Yeah, sorry about that.
It’s been not much more than work, eat, sleep, work, eat, sleep on my part. As for Andrew, the only reason I know that he’s been eating is that he’s been cooking and if he hadn’t been cooking then *I* wouldn’t be eating so he must be. Other than that he’s been spending a LOT of time in his man cave pointing, highlighting, moving, pointing, highlighting, moving….. Now that the holiday catalogue is done, printed, and sent out he’s building online stores and websites in between arguing hotly with the new mail order software that FP is bringing online.

So a few random neural firings before I go outside to (hopefully) finish the fall garden cleanup.

I’ve run across a couple of patient names in the past couple of weeks that I just love. Both cats. One named “Squonk” and another named “Crash”. See, I’m firmly of the opinion that cats especially need to have names that reflect their personalities. It took us weeks to come up with Scamper and Scrum and we bounced all sorts of names off of them before their true names really showed up. Baird was onomatopoeic. Flit and Pogo were easier, but they’re both so much more extroverted than Scamp and Scrum ever were that their names were much more apparent.
I can put together a picture in my mind of how Crash got his name. Squonk is a little more difficult to picture as a stranger just interacting with him from the outside, but…. Well, the name fits Squonk perfectly. He is just simply a Squonk.
So many times the name comes before the pet — I used to see a pair of (very) fat dachshunds named *shudder* Angelica Joy and Montgomery Fitzwilliam. Granted we had a Johann Sebastian Barch which was a name that my dad had wanted to use on a dog for years. Weirdly, as those of you who knew him will remember, Barch was a remarkably apt and descriptive name for that dog. I’ve never known one who was louder.
Or the pet is named based on an aspect of its life “Precious” or “Lucky”. By the way, in the veterinary community it is well known that pets named “Precious”, “Sugar” and the like are all bloodthirsty land sharks while those named “Lucky” are invariably NOT. I knew a Lucky that, during the time I knew him, had been abandoned on a logging road, hit by a train, had to have a leg amputated (not because of the train accident by the way), and had eaten three poisoned rats. Naming your pet “Lucky” is a great way to invite chaos and destruction into your home — or at least your pet’s life.
Pets are named for celebrities or popular movie characters all the time. That’s a cop out so far as I’m concerned. We saw waves of pets named Nemo, about every third Shih-Tzu I see is STILL named Gizmo. I neutered Steven Segal, I neutered Ken Griffey and most recently I neutered Barack Obama (although his owners are calling him “Rocky” now since Barack Obama is rather a hard name to say in casual conversation with your pet). I’ve got a friend who spayed Paris Hilton. These are invariably interesting pet/name pairings. Steven Segal, for instance, was a standard Poodle and Barack Obama is a Yorkshire Terrier. But the name never really speaks to the person or the personality of the pet. The last Nemo I dealt with was an inveterate little ankle biter, and the grey cat named Gollum that I used to see was the sweetest thing on four legs.
People try to be clever naming their pets. We see an awful lot of dogs named Deohgee (D.O.G.) though I have yet to meet a cat named Ceeaytee. There are a lot of “O.C.” (Orange Cat), a lot of black cats named “Midnight” or “Spook/Spooky”, and I can’t count the number of chocolate Labs we see named “Hershey” or “Cocoa”. A word of advice. If you’re trying to be clever in naming your pet….work harder. The ones that you’re going to come up with first have already been used. Although to give credit where credit is due, I did have a client who named her cats “Charlie” and “(Bad, Bad) Leroy”. You can guess her last name.
The first time I ran across transsexual names for pets was a pair of Doberman Pincher sisters that were in at WSU to be spayed when I was a senior on my anesthesia rotation. They were named “Fred” and “Floyd”. To this day I’m sorry that I didn’t ask why they were named what they were named. I had a guy with a (very) male cat named “Daisy”, and there was one dude who brought in this incredibly obvious tomcat (big jowls, thick skin, beefy shoulders and *very* prominent testicles) named “Dolly”. When I pointed out that “Dolly” was a male he said that (and I quote) he’d “noticed the balls but since I didn’t see a penis I just figured she had to be female!”. He continued to call the cat Dolly even after he realized that Dolly was a boy, but what’s weirder is that the owner continued to refer to the cat as “she” for the rest of his life.
The weirdest ones for me to understand, that is to say, for me to TRY and understand, I’ve not figured this out at ALL, are the people who continue to name subsequent pets the same name. There was a sweet little old lady I used to see who had been through three dogs named “Baby” (the last being a balding and completely hyperactive Keeshond) and a disturbingly weird little old man who was on his fourth “King” by the time I knew him. In both of these cases the subsequent dogs were totally different than the previous ones of that name. The third “King” was a fat, blonde Cocker Spaniel, the fourth was a pushy and poorly mannered black Lab cross.

Anyway it’s stopped raining so I’ll stop ranting about pet names and go out and do something more useful….. Once I get Pogo off of my lap.