BoM/TWS Message Forum

That'd depend on whether animals can sense Essentia.

Since pets with good smelling senses, such as canines (dogs & wolves), pick on a physical scent, they might get fooled, as scent would be part of imago (as would every other sense). They might find change in behavior unusual, but if the wearer has a mind band, it's possible to mimic the original's behavior in order to fool a pet.

However, they can probably sense ghosts because of what "they" are - imago remnants. Say, think of the storyline where Will tries to fix Lucy's mask after the Lucy-golem gets devoured by the guardian of Blackwell's villa, and he ends up sending the imago astray. A dog could probably pick up where that imago left, as it'd sense the remnant in a better way a human would. Same for a cat.

There may also be an attempt to tweak the anima band to put someone's imago into an animal, but it requires tweaking the band first to remove the essentia sensor. That way, you'd have an intelligent animal - much like a familiar, but since it's a copy of a human being, they might end up thinking they were permanently transferred into an animal and therefore end up crazy. However, if playing the cards right, the magician might end up with a loyal servitor.

Thing is, since pets (and animals for that matter) cannot use the masks or mind bands, they're not the core of any of the branches. To do so, they must be a catalyst for the story to move on - perhaps in one of the storylines Will finds a stray dog who latches onto him (for reasons unknown), or he tells his dad he'll be a dog-sitter to skip on Salopek, and the book and one mask Will was using gets stolen, but the dog manages to help him find it because it caught on the book's particular scent. (Which would play with the idea that the book always returns to Will - the dog is merely the way the book gets back to him.) There are options to add pets into the story, but for the most part they're not the protagonists - they're instead decoration.

Unless the pet is supernatural on its own. Wolves are usually tied to the moon. Maybe a silverback wolf gets imprinted to Will while he runs away from, say, Blackwell or someone else, and that happens to be a gift from Sulva?