When I adopted my kitten, she did not have a name yet so it wasn’t an issue.
When I adopted my older cat, the name just didn’t fit. She was kinda mangey and tough-looking and they had called her ‘Whiskers.’
We’ve adopted four cats from the shelter. One we kept the name, the other three were renamed. All were kittens, though.
My current cat is 4 years old and previously was a stray, then moved in with a family for a year, then went to my brother for 2 years, and is now staying with me. My brother kept the name that the family gave it and she does respond to it about half the time, so I didn’t want to change it on her. It fits her. It’s kind of a dumb name, but whatever.
Mitzy was 9 when we adopted her. We liked the name, it suited her, and I don’t think she would have learnt a new name.
Most of my pets have been rescues who had previous names. My rescued greyhounds both came with long racing names that had to do with their breeding lines, such as Thunder Sumo Austin (Thunder being father’s line, Sumo being mother’s line, and Austin being the given name). They were then named by the rescue organization Indy (from the “I” group of rescued dogs) and Apollo (from the Greek Gods group). We kept the names given by the rescue organization.
I also had a rescued rat who had been a control subject in a research lab; she came only with a number (“42”) and we named her Sydney.
Current cat was adopted at 2 months old from the SPCA who named him Stanley. When I got him, he just seemed more like a Santiago to me, and now I just call him Santi or Santito.
Depends on the name. Most of the cat’s we’ve adopted have had lame names that we changed, but a couple of our guys (Watson and Baxter) had names that were cool enough we kept them.
We always rename. “Sky” was a stupid name for Captain.
“42” would have been a pretty cool name in itself, though.
I re-named a rescue cat from Fluffy to Spike so he would feel better about himself. He holds his head up high now.
How would I feel as a human? Or how would I feel if I were a dog? Because those are two different answers.
It would depend on the appropriateness of the name. When I got my previous dog (a short-legged Beagle) her name was “Pudgy.” (Seriously? “Pudgy”?!) The minute we stepped through my front door I changed her name to “Madison.” I honestly don’t know how long she’d been called “Pudgy”, the people who gave her to me estimated that she was 5 years old and before that she’d been a lab dog at the University of Guelph.
A couple of years later Madison was sound asleep beside me and I quietly started calling her “Pudgy…Pudgyyy…” and she woke with a startle and looked around whimpering. It took a few minutes of me cuddling her and saying “I’m sorry” and “It’s okay” before she settled down. I felt like such an ass. (Madison passed on in 2008, congestive heart failure.)
After Madison died I thought that the next dog I get would be named “Ruby Tuesday.” I never told anybody that. Fast-forward to this past May when my now-husband showed me an ad on Kijijji for a Blue Tick Coon Hound and said I should call it. When I called my phone didn’t connect properly so all the woman heard was static. She said: “Are you calling about Ruby?” (Here’s me: :eek:) Yes, I went and picked up the dog that night and she’s ours now.
She was “42” for a while because we couldn’t think of a name for her. But nobody got the joke except me.
If the dog has come from a bad situation, you absolutely should change the name. But I generally suggest a name that has something of the original name, like the same vowel sound and the same number of syllables. Like Soylent Juicy’s example, I might have changed “Pudgy” to something like “Bunny” or “Lovey.”
For a dog that has been accustomed to its name and hasn’t had a bad past (older owner dies; beloved pet needs to be placed), changing the name is just mean. The pet already is going through enough with being relocated; why should it have to endure a change of identity too? Even if you don’t like the name, that’s the name. You can gradually start calling it nicknames, and ease it into something, but wholesale change is not called for.
My dogs didn’t really have names; the older one was a stray, and when he was taken into foster care, they gave him a pound name, which he’d had for about two months before we adopted him. And the girl was a puppy mill brood mommy all her life; she had never had a name. She was something like Bitch #186. Any name we gave her would have been an improvement.
If the name was just on some paperwork, fine, change it. Dogs (even very smart ones) don’t read much. But if anyone actually called them by that name, yeah, that’s their name. Even if they haven’t learned to respond to it yet, they’re learning. Changing names on them halfway through would just make that harder on the poor animal.
I always keep the name they came with, if I know it, mainly out of laziness reasons. My family keeps the name too, since they all believe it’s bad luck to change an animal’s name. They think if you do, the pet will soon die. Same for taking pictures of pets.
Normally I don’t call them by names though. If I’m talking to a dog, I’ll usually say pooch or bud, and if I’m talking to a cat I’ll call it puss, pita, depending on what it has just done.
Oliver Cromwell ( aka Ollie ) here came out of the shelter at about age 6 months named “Grapes.”
Nah. Just wasn’t going to cut it ;).
As with others if cat came to me as an adult with an established name, I’d probably keep it. But kittens/sub-adults? I see no reason to keep the shelter names. In fact I know shelter cats where the shelter workers have asked that you change it, because the name is so stupid :D. Since most shelters see a bazillion cats and kittens they have to name, they often run out and have to start coming up with silly/repetitive names just to keep them all identified for adoption purposes.
My cats (all three) all know their names, but I also use a ton of nicknames and so on that I use for them. I have a different tone of voice that I use for each cat, and each one knows it’s “tone” and therefore knows when I’m talking to him/her. I know this because they will look up at me and (more often than not) approach me, frequently with a questioning meow.
Our cats Midnight, Maggie, and Clarence kept the names they had at the shelter. Lotta necessarily got hers changed. She was officially “Girl Teeny” at the shelter, but even before we went there MiliCal said “We have to go get Lotta!” before she even saw any of the cats, so whichever we got was going to be rechristened Lotta, which sounds better than “Girl Teeny” anyway.
Clarence had to keep his name – I’m sure they named him after Clarence the Croo-Eyed Lion from Daktari. Out clarence had one eye, so he was “Clarence the one-eyed mini-lion” (He was a Maine Coon, with lion coloring and a definite mane).
Hermes, our newest, got renamed by us. I don’t even recall his shelter name.
Also species matters. We got Murphy the parrot when he was nine. We weren’t hot on the name, but he said, "Hey, Murph! Hi! Murrr-phy! Murphy, step up. Good boy, Murph!’ etc. He was pretty insistent.
I’ve renamed shelter cats without a qualm. “Smokey” had been there for a year but he was unhappy so I figured a new name would be a good thing. “Stumpy” was a manx kitten and that’s a pretty demeaning monicker, so he got a new one too.
A cat I got from a divorcing friend was called a name I really disliked. I called him by both names for a little while but he caught on very quickly to what I called him. Another was “Cleo”, which I thought a bit of a cliche, so I respelled her “Clio” for the muse of history 
I don’t think animals own their names the way we do ours so, absent any signs of stress from the animal, I would say that a change of name is one of the least things that bother them when they change owner and home.
Madison’s story has brought a tear to my eye.
I adopted a cat from a friend. It was eleven years old and I kept it’s name, as it was an open adoption and the original owner still loved it. Long story.
But I adopted a seven month old dog from the shelter and renamed it to something a fellow Doper suggested.