Look at the top of the B list and notice what it is made of. Blue. Bear. Buster. Brownie. Bentley. Colours, animals, insults and a car — barely a given name among them. B is where owners stop naming their pet after a person and start naming it after a thing.
Which is why it reads male
366 measure male against 208 female, one of the widest gaps of any letter. Thing-nouns in English are read as male by default when they are attached to an animal, and B is full of them. 203 classify strong-sounding, more than any other initial produces.
A hard start does specific work
A plosive at the front of a name is the part that survives a noisy room. 208 of these are a single syllable, and a one-beat name starting with a stop consonant is about as audible as a called name gets. That is not a claim about obedience, which these registers cannot measure. It is a claim about sound.
And then the diminutives
Against all that, 174 of the letter ends in -y or -ie — Benji, Buddy, Brownie, Bailey. B holds the catalogue's blunt end and its fondest ending at the same time, which is a fair description of how people talk to dogs.
What are popular pet names starting with B?
Blue, Bear, Benji, Bentley and Bella lead the list above by registration count. The ordering comes from the live catalogue and shifts when a register is recounted.
Are B names mostly for male pets?
In these registers, yes: 366 male against 208 female. Much of the letter is thing-nouns rather than given names, and those get read as male.
Why do B names sound strong?
203 of them classify strong-sounding, the most of any initial. A plosive at the start of a word is the part that carries, and B is a plosive.
Every count on this site is a tally of real registrations: pet licences and shelter intakes published as open data by New York, Seattle, Austin, Montgomery County, Cambridge, Zurich, Basel and four Australian councils. Popularity here is the average share a name holds across those registers, so a name common in a small city is not buried by one common in a large one. Five of the eleven registers are North American and they supply 86% of the records, so read the ordering as naming in those places rather than worldwide. Browse the whole catalogue or read how the data is put together.