Animal-inspired pet names: naming a pet after another animal

There's a particular joke in calling a dog Bear or a cat Fox, and it's old enough to be a genre of its own.

These are names that are another creature outright — the word is the animal, which makes the tag as checkable as a food name and its own thing to search for.

The word is the creature

A name lands here when it plainly is an animal rather than merely evoking one.

That's a fact anyone can verify — Bear is a bear, Robin is a bird — which is why the tag exists at all: it's one of the few themes that needs no judgement to apply. The list is short because the test is strict.

Most of these run short and blunt, one or two syllables, which is exactly the shape that carries outdoors. That's coincidence rather than design — animal words in English simply tend to be brief.

It isn't entirely a coincidence, though, once you think about why. The animals with the shortest names are the ones people have talked about longest and most often — the ones that were hunted, farmed, feared or lived alongside — and words used constantly get worn down to one syllable. So the theme delivers well-shaped names because the vocabulary was worn into that shape by use.

Why the joke works

The appeal is real and worth pulling apart, because it explains which names in this theme land and which don't.

The best of them are a mismatch. A tiny dog called Bear, a fat placid cat called Tiger — the gap between the word and the animal carrying it is the whole joke, and it's a joke that keeps working because the gap never closes. Nobody has to be told; it's visible.

The second kind is a match, which is quieter and ages differently. A sleek red cat called Fox is a description rather than a joke, and it works immediately and stops being interesting rather faster. It also runs the usual risk of descriptive names, which is that the description can stop being true.

And the third is affection borrowed from the creature — naming an animal after something you find lovely, which needs no cleverness at all and is probably the commonest motive of the three.

There's a fourth that gets less attention and produces some of the best results: a name chosen for how the animal moves. A cat that pours off a shelf and a dog that bounces are each doing something that another creature does better, and a name taken from that is a description nobody else would have arrived at.

What rarely works is a name that needs the joke explained. If the humour depends on knowing something about the species that most people don't, you'll be telling the story for fifteen years, and the story gets shorter every time.

Where to look beyond the obvious

The tag holds the animals everybody thinks of, and the animal kingdom is rather larger than that.

Birds are the deepest seam and the least used. There are hundreds of short bird names in English, nearly all of them one or two beats, many of them lovely words in their own right, and a tiny fraction have ever been used on a pet.

Small and unglamorous mammals are the next. The large famous ones are taken; the rest is wide open, and small ordinary creatures make disarming names precisely because nobody expects them.

Insects, fish and sea creatures are almost entirely unexplored, and full of short punchy words that read as names without any adjustment.

Animal words in other languages are the widest option of all. A word that means bear or wolf or hawk somewhere else arrives with the meaning intact and none of the company, and it's usually easier to say than the English original.

Baby-animal and group words — the collective nouns, the words for the young — are a small strange seam that produces some of the best names in the theme, and they're generally two beats and warm.

Which animals people actually reach for

Read the list and the choices sort into a small number of recognisable motives, which is more useful than the ranking.

Size words lead — the large impressive animals, given mostly to dogs and mostly with some irony. Predators are next, and they behave the same way: a word that sounds formidable attached to something that isn't.

Then the small charming creatures, which go disproportionately to cats and to small dogs and are chosen straight rather than as a joke. And then the birds, which are the one group that reads as gentle and pretty rather than as either grand or funny — which is presumably why bird names sit so easily on cats.

What's almost absent is anything unappealing. Nobody names an animal after a creature they find ugly or unpleasant, which narrows the theme far more than the number of species does — and which is exactly why the unglamorous end of the animal kingdom is such an open seam for anybody willing to be contrary.

The one to avoid, and the pair problem

Two practical notes before choosing.

Be careful naming a dog after a cat or a cat after a dog if there's another animal in the house. It sounds like a small thing and it produces a household where nobody can say a sentence about either animal without clarifying, and the confusion lands hardest on the animals themselves.

The same applies more generally to naming two pets from this theme. Animal names tend to be short with hard consonants, which means two of them can easily share a stressed vowel — and two names that rhyme mean both animals look up whenever either is called. The theme is large enough to avoid it easily; it just takes noticing.

The other check is the standard one. A short blunt animal word is exactly the shape of a training cue, so say each candidate straight after sit, stay, down and no before committing. Several of the best names in this theme fail that test and it's much easier to find out now.

What it will not tell you

Whether the creature's reputation transfers to your pet.

A dog called Bear isn't braver for it, and a cat called Fox isn't slyer; the tag records what the word is, not a temperament borrowed from the animal it names. The registers count what pets are called and stop there.

It also can't show you the full theme. Every name carries a single style label, so an animal word that's also a colour, a place or a person's name will have been filed under that instead — which is why several obvious candidates are missing from the list above and why the tag should be read as a sample rather than an inventory.