Names for cats, dogs, fish, iguanas, whatever

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Once upon a time, there was a Persian named Buttercup. This is an exceptionally silly name for a cat. When I adopted it, though, it had been living with that name for too long and I did not feel justified in renaming it. For more than two years, I would not address the cat by name because I couldn’t bring myself to say it without sneering.

This cat was a happy cat that grew to ridiculous proportions in very short order. As she got bigger (more than 24lbs!!!), I was able to call her by name. Well, not exactly. I took to calling her Butterball on occasion, which seemed to amuse the neighborhood kids. After a while, this morphed into Butter, which is a great name for a cat. However, that name did not stick (ha!), and so, she became Buttercat. This is the first time I’ve tried to explain that poor cat’s name. In the past, I’ve always just ignored the confused looks from people when I would call to her.

When I was a kid, I had a pair of gerbils named Yin and Yang. After nearly three years of living in harmony, Yin murdered Yang, consumed his feet and bowels and left the rest of his remains strewn about the bloody cage. Such is the relationship of my Yin and Yang. Sad.

There’ve been many pets in my life. Most of them have had really cool names (like the iguana named Shrapnel, but there are few good stories about the naming process.

22

I have a friend who breeds Rottweilers, and I just love some of the names he’s come up with. His biggest breeding male is named Ninja, and he is often bred with a sweet-tempered female named Geisha. They produced a son who became the breeder’s personal pet and favorite: Gypsy.

Another friend adopted a huge white dog that was believed to be part wolf. She, being the romantic she is, named him Dragon. After a while though, the family gave him a nickname which unfortunately stuck and became his full-time sobriquet: Barf. It was what he did whenever they put him in the car.

In our family, we have had many, many, many cats. Some of the names we’ve used over the years: Ophelia, Amelia, Soot, Bubba, Hamlet (who became known as Hammy Hambone), Sweet Alice, Galoot, Tomfoolery, Scarlett (as in O’Hara, and boy, did she play the part), and Lady Violet Grayfoot. We’ve also had a fish named Cool Fish (well, he was), and dogs named Oliver, Palomine (Pal O’Mine), and Little Feat (after the band), whom my grandfather would get upset with and stomp around the yard yelling, “Foot! Damn it, Foot! Get back here!” whenever he dug up the garden, which was a lot. My grandfather comes from the Fido-Spot-Rover school of naming dogs and couldn’t quite come to grips with my mother’s Bohemian dog-naming habits.

Last, but not least, my dad once had a cat named Rasputin. He’s something of a legend when it comes to naming things. The story is when I was born, they waited ten days past the legal limit before registering my name because my dad got to pick it and, as he said, “you’ve got to get to know a critter before you can name it.” Pretty cool, eh?

23

My cat Annie is named after Little Orphan Annie. She was the first kitten I ever raised from a newborn. Someone found her abandoned in some grass, her unbilical cord still attached, and she was covered in ant bites. I had never even seen a kitten that small before, but the second I saw her, I was in love. She is still a very small cat but she rules the house and all the larger cats run from her.

I have another cat named Angel. He came into my life shortly after my cat Sunshine died. I was still feeling very depressed over the loss of my baby, when a lady came into the hospital with a cat she found squashed on the road. He had head trauma and one of his rear legs was out of its socket, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to put him to sleep. He was bloody and underweight, but we could tell he was a beautiful cat (long, silky white fur, big blue eyes, pink nose). We were able to nurse him back to health with minimal care. And he was so sweet…he never complained the whole time we were treating him. He was so affectionate and loved to be petted. Although his face was swollen and distorted, he would purr and purr and make bread with his feet. I would sit near his cage and hold him, and I thought, “This cat is as sweet as an angel.” And he was able to make me smile despite the fact that I was still mourning over Sunshine. So…I ended up taking my sweet Angel home and now he is healthy and robust and absolutely gorgeous.

Then there is Happy…Happy came to me after my cat Domino died. When I first met Happy, he was a scrawny, ugly little kitten cowering in the back of his carrier. But as soon as I got him home and opened the carrier, Angel walked over to him and took him under his wing. They bonded immediately and instead of a terrifed kitten I had a happy, playful ball of energy. Of course I had to name him Happy after that. Now Happy is 13 pounds and a little more sedate than he was when he was a baby, but he still loves Angel very much.

