As I rushed to get ready this morning, I heard a piece on BBC Radio 4's Today Programme* about stupid pet names - or rather quite sensible human names given to dogs and cats.
Max, Charlie, Holly and Molly top the table of popular pet names in Britain. I've certainly known people and pets with these names.
I admit I'm guilty of giving my cats people names. But I've tended to give them names which, if ever popular, have faded out of general use. Hence, Otis the Cat and Berty the Cat. These names never caused any problems. (Bert was coincidentally the name of my grandfather's girlfriend - which I knew before I named the cat - oops).
But Berty's kitten, Other Cat, was hard to name due to her blankness of character. Eventually we settled on a moniker that is a person name - but I'd never heard of anyone with this name, nor had I seen it used in fiction. Other Cat blogs pseudonymously, but trust me it's not an everyday name. We moved around the time Other Cat was 2 months old and guess what our new next door neighbour was called - yep, the same. For the two years we lived there we called her Little Cat to avoid embarassment.
We can't call her Little Cat anymore, because she's fat.
Fancy the Cat came into our house after Berty's death No doubt someone, somewhere has christened their child Fancy, but they really shouldn't have. We named her after the 'ho character in the Reba McEntire hit. She might have been born just a plain black cat, but Fancy is her name.
Other cat - not so little anymore
She's Fancy
4 comments:
Why is it stupid to give a pet a human name? I can see how some human names might not sound like a good pet name - Carl, for instance, or Arnold perhaps. But there are many "human" names that are quite good pet names.
I think Molly is a great dog name. And Max seems as much like a pet name as a person name.
Just my opinion, I guess. My cat's name is Mingus, after the musician.
I agree that people names are fine for pets. . .
I named Garbo because she is so shy and is gorgeous.
Gorden had that name when I adopted him so I didn't change it. Sometimes I called him Gordie.
George was from the adomidable snow man in the Warner Brothers cartoons. "I'm gonna hug him. And squeeze him. And take care of him. And never, never not take care of him. And I'm gong to call him George."
It was later that I realized with horror that all of my cats had names that started with a G. . .
Some cats require human names. It is all up to the cat. It isn't stupid, really.
Well, as you can see I like to use people names for cats, but I like to use unusual names - to avoid having to explain to the Charlie the designer that my cat is also named Charlie.
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