiar, in the theology behind the trials, was an imp or minor demon a witch kept as a servant — most often described in the shape of a cat, dog, or bird. Reporting a neighbor's animal as suspicious wasn't a fringe accusation; it was one of the most ordinary moves available to a frightened colonist — and a deceptively safe-feeling one, since no person had to be confronted directly. But a familiar implies an owner, and the accusation rarely stayed pointed at the animal for long: naming the creature was usually just the first, safer step toward naming whoever it belonged to.
Tituba, the first person to confess in the outbreak, gave courtroom testimony describing a red cat, a black dog, and a yellow bird as agents of the Devil who had pressured her into service. Her testimony was treated as credible, detailed evidence — not folklore, but a witness statement.
A widely retold account from Andover holds that an afflicted girl accused a neighbor's dog of tormenting her, and villagers shot the animal on the spot. Only afterward did Cotton Mather reason the dog had likely been innocent all along — if it had truly been Satan in disguise, he argued, it couldn't have died so easily. One of the only acquittals the entire episode produced, and it went to a dog, posthumously. (This specific anecdote isn't part of the surviving official court record — it's filed here as a well-documented historical account, not a courtroom fact, which is why this record is marked verifying rather than verified.)
A version of this same reflex resurfaced in the United States three centuries later, during the ‘Satanic Panic’ of the 1980s and early 1990s. Day-care abuse cases across the country came to include claims that caregivers had involved animals in rituals — in one Southern California case, children accused a defendant of killing a giraffe and an elephant in front of them. A 1994 survey of more than 11,000 psychiatric and police professionals nationwide, conducted for the federal government's National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, found no substantiated evidence of the large-scale, organized ritual-abuse rings the panic assumed — but by then, dozens of prosecutions had already been built on testimony no more verifiable than Tituba's yellow bird.
The cat was never questioned. It still lost.