Hootie was left at my clinic by a client who did not want to be responsible for her care. She was already named Kufta, but once we took ownership of her we changed her name to Hootie because she looks exactly like an owl.

Last is Cherokee, who’s name I pulled out of left field and has no meaning behind it what so ever.

And those are my kitty babies. :slight_smile:

24

I remember seeing a lifestyle show on TV a few years ago, where the celebrity guest spot was given over to a huge lump of slobbering, sweet-natured dog called Fugly.

When the somewhat naive reporter asked as to the origin of the name, the dog’s owner replied, “Isn’t it obvious?”

Suffice to say, the dog was never going to win any beauty contests.

25

Our latest cat is named Snickers

Cats I’ve named in the past:

**Sydney

Norm From the Planet Dave

Fran**

My favorite cat of all time Stanton Van Horn

I was a security guard 20 yrs ago. I met this mentally ill fellow in the City’s Park. Giant marshmellow men were trying to eat his brain, Sunflowers new his most secret thoughts, his pants could track KGB agents…that kind of thing. I spent several hours talking with this man.
I named my cat after him.

26

The first pet my family ever got was a cat that we lured to us from the wild with a bowl of milk. We never formally named this cat but after it had kittens we named her ‘Mammy Cat’.
Eventually these kittens had kittens and Mammy Cat became ‘Granny Cat’. Before we could name her ‘Great-granny Cat’ she disappeared. I miss that cat.
We never named all our cats (we had 24 at one stage - they just would not stop breeding) but names I do remember are Oscar (it was a wild cat - get it?) and the intellectual Fluffy

27

LMAO. Eeeewwwww gross.

I named my first cat Ivy, so when i got a second cat, i wanted to keep with a theme. So she is named Cypress. Some people think that’s a wierd name, but i think it’s cute. It fits her well as she is a very feminine, ladylike cat.

28

My wife’s earliest cat was Lacey after a great-aunt.
Her next cat was Orrin ('cause my wife liked the name.) I protested that Orrin was not a good name for a female cat. My wife, the farmer, assured me Orrin was male.

We kept two of Orrin’s kittens, naming the one that looked like a Sealpoint Himalayan Smudge for the “smudge” of coloring on his nose when he was a kitten and the other (a buff tabby like his mother) Skitter because he skittered away from anything new. (I identified the sex of the kittens and we gave away the females.)

After Orrin had died, when my wife insisted on bringing home a little orange tabby Manx kitten, it was quite fierce around the three older cats, and so was named Keegan, which is reportedly Celtic for “small and fierce.”
(Smudge actually “adopted” Keegan as Keegan grew up and would play with Keegan and teach him to hunt.)

After Smudge disappeared, the barn where my wife rides had a “kitten clean-out” and we wound up with two calicoes–Frances and Eleanor. Francis developed a stomach disease and died, so at the next barn-cat cleaning, we wound up with two more gray tabbies, Samson and Otis. Otis ran away and was adopted by a family down the street, so we now have the mammoth Keegan (whose size and demeanor are no longer small and fierce), Eleanor, and Samson.

Meanwhile, we have had a Bearded Dragon who was named Chrysophylax after a Tolkien story, a pair of Geckoes named Fatima and Scheherezade because they come from the Arab/Persian part of the world, a Royal (or Ball) Python named Shango after a king in the part of Africa where his ancestors lived, a Kenyan Sand Boa named Thika, and a mean, virulent, nasty, misanthropic, irritable, irascible Green Iguana named Lioth from the Anne McCaffrey novel because my wife was still in “dragon naming” mode when she brought the evil critter home.

Our first Boxer was named Emma which comes from the Germanic for “nurse”–and she made an excellent nurse and child-watcher. Our current Boxer came with the name Chloe which we did not bother to change.

The two tree frogs, two anoles, assorted fish, feeder mice, and feeder crickets do not have names. The current horse is named Reggae for reasons I have not discovered.

29

Just this week my husband and I adopted a 6 month old cat from an animal shelter. We’ve been thinking about it for months since we have kids we wanted to make sure they were ready for a pet first. I’ve been running names through my head trying to find the cutest name for a cat and could think of nothing at all. Well, I go in, pick out this homely clumsy little black cat and come out to my husband who is waiting with the kids in the car. And right out of the blue I said “This is Miss Cleopatra Kitty”. We’re calling her Miss Cleo for short.
In the past I’ve had cats with the names Fat Cat, Spawn From Hell, Thelma, Louise, Nicodemus, Nona and Gypsy. Our dogs names included Bookie, Harvey and Binkie, Binkie was originally named Jynx but she responded better to being baby talked and Binkie came off calling her Jynkie.

