My good friend acquired a gorgeous golden retriever at a Ducks Unlimited dinner, and named him “Dudley”.
We named our first beagle “Kichwa Tembo”, after a place in Tanzania that my husband had visited. It means (roughly) elephant head/skull, and the place in Africa is so named because there are a lot of elephant skeletons there. Anyway, the beagle pup had really long ears, like Dumbo the cartoon elephant, but I didn’t want to call her Dumbo, so away we went with the Swahili name for our dog.
When I adopted my two adult sibling cats from the Toronto Humane Society the volunteer didn’t know whether “Dusty” and “Whiskers” were the cats’ “given” names, or if the THS staff had simply made up names for them. Since I didn’t want to pull a complete Christopher Columbus on them I gave them last names. To the delight of my vet my cats are now known as “Dusty Springfield” (after the singer) and “Whiskey Saigon” (after the nightclub).
Current pets:
Dog: F: Tegan is a Welsh Corgi. Tegan is a Welsh name that means “fair”.
Cat: M: Whiskers is a tuxedo cat with extremely long whiskers.
Hamster: F: Sulu. Named by my son after hamster from the series of kids’ books “Captain Underpants”.
Deceased pets:
Dog:F: Lady was a Cocker Spaniel, just like the one in Lady and the Tramp.
Cat: F: Ranger. Named by then teen-aged brother-in-law who hated the New York Rangers hockey team whom he felt played like a bunch of pussies.
Cat:F: Sherry was a blue point Siamese, named by my older brother who liked the name because it sounded French.
Cat:M: Hassan was a Chocolate Point Siamese. Named by my teenaged self after watching a Looney Tunes cartoon that featured a caricature sword-wielding Bedouin who kept saying “Hassan chop!”
I had a tortie named Juniper who I found as a feral kitten about 4 weeks old, living under a juniper bush.
Petra is named after Petra Arkanian from Ender’s Game, sort of just because, but also because our vet insisted that we not name her Tripod, which is the name everyone suggested, but it was the name of every other three-legs they saw at that office.
Loki earned his name due to an uncanny knack for emerging from a room from which we’ve just heard crashes, bangs and sounds of general chaos, wearing a “Who, me?” look on his face. As he’s gotten older and mellowed out, it’s also a nice homophone describing his fairly low-key nature (though he’s still quite capable of being a troublemaker).
That reminds me of our old dog Amoco, who was found as a puppy wandering around at the gas station.
When I got my wife her first Jack Russell she said she used to own a dog that looked just like that, so we named him Bandit after her long gone pet. When we decided he needed a friend, we got a female Jack Russell and I naturally named her Carrie because wife didn’t like Frog.
In the Smokey and the Bandit series of bad movies Sally Field’s called Frog but her real name in the movies was Carrie.
No one ever gets it.
Our dog’s name is Shamrock. We adopted her the day after St. Patrick’s Day - my wife’s birthday.
When I was a kid I had a hamster named Nobella named after that one guy and the prize thing.
My cats:
**Tenshi **came with his name. We were going to name him “Kibo,” but he was such a dignified fellow (even as a kitten) that the name just didn’t stick. We thought Tenshi was a cool name so we kept it.
**Ozzy **was named after Ozzy Osbourne and Ozymandias (his full name is Ozymandias C. Nosewuffle). He was a bit of a wild man as a kitten, constantly bouncing off walls. Back then his nickname was “the Nutro-Burning Funny Kitten.” 
He’s calmed down quite a bit since those days and put on some weight, and he likes his creature comforts. His new nickname is “Mycroft” (Tenshi, who’s lean, angular, nervous, and whip-smart, is Sherlock).
**Grace **was named after a cat of the same name from the story “The Autobiography of Foudini M. Cat, Housecat.” We have a version on tape, and we love David Hyde Pierce’s reading of the story. The name she came with was Aria Bella, and we sometimes use that too. Her nickname is “Boo.” Sometimes she gets “Graciela Aria Bella Boo,” which is just fun to say.
**Sonata **came with her name (she’s Grace’s sister, and all the cats in the litter have “musical” names). We liked it so we kept it, but eventually it evolved into “Frankie Sonata,” then “Frankie Fred,” and finally “Fred,” which is her nickname. Like Grace, she has a long name too: “Francesca Frederica Sonata.”
**Clarice **was named by the spouse. She’s a sweet tabby we adopted from the vet’s office, the last of a litter whose mother had been killed and were being cared for by the vet techs. Spouse thought she was a scrappy little thing, so he named her after Clarice in “Silence of the Lambs.” Sometimes we call her “Agent Starling,” and she’s not little anymore.
Meep (RIP) was named after two sources. The first was that in the video game “Lunar: The Silver Star,” baby dragons took the form of cats, which we thought was cool. The second was that somehow we came up with the idea that “Meep!” is the sound baby dragons make. So…Meep the baby dragon-cat. I still miss her…
A good friend of mine is a foster home for her local Siamese rescue, and she always comes up with great names.
The haughty female became Queen Victoria.
A momma cat from a kitty mill eventually became Kate Spayed.
The male who flung himself on every available woman he could find became Bill Clinton.
One she ended up keeping had had ear mites, and not much left of his left ear. He was a big guy and looked like a toughie. He became Boxer, although he was a sweetie. Unless you were a dog.
We had an orange cat named Linton when I was younger. He was originally named Heathcliff, after the cartoon orange cat, but he was such a sickly little thing as a kitten that he quickly got renamed Linton Heathcliff, after the character in Wuthering Heights.
Pudding was always going to be Pudding; I had the name picked out before I had her picked out. Getting her was a matter of going to the pound and seeing who looked like Pudding.
My next cat will be Tiffin.
The markings on my Luna reminded me of the markings on the moon, so Luna she became.
Katya is named after Catherine the Great- her full name is Ekaterina. I wanted a Russian name because I thought she might be a Russian Blue mix. Another Russian Blue named Ekaterina had a website where there was a comment that she should be nicknamed Katya, so Katya became Katya.
My old cat, Arnie, just because it was the first name that came to my mind.
My young cat, Idiot, well, because he is.
The dog, Spanky, was named by the husband and I have no idea why. I wanted to name him Syndrome so we could say, “Down Syndrome!”
I went on a website looking for famous dog names and we came upon a name that just grew on us. I really wanted ‘Samson’ the name of the favorite dog of my childhood hero Ernest Shackleton, but we decided on a name that was more unique…turns out the name was that of a rabid dog in a horror novel.
The best dog names in our family have come from Mrs. J.
The female half of our sister-brother spaniel act was named Fargo (she came from Fargo, N.D.) and male half became Bubba (he was acquired during the 1992 Presidential race when there was much talk about Bill Clinton and the “Bubba” vote).
