[Kwpolska]

If I ask you "do you have a pet?", and you respond "yes, I have a cat", I can easily imagine the pet you have and be generally right (maybe except the colour). How would you respond in Toki Pona so that an average person would understand you have a cat, not a dog or a guinea pig or fish or a rabbit?

[masklinn]

From other comments, you would probably describe the pet’s features (likely with a fair amount of confusion / fuzziness), or some feature-descriptions might be stand-ins for specific animals.

For instance imagine that rather than a cat your pet is a chuckwalla, while that name is quite precise, it is almost certainly useless to the average conversation partner because most people have no idea whatsoever what a chuckwalla is (or that there’s something called a chuckwalla in the first place).

[Kwpolska]

If you have an unusual pet, the name is useless, agreed. But everyone knows what an average pet, like a "cat" or a "dog" or a "guinea pig", looks like, and it would be weird to describe what a cat is in response to this question in most non-conlang languages.