Animating two parts of player character independently

I have a player consisting of a body and a tail which I want to animate independently. I have set the two parts as children of the player and created animations and controllers for both and attached them respectively in the Inspector. This is what my player script looks like at the moment

  public class PlayerCharacter : MonoBehaviour
         Animator bodyAnim;
         Animator tailAnim;
         void Awake()
         {
            
             bodyAnim = GameObject.Find("Body").GetComponent<Animator>();
             tailAnim = GameObject.Find("Tail").GetComponent<Animator>();
         }
  

and for whatever reason no animation happens. It's not a problem with the set up of the controllers and parameter setting in the script because when I attach them to the player object they work fine, but doing that only allows me to include one animator controller. Help?