30

As if there were some other kind of Green Iguana. Really, Tom, I think “Iguana” implies every adjective that you have selected, along with a few others.

[Hijack]How was Chrysophylax? Would you ever recommend that someone else take in a Beardy? I’ve been giving it some thought.[/Hijack]

31

We named our cats after artists, as well, Frannie!

My fiancee’s cat is a large orange tabby named Pablo Picasso and my cat is a black half-siamese named Gustav Klimt (Pico n’ Gus for short) :smiley:

32

idiotboy,

The second “_______” in your sig is a wee bit long and causes the need for horizontal scrolling. Could you shorten that by just a bit?

33

Other Pet Name Stories from the Files of Jack Batty . . .

I’ve had two cats named Kitty. The first one got the name because my roommate and I were a couple of stoners and too lazy to actually think of a name. But the second Kitty was already named Kitty when I got her. I got her at a shelter. She came in with another cat, they were Kitty the First, and Kitty the Second, respectively. And offically. So Kitty it was, with out the title. At least it was easy to remember.

In college I had two hamsters, originally I believe their names were Laverne and Shirley. But they got evicted from the dorms and my mother agreed to take care of them for me. Laverne, should have been called Steve McQueen because the little bastard would execute a great escape every night. At one point, my mother told me, “If that little f**ker gets out again, I swear to God, it’s lunchmeat.” Of course it did get out again, so keeping my mother to her word, she was re-named Lunchmeat. Like Tymp’s gerbils, these hamsters seemed to be particularly bent on canabalism as well. But Lunchmeat did the eating.

34

had a lizard named algernon, i luved watchng him down crickets. but he’s dead now…:frowning:
a black named zahin (sa - EEN) which means black in i forget what language…my mom named him. he brought us dead birds all the time and beat up other cats. he was sweet…
a turtle named woka woka, but my uncle stepped on him. i saw the corpse, it was grotesque, still gives me chills to think about it.
and a lorikeet named tiki bird, he was beautiful, but i couldn’t give him the attention he needed, so i gave him away to a bird enthusiast. they’re very intelligent and need loads of attention and playtime.
i want a killy cat now, but my roomates dog (dahdi) is such a pain in the ass. i’m thinking siouxsie sue will be my next killy’s name…

35

D’oh! Sorry about that…I’m oblivious to horizontal scrolling due to my 21 inch monitor! :smiley: Is it better now?

36

There was rarely any logic in our pet naming:
Great Dane named Herschel
Himalayan named Wendell
A pair of kittens named Daryl and Daryl
Terrier named Freeway
Dalmatian named Pixel
Border collie named Bernie

I wanted to call the dalmatian Rorschach, but I didn’t want to spend all my time explaining it… bad enough I have to explain “Pixel” to people

37

Chrys was great. In warm weather he had the run of the house (we’d close off the bedrooms and basement so that he wouldn’t go hole up somewhere) and he’d sit in an eastern window in the morning and move to a western window in the afternoon (crawling down to do his lizardcicle imitation in some nook or cranny if the nights got cool).

In the cool months he stayed in his tank with the heater.

For being a rather small reptile, with few facial muscles, he had a lot of personality. When he wanted to be fed, he would greet us in full “display” mode with his beard a dark black. On summer weekends, we’d put him outside on a lizard leash while we did yard work. He would hang out and bask unless he saw a bumble bee. He loved to snatch them out of the air (apparently without being stung). I came home one day when he had been out without being fed for a while to find him up on his back legs with his nose pressed against the cricket cage.

My wife is the animal lover, but I have been tmpted to pick up another dragon, myself.
He was a bit lazy when hunting. We’d pull the basking rock and water out of his tank and thrown in some crickets. He would sit in the middle of the tank as the crickets paraded around the perimeter, snatching any that got too close to him (and ignoring the ones that climbed up on his head or tail). He did hunt them down when he was really hungry and I don’t know whether his “lazy” approach was typical of dragons or peculiar to him.

