I’ve been following all of Zsofia’s trials related to cat ownership, and got to wondering how she came to name her cat Dewey. (And maybe she already shared that and I missed it.) Is she a librarian? Or maybe a Car Talk fan and her other pets are named Cheatum and Howe?
I have a large orange cat that adopted us at the time my son was reading the Redwall books, so he named the cat Squire Julian Gingevere after one of the characters in the book. We call him Julian.
Our other cat is Miranda, the third in a string of cats with Latin names (the other two being Catullus and Fortuna). When she was a kitten, the M mark that tabbies often have on their foreheads was very prominent, so I picked a name that started with M. (In retropect, Messalina would have been a better match for her personality…)
So how did you come up with your pet’s (or pets’) name(s)?
I found my current pup on the street in Kosovo when he was only about 4 weeks old. He resembled the then prime minister in both appearance (stocky and low to the ground) and temperament (pugnacious) so he’s named after him. Unfortunately, Kosovars don’t view dogs the same way Americans do so if he knew, he’d view it as a deadly insult when, in fact, it’s a compliment.
I’ve always named my pets with workaday human names like “Dave” or “Bob”. I like it that way.
My cats (now with my ex) were William (RIP), Mike, and Kim.
My dogs (now with the ex before that - if they’re still alive) were Naomi and Tolly (I didn’t choose the last one - apparently it’s the Chinese version of Fido or Rover)
When I was a kid, my parents acquired a couple of strays. ONe was found in the Sydney suburb of Rozelle, and became “Rozelle Reggie”, and the other was nameless until a posh aunt with a posh plum-in-her-mouth accent came over and said “Wot ay reVOLting cat!”, so he was then known evermore as “The Revolter”.
I’ve owned a springer-lab mix named Zaria, but she already had the name when we adopted her from the pound. Didn’t want the extra confusion of changing it, but it was a pretty cool name so we lucked out.
Our current beastie is a calico cat named Monkeyface, so named by the niecephews because she was the only one of the litter to have whitish circles around her eyes. We generally refer to her as the Fuzzy Hand Of Doom, regardless.
Well, I almost three years ago to the day, I found two orange kittens abandoned in near the hay pile. Both kittens still had placenta and part of the sac still attached; I cut them free and left them for a little while to see if Mama would come back. An hour here, and hour there, no Mama. Maybe taken by a coyote, maybe hit by a car, maybe just a bad Mama. I’ll never know. I took them both.
After a day or two of bottlefeeding, it was clear that one was a little bigger. “I call the big one Bitey”, a Homer Simpson quote. Bitey has been Bitey ever since. I love having to explain her name at the vet’s office.
Her brother, Little Orangie, died at about a week old. I have heard it is common, especially in bottle-fed kittens. Bitey however is 4 pounds of mean, healthy, and beautifully dangerous feline.
Rubicante we got the following Christmas. He was a stray, we took him in. My husband called him a “fiendish little Malebranche”. The Malebranche were demons from Dante’s Divine Comedy; the name means “evil claw”. One of the Malebranche’s name is Rubicante. The name just stuck; especially because of his reddish highlights and his ceaseless vocalizing.
We didn’t get Cante to the vet in time, however. He was able to pop just one off. I came home from school one afternoon to find a little kitten under the bed. He looked just like a fox kitt. So there’s Kitt.
When I got my cats (sisters from the same litter), in 1989, I was friends with Lillian Gish, so I asked her if I could name them Lillian and Dorothy. She gave her consent and asked for a photo of the girls, which she kept on a table in her living room. Much like their namesakes, the Gish cats lived a good long time, 15 and 16 years.
(Had they been Siamese cats, I’d have named them Daisy and Violet)
My cat is a beige tabby. I was present at the furball’s birth and got to watch him for a couple of weeks before he was old enough to take home with me. We initially thought it was a female kitty, so I wanted to call it Tia Maria (because of the color, and because I was a silly college student at the time). But then some extra parts sort of appeared and I had to make the switch to Tio. Of course, now we just call him chubb-chubb because he’s 15 pounds of beast.
I am indeed a librarian, and Ranganathan’s kind of a long name for a cat. (What a dork I am!) My dog’s name is Haplo, because I was 12 when I got him and it’s not embarassing to name an animal after somebody in a Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman book when you’re 12. It’s a little embarassing when the dog lives to be 14, though, and you can’t change his name or anything.
Shan was named after a fictional character, Shan yos’Galan (from the Liaden Universe series of novels by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. Like his namesake, he is big, white-hai…er…white-furred and it’s always a surprise to see him spring into action.
Let’s see…Valentino was a Valentine’s Day gift from my husband. Gwen got her name because I was assistant stage manager of “Camelot” when I got her. Bill the Cat was named for the Bloom County character, because he was absolutely the ugliest kitten I’ve ever seen. Cricket - her name was very strange. She was only a few weeks old when I got her, and as I went to warm her bottle one night I commented to my husband "I’m going to go feed Cricket. Cricket? Cricket? Where did that come from? It’s not anything like what I usually name my cats, but I decided maybe she had told me her name by thought transference or something. She’s also known as Cricker Kidder Cat. Yogi is a polydactyl former clinic cat who was named for Yogi Berra. I didn’t name him. Sugar Magnolia was named for the song - “…head’s all empty but I don’t care…” Mr. Spock was a very reserved kitten, and I am a Star Trek fan, so there you go. I don’t have a good picture of Lt. Dax, but she was named that because she was solid white when I got her at about 3 days old, but started developing markings that looked remarkably like the markings on the temples and neck of Lt. Dax.
Best cat name evar was “Heathen Buzzbutt the Yowler”. Meanest kitten I ever bottleraised - the guy who adopted her tells me she chases large dogs out of their yard.
My present Feline Overlord earned his name the night I found him. I’d come back from an out of town job interview, and it really was a “dark and stormy night”. At the time, I lived in an upstairs apartment. The units were arranged 8 per building, with 4 on each floor, and a common breezeway joining the entry doors on each floor. As I came up the stairs, I heard the fearsome demon-growl of an adult tom meaning to inflict felonious damage on something. When I reached the top, I saw the situation. A large adult tom had this little ball of fluff backed into a corner, and was obviously about to kill the kitten. The kitten was scared, but he wasn’t going down without a fight. Little thing was bowed up, hissing, spitting, bound and determined to make the Tom pay for taking his life. I acted without thinking–citing the landmark 1975 case of Boot vs Ass, I sent the Tom flying across the breezeway, scooped up the ball of fluffm and took it inside. For his display of courage under fire, I awarded the kitten an Honored Name in my part of the country. He is now known as…
I give all my animals human names but try to use ones I don’t often hear. My most five recent cats have been named Sebastian, Minerva, Julian, Sophie, and Ariel.
The names of my animals just pop into my head - this has resulted in dogs named Candy and Jose, cats named Marble, Toby, and Badass MotherF… or BAMF for short.
I can’t tell me lizards apart so they’re named Simon and Simon.
