The GQ thread about naming pets got me to thinking about this. Several years ago we acquired a guinea pig. My stepdaughter and her kids had gotten it from a neighbor, but they didn’t have room for it at their tiny place so they asked if we could we watch it until they found a home for it. Well, you can guess how that turned out…
As far as I know, the guinea pig never had a name. Or at least nobody told us. So my wife and I just called her “Piggy”. After we had “Piggy” for about a year, we wound up buying another one from the local pet store so she would have a friend to play with. At that point “Piggy” became “Big Piggy” and the new one became “Little Piggy”.
After we had “Little Piggy” for a couple of months, we discovered she was pregnant. (And most likely had been when we bought her. Bonus!) After “Little Piggy” had her litter of one… yep, they were now “Mama Piggy” and “Baby Piggy”.
So what’s the most uncreative name you’ve come up with for a pet (or pets)?
Similar story to the OP. We got two pet rats. My wife wanted to name the smaller one Bozo. I liked the name but thought it was more appropriate for the bigger one. We discussed this for quite a few days without coming to agreement. Finally I proposed we name them both Bozo, so they became “Big Bozo” and “Little Bozo”.
Then some months later we got another baby rat. We discussed a few names, but when I proposed “Tiny Bozo”, that was clearly the winner. Ironically, Tiny Bozo eventually grew to be the largest of the three Bozos.
When I got one of my rabbits I thought his little poops were so cute. I kept going on to my GF about his little doodies. I named him after them, Doody! Which my GF hated.
Our cat’s name is “Kitty”. We inherited her, so it’s not our fault. We thought she needed some class, so we made the spelling Q’itih for the vet’s office.
My first rabbit (I kind of inherited him when my then live-in GF’s kid lost interest) was named “Bunny Bunny.” Big laffs at the vet when she called out the patient’s name to come on back. I wanted to name him “Cadbury” because of the little chocolate treats he left around the house , but cooler heads prevailed.
Pie is… piebald patterned. Wasn’t intended as a name name, though. I never thought I’d end up adopting her; I was just nicknaming her to distinguish her from her littermates.
Mine was also for a black Lab. We named her Souzao, after the Portuguese wine grape. It’s one of the Port allowed varieties, and by itself, it makes very inky wine. Black ink. At least when Randall Grahm of Bonny Doon did it.
I’ve been told it was a very dorky thing to name a dog. Unlike my in-laws naming another black Lab, “Blackie.”
Our first dog was an purebred maltese whose official name was San Yin Annabelle, but she was already renamed Mopsey when we got her. She was brought over from Australia as a show dog, but had an overbite so the person who brought her over gave her to us.
My GF named a black stray cat Put Puts and when she had a kitten, the Dad was a calico so it had some really ugly calico markings mixed with it’s black fur. I named it Ugly. Not surprisingly, Ugly never warmed up to us and was chased away by Put Puts after she had a second kitten.
There was also Stupid, a really nice gray stray. I called him Stupid because he would hang around me even before I started feeding him. The last time I saw him was when I was hanging out with some friends in the garage. I hadn’t seen him for a few weeks, and he started walking up the towards us just as another friend got of of his car. I called out “Hey Stupid!” and my friend joked that he was going him if I called him names. I had to explain I was talking to the cat, not him. Upon seeing my friend, who didn’t come too often, Stupid turned around and I never saw him again.
Are you sure about that? Calico is a sex-linked characteristic requiring two X chromosomes, so almost all calico cats are female. A male can be calico only if it has an XXY genotype, but among those very few male calicos, almost all are sterile. A fertile male calico is exceedingly rare.
When I was a kid, my sister had a dog, which she named “Magnolia Wrinkles Dawson”. I had a cat. I named him “Pud” (rhymes with “would”), because that was the sound his front feet made hitting the floor as he jumped down from the counter.
My friend had a beat up old rescued Poodle named Robespierre. He was incontinent so of course it turned into Pee-pee. He wore diapers everyday. Gross-ist dog I ever loved.
Maybe not a calico (maybe a tortiseshell?), but the male was black, white and orange like a calico. Ugly was black with tinges of orange and black under his/her fur (he/she never let us approach close enough to tell for sure).
Edit: Most kittens are cute, but even a s kitten, Ugly’s face wasn’t. The name was mean, but described him/her well.
, but cooler heads prevailed.