Time again for the semi-regular - what are your pets names and how did they get those names?

Abbott: Actually he was almost Eleanor (after Eleanor Roosevelt) until I found him licking a certain something :scared: I was reading a biography of Abbie Hoffman and decided to name him Abbie. Only problem was everyone assumes Abbie is a girl name plus the cat was such a dork that Abbott just fit him much better.

Evita: After adopting her, on the drive home I was listening to Madonna's Greatest Hits vol #2 and the song "Don't Cry for me Argentina" came on. Now "Evita" is my favorite broadway musical and yes, I did love the movie version of it. And the cat was so regal looking with her long soft hair that I thought Evita was appropriate.

My cat is Toots (or Tootsie) for no reason at all. I just started calling her that.

Phoenix was supposed to be a golden retriever, but somehow wound up as a classic tabby instead.

Another of my cats is named Guylian, after the chocolates (my ex named him), he goes by Guy most of the time.

Siouxsie was named because she wailed like a banshee.

Cosmo was named after the Seinfeld character.

Casey: Her shelter name was KC, and I like the name Casey, so it stuck. :)

Vicki: She looks like the RCA Victor Dog, so we named her Vicki. :)

Sounded soft and dainty. Well she IS small and dainty but a real "piss ant" that is full of vinegar (and I wouldn't have it any other way)

Her big brother, Puddy (on right) is now gone...:(

Sundance because he is a blonde and the movie was on a lot when we got him


Pepper was my mother's nickname in college

Silver and Gray were already adults when I got them. They were abandoned. So they already had names, but nobody knew what they were.

I spent six months with a baby book going through names calling them everything, trying to find out what they would answer to. After 6 months I gave up and said, "Your name will be Silver, and your name will be Gray, and we'll all get used to that."

They now answer to those names, and follow me around like puppies when I call them.


Millie Dear is named after my Grandmother, sort of. When my Grandmother first came to the US, her parents wanted her to have an American sounding nickname. They thought Millie sounded American, and thought people would like her better if her name was Millie instead of Pearl, her real name.

So my Grandmother was "Millie" until she became an adult. She then insisted that nobody was ever allowed to call her Millie ever again. In fact, none of her children or grandchildren knew that her name as a kid was Millie until she was in her 80s and shared the story with us. She no longer disliked the name, because nobody ever used it anymore. When I got this tiny little kitten, only a few weeks only, I asked my Grandmother if it would be okay to name the kitten Millie in her honor, and my grandma said yes.
:)

Sneezer

Because from the moment we saw him as a puppy at the shelter, whenever he's happy he sneezes.

Charley

Kennel name: Rhapsody in Red Charles. Charley was his Dad's name, and he was a COOL DUDE. "Rhapsody in Red" because Charley SINGS.

Brigette

Kennel name: Red Alert Brigette. Brigette was her Mom's name. She and Charley are littermates. "Red Alert" because she is ON DUTY 24/7.

Vinnie

Kennel name: Scout's Vincenzo la Bocca. Scout is his mom, and Vincenzo because he IS the gangster and Bocca because I don't know anything he hasn't tried to eat. This shot:

He is 3 weeks old. He's on the left. 2 seconds after that, he tried to eat the other pup's nose.

BlackJack

Black for obvious reasons, but Jack was the name he'd answer to. He's a rescue, and the rescuers tried every name in the book. When they got to Jack, his head SNAPPED toward them.

but when I brought him for his first vet visit,

Vet "Whats his name?"

Me "Well, the humane society said his name is Toby"

Vet "What does he think his name is?"

Me "....... Kunta Kinte"


She didnt get it.

:thumbsup:

Our Golden retriever (god rest him) and yes of course he was named for the Grateful Dead song. Our other one is Sunshine Daydream (sunny)

When we got married the minister came over to see if we were fit to be together (mandatory meeting) and I told the dog... "Esau go lay down" The minister says "Oh yes, very clever, Esau the red hair brilliant!" I no fuck all about the bible and I didn't know what to say. It all ended well though- The minister got divorced and moved shortly thereafter so we never have to think about church!

:D :hi: (see my post below - used to have a cat named Esau) :headbang:

bebby kittehs came to us, and Pick because a) I kept calling Pretz that for some reason *hanging head* and b) because of the old book Pickles the Fire Cat. Oh, and their mommy was named Pepper, so we thought it was cool that they all had food names starting with the letter P.

Will post pics at another time.

maybe next time you'll share a few.....................

:silly:

Bean came with his name.
Luna is white and slim like a crescent moon.

