Create a Strong Meaning To Your Dog’s Name
The most important tip of all is to choose a name with a strong meaning. What do you do with a name if it means little to your dog?
Dogs are not born knowing their names, and their names are neutral stimuli. It is totally up to you to give a name a very strong meaning.
You can easily accomplish this by creating a strong conditioning history. You may find the need to occasionally tweak and maintain conditioning training throughout your dogs life to keep it strong.
Dogs live through associations. To train a strong response to a name, they will need to learn to pair it with pleasant associations. The process of making the name meaningful is like the process of charging a battery.
There are some things you can do to charge it to make it more potent, and things you can do to weaken its power.
Keep Your Dog’s Name Short and Simple
Have you ever been to a dog show and glanced at the list of names only to wonder, “Why in the world are such names so long?” Well, breeders and seasoned exhibitors are very familiar with long and fancy names.
The American Kennel Club allows registration of names up to a maximum of 36 characters long, but if owners need more (for a $10 fee), they are authorized to use up to 50!
It turns out there are actually many good reasons for these long names. The names of dogs exhibited in shows need to stick out from the crowd and leave a strong impression.
Many of these dogs come from prestigious bloodlines, and their owners and exhibitors are very proud of them.
It would feel somewhat degrading for their prestigious pooch to carry a common name such as “Rover” or “Missy!”
Show dogs are given names that may sound peculiar, but thats because the names incorporate clues of the dogs ancestry and kennel of origin. On top of that, titles are often mixed into the names to further complicate things.
For example, the 2017 AKC championship winner was a Cocker Spaniel by the name of “GCHP CH Silverhall Strike Force.”
In this case, the GCHP stands for “Grand Champion Platinum,” while CH stands for “champion.” The name “Silverhall,” is there to remind the audience that this handsome stud comes from a kennel known as “Silverhall Cocker Spaniels.”
As one may imagine, if the owners were to call a prestigious show dog by its official name, they would be long gone by the time the owner finishes saying it!
So, what do owners of show dogs do? Easy, they give them what is known as a “call name,” or a working name.
The owners of “GCHP CH Silverhall Strike Force,” for example, would simply call him “Striker.”
If you want a dog who easily and promptly responds to its name, keep it simple and short. The name should be no longer than two syllables.
This allows you to pronounce it quickly should you need to get your dogs immediate attention. A short name, therefore, works great for working dogs or those enrolled in sporting events.
While short names work best, two-syllable names may actually work better than one if your dog is distracted.
This first syllable alerts them, while the second one gets them running. If they are distracted or miss the first part, they receive confirmation when they hear the second.
Your dog may not readily come when called if his name is “Kai,” especially in noisy or windy conditions, but you may have more luck if you follow up “Kai” with “ser,” which, by the way, is my male Rottweilers name. Kaiser!
A name should grab your dogs attention. Make sure you choose an identifiable name that stands out from conversation and common sounds.
You may have found a name that is appealing to you, but have you considered what your dog thinks of it? Were not talking about whether he likes it or not. Were talking about how he perceives it.
They may be attracted to certain names more than others because of the way it sounds to their ears.
Consider this: Dogs appear to respond better to names with sharp-sounding consonants. Examples of some sharp-sounding consonants include the letters P, K, and D.
Lets go into some specifics. According to Certified Applied Animal Behaviorist Patricia McConnell, the reason why dogs seem to respond best to these consonants is that they tend to produce a more “broadband” sound (similar to the noise emitted by a clicker) compared to others.
These sounds, therefore, create more energy and are more likely to act as attention grabbers.
For those folks interested in the neuroscience behind this, these strong consonants work particularly well because they tend to stimulate the dogs acoustic receptor neurons in the brain (compared to softer sounds produced by vowels or soft consonants).
Now you have a reasonable explanation as to why so many working border collies are called “Hope!”
Method 2: Weaken the Name Association
If your dogs name is too close to a verbal cue, but your dog doesnt respond to his name very well and hes already fluent in responding to the verbal cue in question, you can change the name and create a very strong conditioning history.
Make your dogs name stand out. Well, this is a bit of an exaggeration . . . but you get the idea . . .