The records contain animal-shaped agents of the Devil. That does not make every suspicious pet a standard legal accusation.
Early-modern witchcraft belief often included familiars or demonic spirits described in animal form. Salem testimony drew on that wider belief world. Animals could appear in stories about the Devil, temptation, supernatural service, or invisible attacks.
What the record does not establish is a routine Salem procedure in which reporting a neighbor's ordinary cat or dog automatically triggered a case against its owner. The historical evidence is better read as testimony shaped by familiar animal imagery than as a standardized “pet accusation” mechanism.
During Tituba's examination before magistrates in March 1692, she described a great black dog, a little yellow bird, and two cats — one red and one black — among the supernatural figures she said had appeared to her. These statements survive in the examination records. They were not later courtroom testimony before a trial jury; they were part of the magistrates' early questioning that helped shape the outbreak.
A later historical account from Andover tells of a dog accused of afflicting a girl and killed by villagers. The story has been repeated in Salem histories, but it is not preserved as an official witchcraft-court record in the same way as Tituba's examination. It belongs in the archive as a qualified historical account, not as proof that a dog was formally tried or acquitted by a Salem court.
The broader pattern — frightening testimony absorbing culturally available images and symbols — appears in later moral panics too. That comparison should not erase the differences between episodes. The useful point is narrower: once a community shares a vocabulary for hidden evil, ordinary objects and animals can be recruited into stories that feel evidentiary to the people telling and hearing them.
The animal was evidence only after people decided what kind of story it belonged to.