Our cat is Blackie. Our chicken is Brownie. (We also had another cat named Blackie, and a chicken named Blackie). These names are, of course, self-explanatory. We are obviously very creative people.

She's 2.

Shetland Sheepdog - Winnie because she just looked like a Winnie. She's the old lady at 12.

:D

:D

This is Katie, our beagle/dachshund mix. She was already named Katie when we adopted her from the SPCA, and we were lazy/thought it was a cute name/didn't see any point in changing it, so ten years later she is still Katie. :)


This is Phoenix. We got him when he was a kitten, and the neighbors who gave him to us mistakenly told us he was a girl, so we were originally going to call him Arizona because of his sandy color. When we found out he was male, we decided that Phoenix sounded a bit more masculine. :shrug:


And this is Isabel. One of my dad's employees found this tiny kitten alone up a tree and mewling for all she was worth just before the worst of Hurricane Isabel hit, and my dad took her home because we already had cat supplies for Phoenix. After a few days we decided she was too cute to give up for adoption, and so we ended up keeping her and naming her after the hurricane. :)


Before these pets, my family & I had two others:

- Topaz, a tiny abandoned stray kitten my friend and I found when we were in third grade. I took him home because my friend had a dog at the time and we didn't think that would work out so well. I named him Topaz because he was kind of the color of a topaz stone (and he had really pretty blue eyes that were the color of blue topaz, I guess), but the poor thing was really sick and died after only ten days. :cry: That was twelve years ago and I still miss the little guy sometimes. :(

- Esau, another male orange tabby that we got from some friends from church. We were going to call him Caleb (because apparently that means "dog"), but settled on Esau ("hairy") in the end. :)

And when I was really little, my parents had two birds, Tiel and Avion (Tiel was a cockatiel - actually, I think maybe they both were - and Avion I guess because he flew like an airplane, or something. :shrug:). I don't really remember them, though, because when I was about two or three (I think), my dad either realized he was allergic to birds, or his pre-existing bird allergy got bad enough that they had to get rid of them. :shrug:

love the pets!

:hug: :hi:

Ed:
She (yes she) was named by my husband (before we met he got her when he was in college). He first named her Disney, but his roommate felt the name was too corporate, so he named her Ed after the hyena in the Lion King:




Clearly our Ed is much cuter



Lienie:
Named after my favorite beer Leinenkugel's. The vet spelled it wrong and we just left it that way.



Scout:
Our kitty .... he was first named April because he showed up on our doorstep on a raing April night. He bit my husband, so we brought him to the vet who informed us she was really a he, so we renamed him Scout after my favorite character in To Kill a Mockingbird.




Jasmine:
Our baby girl, she is our "accident" - it was pet adoption day at PetCo, I saw her and we brought her home. Her original name was Lacey but to me that seemed like a pornstar name. So I named her Jasmine, that was the name I picked out for my first born girl, since we decided no human kids...she got the name.

Everyone assumes that i must be a big Sesame Street fan... but really i just thought he looked like an Elmo! :shrug:

I always wanted to name a dog Fenway, but that just didn't seem to fit him.

Riley: Poor cat isn't named after anybody. I just liked the name, though I did try 3 others before settling with Riley.

Spencer: I'm a huge West Wing fan. He is named after John Spencer, who played Leo on the show and died during the final season.

Kyra: I had a really hard time naming her. I wanted a strong, liberal female name, but couldn't think of one that fit her. Then one day, she was beating up on the far-larger boys and my roomie said that we should name her after a TV cop. Brenda Leigh Johnson from The Closer immediately popped to mind, especially since Kyra was found in downtown LA, which is where The Closer is set. I didn't like the name Brenda though, so I named her after the actress who plays Brenda, Kyra Sedgwick.

Edit: OMG, I didn't include pics!

Riley & Kyra...


Spencer...

a little surfer girl I went to school with out here in So Cal during the late 60's.


Tikki

Puddy :eyes: :puke: who I inherited from my Dad, he gave her that awful name, for what that horrible little bird says, "I tought I taw a puddy tat" I HATE THAT BIRD so much. But I love Puddy, we tried to rename her Spain but I didn't work, even though I used to think of that F'ing bird every time I said it, now it's just her name.
Also Puddy has a penis but I didn't find this out until years after I got her and had been calling her "she" all along.
This is her screwing some paper towels, and proof she's a boy, that little pink mark there :blush:

That Puddy's story!!

The other two are Tonka and Percy.

excuse me

him and named him after their "Buddy" who had passed away.