The closest he came to “creating” a problem was when we brought the iguana home. We did not know that they were incompatible (where would an Australian desert lizard and a Central American jungle lizard develop any antipathy?), so we had a couple of instances where 18 inch Chrys chased 37 inch Lioth out of a room with much hissing and hurt feelings. We soon learned to keep them in separate areas, because Chrys would seek out Lioth to assault her. (No physical attacks, just a lot of threats and inflation.) I also don’t know whether Lioth would run now that she has been in the house over a year and has reached 48 inches.

I have seen dragons caged with other lizards, but I guess you ought to figure out which ones are compatible, first.

Unfortunately, when Emma died we initially wound up with two rescued boxers. The older one was pretty aggressive in her play and I think she smashed him with her paw. Chrys died of an internal infection of “unknown origin.”

38

I keep several snakes. Probably the best and most aptly named one is a Canebrake Rattlesnake called ‘Pipe Bomb’.

Other snake names: Short Fuse, Copenhagen, Sweet Lucky, Big Nose Kate, Trebuchet, Society Red, and I have a new one that hasn’t told me who she is yet.

Also, I’m afflicted with a cat named, you guessed it: ‘Cat’ (sometimes followed by: ‘Damnit!’).

39

Ok, gather round. When I was a mere sprout (may even have been before I was born, I’m not sure) my family had a cat named Bert (a female, incidentally). Bert died, and was succeeded by Garbanzo, who later ran away and was succeeded by Rosie.

Rosie (with her nicknames, Rosarita and Ree-ree) was so named because Mom didn’t like the name she had borne previously, Rascal. I unilaterally decided that Rosie’s full name was Rosarita Dolores la Reina de los Gatos. She is an immense and ancient grey-and-white longhaired cat, who is, according to my calculations, slightly older than my brother Theo.

In the other pets department, I later had a string of fish, whose names I forget except that two of them were named Talbot and Melissa, after Bert’s goldfish on Sesame Street.

I also had a succession of budgies. The first one, a green one, was sitting in my room right after we’d got him home, and I referred to him in code as Harold, so that Theo wouldn’t know whom I was talking about. The name stuck.

After my dad left the cage door open and Harold met an unfortunate end as a Rosie-hors-d’oeuvre, we continued the English monarchy theme with Victoria, a blue and white budgie who died of eggbinding; William and Mary, blue and yellow the latter of whom died of unknown causes, and was replaced by Elizabeth, who after just one day freaked out, bent the cage bars and escaped, meeting the same fate as Harold. William accompanied us all the way to Montreal, but died shortly afterwards. We got another two budgies named Ferdinand and Miranda, but decided we didn’t want them in the kitchen and returned them.

Back in Winnipeg, in Grade Seven I did an experiment with rats in a maze (how original); the test subjects were named Clarinda and Vanessa, for “control” and “variable”. Vanessa had apparently been pregnant when we bought her, and a few weeks into the experiment, we ended up with five new rats: Maurice and Garfield (named in a fit of irony), and California, Malta, and Australia (named after the markings on their backs). Advice: Rats can make lovely pets, provided they’re female. Maurice and Garfield hit puberty and began to stink, and Malta and Australia died, so the rats went back to the pet store.

Sometime in this, my brother had a large, nocturnal, unfriendly hamster, whose name I forget. It was dead for about a week before we realized it.

Anyway, I’m currently sharing my living space with a kitten named Zazou, which is the French word for “hepcat,” specifically a subculture of disaffected youth in the 1940s who frequented jazz bars in Paris and wore zoot suits. It was a close race for this name between Zazou, Cassandra (after the frustrated priestess of Troy), and Schrödinger (which ought not to need further explanation).

calls Zazou over, talks in syrupy voice Yeeeeeees! Who’s an evil little monster demon kitty? Is it youuuuuuu? Is it youuuuuuu? Yeees it iiiiiis! Nummanummanumma!

40

Thanks, Tom. That’s the kind of first hand herp review I was looking for. I’ve heard good things about beardies, but mostly from rabid lizard lovers who can’t be trusted to give unbiased information. Although you might be one of those rabid lizard lovers, you seem to be pretty well balanced and sensible so I respect your opinion a lot.

Actually, he probably was stung. Beardies are immune to most insect venom. Supposedly, funnel web spiders are part of their regular diet in Australia. In comparison, your average bee sting isn’t much for a beardy to worry about.

idiotboy, that’s much better. Thanks for looking out for us laptop users.