El animal parió ayer.

It comes from parir, which means to give birth.

In El animal parió ayer, parió is the third-person singular preterite form, so it means gave birth.

The preterite is used because the sentence talks about a completed action at a specific time in the past.

The word ayer means yesterday, which points to a finished event, so parió is the natural tense:

• El animal parió ayer = the animal gave birth yesterday

If you used the imperfect, it would suggest background, repetition, or an ongoing situation, which does not fit as well here.

The accent mark shows the correct stress: pa-RIÓ.

Without the accent, Spanish spelling rules would suggest a different pronunciation. In this verb form, the written accent helps mark the stress on the last syllable.

A simple pronunciation guide is:

el ah-nee-MAL pah-ree-O ah-YER

A few notes:

• animal is stressed on the last syllable: aniMAL
• parió is stressed on the last syllable: paRIÓ
• ayer in Spain is roughly a-YER

Spanish can use either a noun or a pronoun, depending on context.

Here, el animal makes the subject explicit: the animal.
If the subject were already clear, Spanish could also say:

• Parió ayer. = It gave birth yesterday.

Spanish often omits subject pronouns when the verb form already makes the subject clear.

Animal is grammatically masculine in Spanish, so the usual article is el.

That does not necessarily mean the animal is biologically male. Grammatical gender and biological sex are not always the same thing.

If you want to make the animal explicitly female, Spanish often does that with another word, for example:

• la hembra = the female
• la perra = the female dog
• la vaca = the cow

But el animal can still refer to an animal that is female in real life.

Yes, parir can be used for humans too, because it literally means to give birth.

However, with humans, it can sound:

• more biological
• more direct
• sometimes a bit clinical, blunt, or dramatic, depending on context

For people, Spanish often prefers expressions like:

• dar a luz = to give birth

So:

• La mujer dio a luz ayer sounds more neutral for a person
• El animal parió ayer sounds very natural for an animal

Yes, but its tone depends on the context.

For animals, parir is very normal and natural:

• La vaca parió
• La gata parió

For humans, it is understood perfectly, but many speakers prefer dar a luz in neutral conversation.

So in this sentence, using parió is completely normal.

Usually yes. Parir is used for giving birth, especially to live offspring.

For animals that lay eggs, Spanish normally uses:

• poner huevos = to lay eggs

So if an animal laid eggs yesterday, you would not normally say parió ayer.

Yes. Spanish word order is flexible.

The most neutral order here is:

• El animal parió ayer

But you could also say:

• Ayer parió el animal
• El animal ayer parió (less neutral, more marked)

Changing the order usually changes the focus or emphasis, not the basic meaning.

Putting ayer at the end is a very normal way to add the time expression after the main information:

• El animal parió ayer

Spanish often places time expressions at the beginning or end:

• Ayer parió el animal
• El animal parió ayer

Both are correct. The end position is especially common in straightforward statements.

No. In this sentence, parir is being used intransitively, meaning the important idea is simply that the animal gave birth.

Spanish can also use it with an object if you mention what was born:

• La perra parió tres cachorros = the dog gave birth to three puppies

But when that information is not included, parió by itself is fine:

• El animal parió ayer

Normally, el animal refers to a specific animal already known from the context: the animal.

If you wanted to speak more generally, you would usually need a different structure, for example:

• Los animales paren = animals give birth
• Un animal puede parir de noche = an animal can give birth at night

So here, the most natural reading is a particular animal gave birth yesterday.