Buddy with his pals, Daniel and Leah.

As a kitten he had a fondness for attacking and chewing electrical cords. Which I assured him would result in that name. So I guess he sort of chose it himself.

Guinness: black lab/border collie mix. Black coat, with a spray of white on his chest. It was a natural.

Sampson. my wife's miniature pinscher. He's a hundred-pound dog in a thirteen-pound body; truly larger than life. Sampson it is.

Because her first owners named her "Daisy", but it didn't seem to fit her, to me. Don't know why, but it didn't. But I wanted something close to it, to keep from confusing her. She was soooo pretty and needed a really pretty, classy kind of name. So, it's offically "Gracie", but now call her "Grace" most of the time.

Leo the cat was named that because I had another cat named "Ari" at the time. Leo was a neighborhood stray who would look in the windows at Ari. They were the same color--a kind of buff tabby coat--and looked like reflections of each other in the windows. "Ari" means "lion", because he looked like one. So, I named Leo a name that meant lion, too. And eventually I let him move in.

Sophie was a Humane Society foster who was 4 when her owners gave her up. So, she had a name, and a good one.

Shadow was also a Humane Society foster. I didn't think I'd be keeping him, so just gave him a name that would work for a black cat. Didn't really think about it. He has some health problems, and couldn't get adopted, so I still had him when it was time to move. So, I adopted him and brought him with. If I'd known I'd be keeping him, I would've put more thought into his name. Most of the time I call him "Shamu" because he's huge.

Leo

Sophie

Shadow

Grace

I was with my ex when we got her. He loved Marvel comics, and because she has a white streak through her tail he decided that Rogue was fitting. :D

Max: Black Lab, he came from the Humane Society already named.



Francesca: Black cat, named by my daughter.



RL

than I used to do with naming the kids, because of several adoptees.

I used to name my kids after TV characters--so in the very old days, there were Starsky, HarryO and Baretta. Baretta died. And both Starsky and HarryO turned into girls. Then there were Alan and Sandra (from Space: 1999), and once again, I sucked at determining a girl from a boy, so I ended up calling Alan Alyn. Then an ex-roomie added a kit, and she ended up being called Piccolo.

Then there was MacGyver, who ended up being Jessica (Fletcher, because she was always sticking her nose into everything).

Then there were the two orphans (lost their mother after a week and a day) who got named Dax and Kira.

Then Jean-Luc, Garibaldi and Delenn.

Orphaned kits were Amanda and Oliver. I've managed to find TV characters to fit them, though I would likely have chosen other characters to fit their personalities.

my first two were a pair of cuban tree frogs. One was chubby and the other was skinny, so I named them Sam and Frodo. Later I found out Sam was a girl. :)

Then I got a leopard gecko. I named her Frank, after Frank Sinatra, because she had a band of bright blue across her eyes. And while that isn't uncommon, she also had a matching band of blue on the opposite end on her tail, which made the one across her eyes stand out even more. She was also named before I found out she was a girl.

Then I found a crawfish, dying of dehydration, in the middle of a Wal-Mart parking lot at 3 or 4 am. So I took her home and named her Roadkill.

Brianna came with a name. That's what the folks at the shelter called her, and since it sounds like a frilly, spoiled girl name, it just fit.

Pippy was originally Dippy. We adopted her when her previous family moved to a no-pets apartment. "Dippy", while in many ways appropriate, seemed demeaning. Since the Lord of the Rings movies were out at the time, we renamed her Pippy, a play on Pippin Took. Like her namesake, Pip Cat is too mischievous and curious for her own good, but she's a good soul.

Clancy is a dog character in a James Herriot novel and Riff Raff is not only for the infamous Rocky Horror's Riff Raff but in honor of my grandma who called any guy with long hair "riff raff" :D

Bailey... I made a long list of names that I thought were nice and I had my mom pick one.

Pippi is the name they gave her at the shelter. Her real name is Ginger.

The Large Area Crop Inventory Experiment.

Stinky (because of his bad breath when we rescued him. Not stinky anymore, after visit to Vet).

Moon - A basset hound named for his penchant for howling at the moon.

Pretty Boy - Large fat MALE Calico cat.

because the friend whose yard she was wandering around in had a new grandchild named Sophie.
Smokie--see picture...its apparant why...

one of the greatest theologians of the Islamic faith. We got him from a very good frienof my wife's who converted to Islam after being raised in the Catholic faith. We call him "Boo".

