I am talking about a new-to-you dog.
Suppose you adopt a beautiful one-year-old dog named Jenny. Problem: Jenny is your ex-wife’s name.
Should you / would you leave it? Change it to something that rhymes with Jenny? What if the dog was older? At what age would it not work to change its name?
Reason for asking: I’m considering adopting an adult dog, and I am picky about pet names. For example, I saw a cute boxer named Cookie. I will not own a dog named Cookie.
mmm
It’s pretty common, in my experience, for people to change their adopted dog’s name. That is, I used to volunteer at an animal shelter, and almost every time I’ve seen a follow-up about one of our adopted dogs, the name had been changed. I, personally, did not change the name of our dog.
So have at it.
A dog will learn its new name at any age.
They will learn the new name. They don’t have any identity crisis or anything, they just need to learn it. Some try to make it easier by keeping the first consonant and/or the main vowel sound similar. Like you could call her Jemmy, or Ginny.
My dog has at least a dozen names and he knows 'em all. He is the living embodiment of the phrase, “I don’t care what you call me as long as you don’t call me late for dinner.”
Do we know if a dog treats its name as a label associated with itself in quite the same way that a human does? It could be that it simply recognizes this as a sound that prior owner made to get its attention. If so, it would certainly not go through any kind of identity crisis if a new owner uses a different sound for the same purpose. The difference would be associated with two different humans, not some change in its own identity.
It’s not a perfect parallel, but when human parents speak two different languages to a young child, the child experiences no confusion - the situation is readily processed as mommy speaks one way, daddy speaks another way.
I would bet that if two co-owners use different (simultaneous) names for a dog, it creates no issue at all. It might be an interesting experiment to see an intelligent dog’s reaction if one day they switched!
Change it to “Mookie”.
It helps if you’re a baseball fan.
I don’t think it matters. My wife and I adopted a standard poodle from the local shelter in November. He was 2.5 years old. The dog’s previous owners had called him “Avery” which neither of us really liked. We decided “Philo” was a better fit for him, and began calling him that when he came home. He always responded to Philo, but never to Avery. My wife says the reason the previous owners surrendered the dog was that they didn’t even know his name.
By the way, Philo thinks we’re the best thing he’s ever found.
Works for basketball fans, too. And even Pearl Jam fans who are knee-deep in their history of the band.
I do wonder if all the Chihuhuas I’ve met are pissy because they don’t understand what’s going on, and suspect that people are talking about them behind their back. Maybe Chihuahuas with Spanish-speaking owners have the temperament of a Golden Retriever.
Or “Moogie” if you’re a Star Trek fan.
I make it a policy to change the name of a dog I acquire after puppyhood. Learning a new name differentiates the new situation from the old and the dog has to pay attention to you to figure everything out, so having a new name focuses their brains. Widget was Dillon at the rescue (barf) and Bear was Buddy in the shelter, then Bauer with the guy I got him from several months later–Bear is not the sharpest tool in the shed so I kept his name reasonably similar. Shoga was Nova and she’s so smart she’d have learned her name no matter what I called her, but keeping the vowel sounds the same didn’t hurt. Kosh has only ever been Kosh since I got him at eight weeks old. Change the name, it won’t bother the dog none and you’ll like it much better than feeling forced into using a name you abhor.
Please don’t let a name get in the way of adopting a deserving pupper. Call Cookie whatever you like. It’ll be fine.
I adopted a dog from a shelter. A beautiful chow /golden retriever cross that came without a name. I decided to name her Mandy. She was responding to it within 20 minutes. She was about a year and a half old. Change her name of you want. She’ll adapt.
We’ve changed the names of all three of our rescue dogs on adoption, at ages of 7 months to 2 years. The new names were nothing similar to the old ones, and none of the dogs had any problem figuring out their new name.
Nope, my aunt and other relatives had them when I was a little kid and they spoke nothing but Spanish in the home. They are still hyper little attention seekers even with spainish speaking owners.
Wow, I had no idea that name-changing dogs was common. Nor did I realize how easily dogs apparently adapt to their new name.
Thanks for the edjukation.
mmm
We adopted a Cavalier King Charles spaniel from a shelter when she was 6.
Her previous name was Duchess of Malfi. We renamed her Portia.
She adapted readily.
She probably thinks it’s really cool to be named after a sports car.
Any age.
With shelter dogs, a good portion of them will have been given their names at the shelter anyway, rather than having had it their whole lives. And, considering that the people who name shelter animals name several a day, they used up “Luna” and “Apollo” long ago and now they’re naming the dogs “Beverly” and “Count Chocula.”
And if it’s a dog who is inclined to learn their name, they’ll learn another name. If it’s a dog who isn’t, they didn’t know the old one anyway.
You can, if you like, use both names for a while- “Buddy-Horatio” or whatever- and then eventually drop the “Buddy” and hope that he gets that he’s supposed to come when he hears “Horatio.”
Or give them a new name that sounds somewhat similar. That’s what I did with my dog (who was 11-12 when I got her). She did respond to her name and not just the tone and I knew she’d had the name most of her life, but I didn’t think it quite suited her and there were other dogs with the same name all over the place. So I changed it to something that sounded similar enough that I don’t think she even noticed the change.
When I’ve fostered dogs, too, I always saw the name as a gift you give them. A sign of a new life. Sure, maybe you were “Li’l Bit” But Li’l Bit was a dog who lived under a porch and ate out of the garbage and had infected ears and zillions of fleas. Now you’re “Cora,” a dog who gets to learn tricks and go for walks and have toys and sleep on a soft bed and who is loved and will be cherished for the rest of your life.