The joy of choosing a good name for your pet
BELLA, Charlie and Coco are pet names with something surprising in common with one another: all three feature in the current top ten of names chosen for dogs in Ireland at the same time as being in the top ten of names chosen for cats. The other top names for dogs are Max, Ruby, Molly, Buddy, Lucy, Archie and Daisy, while the remaining favourite cat names are Luna, Tiger, Oscar, Simba, Milo, Missy and Leo. I know pets with all of these names: we all think that we are being highly original but it’s interesting how these things follow trends.
Choosing an appropriate name is one of the real challenges when you get a pet. The name has to fit the animal, and it can take time to be sure that this is the case. Whenever we get a new animal in our household, there is a delay of two or three days while we try out different names.
Our current five animals have names that each tell a story.
Our oldest pet is Sushi the cat, who arrived in our home at the same time as Couscous, another cat. The two kittens came along a decade ago, when we had a Japanese student staying with us. We liked the way the names included the “sss” and “shh” sounds, which makes them easy to use when calling the cat. Our Japanese student was highly amused that we used food names for our pets: she told us that when she went home, she was going to call her new kitten “Potato” and her new puppy “Cabbage”.
Our oldest dog, Kiko, also has a name with a Japanese angle: the word means “be happy” or “rejoicing child”, both definitions which appealed to us when referring to the joyful, playful puppy that she was when we named her. Indeed, she’s still a happy, rejoicing dog now, at eight years of age.
Our other dog, Finzi, was found as an abandoned, dying dog. We rescued her and nursed her back to health. At the time, another student was staying with us, called Linzi. We didn’t feel that we could call our dog directly after her (that didn’t feel right), so we played around with different versions. (Kinzi, Minzi, Tinzi…) and in the end, Finzi just sounded right. It was only later that we discovered that Gerald Finzi was a famous early twentieth century British composer, so in certain company, we can now offer the illusion that we are a highly cultured and musically educated household.
Aslan, a Maine Coon cat, is the latest addition to our family. He was only a kitten when he arrived, but we that he was going to mature into a huge, lion-coloured cat, so the name Aslan, from the lion in the Narnia Chronicles by C S Lewis seemed very appropriate.
I also have fond memories of some of our pets from the past. One of my favourite-ever cats was a lovely black Burmese cross, who we named Gladstone, because we had just returned from working in the town of that name in Australia. It was a coincidence that we happened to have moved to Ireland, where the name was well known as the British prime minister of that name from the 19th Century. I’ve known many other pets who are named after famous people, from politicians like Churchill to sports people like Tyson, Bruno, Packie and Messi.
We also once named a kitten “Baby”, when we were a newly wed couple. When people told us that we’d done this because the kitten was appealing to our nurturing instincts we scoffed at them: couldn’t they see that the kitten was a particularly because we were thinking of having children, we scoffed at them – it was just that the kitten had particularly baby-like characteristics of being small and vulnerable. Anyway, within two years, we had gone ahead and produced our own first baby. The onlookers were right. The funny thing is that since then, I have seen this pattern repeated when other young couples have chosen the name “Baby” for a pet. It’s amazing how often they turn up with a baby in a buggy within a couple of years.
If you ask anyone about the background to their pets’ names, they’ll often have an interesting story of some kind.
One of the most remarkable that I’ve come across was a woman who had guessed that her husband was having an affair. He didn’t know that she knew this. She got a new puppy, and she deliberately named it after her husband’s girlfriend, who was also a family friend. So whenever she called the dog, the husband did a double take. Eventually, the truth came out, and she continued to take great pleasure in calling her dog the betraying woman’s name.
Many people use wit and humour when naming their pets. Last week I met an adorable terrier who loves his food: he has been named Bonaimh, which is “little pig” in Irish. Deefor (as in D for Dog), is popular, and I know a cat who has ironically been named Madra. I know several three-legged cats called Tripod, and I once knew a stray cat with paralysed hindlegs after a road accident who was called Slug.
I know a lovely golden Cocker Spaniel who is called Sam 3: he follows in the footsteps of Sam 1 and Sam 2, and no doubt there will eventually be a Sam 4. Of course, he is just called Sam on a day to day basis, and it makes it much easier to remember the name of the dog.
It’s one of life’s pleasures: choosing a good name for the animal in your life.