Blue and Gold Macaw: Captain "because I outrank you"

Congo African Grey: Louie, she's a giveme and she came with the name.

Two cockatiels: Spaz because he's basically nuts and Vern, another giveme, but the name suits him perfectly - not the brightest bulb in the chandelier.

Parakeet: The Keet Who Must Be Obeyed.

Their mother was a neighborhood stray that I fed daily. I found the little male ball of fur snuggled against my doorstep one morning. I named him Rascal. His sister strayed from the group and got into my yard a short time later. I grabbed her and named her Puddin'.

Lewis because he was the intrepid explorer, first out of the box, first to do everything

CatZilla because he was this really HUGE kitten, although he is not the largest of the mature cats


and Clark, because since we had Lewis, we had to have Clark.

I adopted the second one from the pound the night he beat Joe Lieberman in the Democratic primary. I call him Monty but his real name is Ned Lamont. It seemed appropriate! Sophie's name happened because she reminded me of someone I once knew.

Claudia is our cat. She is named after Anne Rice's little vampire child. When we first got her, she would meow at the back door every night to be let out. She would hunt all night, and come back about 7:00 a.m. to sleep most of the day. She had a litter of kittens, and we had her spayed. Then, she started staying in all the time. She has not ventured out of doors in years. (She is eleven).

Also, she bit terribly when we first got her. It is no wonder that someone left her in a box in our neighbor's yard! She was probably not properly socialized as a kitten. We have broken her of most of the biting. She still bites sometimes, though.

Our dog is Kinsey. We got her after our beloved Emily the Lab died at thirteen-and-a-half. Kinsey is a Lab/Dobie mix, about 65 pounds, and she is two years old. She looks like a small Dobie whose ears and tail have not been cropped. She has funny little gold eyebrows that move around when she is thinking. She is intelligent, inquisitive, friendly and funny. She is always busy doing something. I think that is the Lab in her. Kinsey is named after my favorite fictional detective, Kinsey Millhone.

I will look around for some pictures to post later.

Just because the pattern on the side of him formed the shape of a gun target (or Target the store if you like), plus in my younger days my dad got PO'ed enough at the cats doing their toilet business right in his newly planted flowers that he was driven to scaring them off with his air pistol. So I thought this name would be appropriate for this cat.

Target ran away, never to return.

Mark.

Named by my son. Blackie - is black.
Patches - is a smoky grey/black tortoiseshell type patterned cat.

Sorry no pics yet.

Mark.

Tom: A stray who adopted my husband years before we met; "Tom" just seems to fit him, he is the epitome of cat! Known as "Boogie". A gorgeous, burnished orange (with white bib and paws) tabby.

Ivan: Blew into our lives right after Hurricane Ivan; he was very ill, but nothing that antibiotics wouldn't fix. Monstrous tuxedo cat, with a head the size of a softball. "Ivey" on occasion.

Clarisse: I adopted her from a no-kill shelter in NYC - the guy who ran the place rescued street cats in Brooklyn and would bring them to Union Square every weekend for adoption. I had to pass an "apartment test" (no unscreened windows) and swear to be a good momma. Clarisse was her given name, and it suits her. Mostly white calico. Nickname: Psychobitch.

Novi: Brought us her three girl babies; during the time she and her girls arrived my husband and I were listening to Isaac Asimov read his Foundation trilogy and Novi is one of the female characters. She's known more as MommaKitty, though.

Marilyn: One of the girls. They're all named after movie stars (in her case, Monroe); but she's long-haired, creamy-orange-blonde, and shimmies over the heating and cooling vents. Pure Marilyn. Aka Bimbo.

Hedy: Second girl from MommaKitty, named after Hedy Lamarr. A very intense, soulful cat, but is known more as SilverGirl.

Ingrid: After Bergman. Ingrid is a thinker, and can be a bit aloof (maybe Greta would have fit better). But she's the spitting image of Tom, only a bit smaller, so she's known as MiniMe.


edited for punctuation.

Dogs:

Madison- already named when she came to us.
Watson- Because she likes the name
Sunshine Daisy Lane (Daisy)- She was falling over her ears and it came to me.

Cats:

Wednesday- Wednesday Adams
Truman- Truman Capote
Tucker- Kathrine Tucker Windham
Butler- Judith Butler
Pratt- Minnie Bruce Pratt

My wife was pregnant and had a miscarriage. The child's name, if a boy, was going to be Gabriel. So we got a great cat to cheer us up and name him after the lost child.

About a year later, our wonderful daughter Tabitha was born.