How to Empower vs. Weaken Your Dog’s Name
| Empower Your Dogs Name | Weaken Your Dogs Name |
|---|---|
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Use your dogs name only when needed, turning it salient |
Repeatedly pronounce your dogs name over and over, making it redundant |
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Always follow your dogs name with pleasant happenings (toys, food, play, walks) |
Use your dogs name for negative happenings (scolding your dog, giving him a bath if he dreads baths, etc.) |
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Use your dogs name when something positively meaningful is about to happen immediately afterward |
Use your dogs name often with nothing positive or meaningful happening immediately afterward |
The first Seeing Eye dog was a German shepherd named Kiss. When Morris Frank, a 19-year-old college student, was matched with her, he changed her name to Buddy. Morris Frank would title his memoir The First Lady of The Seeing Eye in tribute to Buddy, and he would name every Seeing Eye dog he subsequently worked with after her. After Morris Franks death in 1980, The Seeing Eye retired the name Buddy in her honor.
As the oldest guide dog training school in the world, we name around 500 puppies every year — thats about 42 dogs per month! That’s a lot of name-storming! So we’ve developed a method to make our naming process a little easier and more uniform.
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Fresh Off The Birth Certificate! Here Are a Few of the Puppy Names Currently in Use at The Seeing Eye: Ace Flower Kayla Parker Uma April Fred Kirk Primrose Unity Beacon Galaxy Lady Quella Valentine Bernie Gilly Logan Quinn Vincent Champ Hagrid Mandy Ripley Wallace Cooper Hermione Monet Ryder Winnie Daphne Ian Nacho Sage Xander Domino Indy Nitro Storm Xena Eddie Jackson Olive Theo Yvette Enya Jiminy Otis Trevor Zen
We name our puppies at 2 weeks of age. The Seeing Eye Puppy Development Manager has the honor of generating and bestowing the names. All the puppies in a litter are given a name that starts with the same letter. The litters are named alphabetically. We begin with A on October 1st, the beginning of our fiscal year. Then each puppy in the next litter gets a name that begins with B, and all the way through to the “Z” litter, when we start over again.
JoAnn Vela, the owner of Canine Cuties Dog Grooming, in Chicago Ridge, Ill., has four dogs: Moose, Bleu, Tyson and Coach. Moose, she explained, because their English mastiff was such a galumphing klutz. Bleu, because her daughter thought the dog looked so sad. Tyson, because her husband wanted the German shepherd to have a tough name. And Coach, because when her daughter gazed longingly at the Shetland sheepdog in a pet shop window, the dog gazed back longingly at her Coach purse.
Laura Waddell, a dog trainer and animal behaviorist in New Jersey, works with a bred-in-captivity wolf named Tacoma, and she named her own golden retriever-spitz mix Loki. “They can distinguish frequency ranges that we cannot, particularly dogs with pricked ears, which work almost like parabolic microphones,” she said. “The hard consonant is a relatively sharp sound that the dog can respond to quickly. I think sibilant sounds are more muddled for them.”
The Monks of New Skete, a monastic community in upstate New York, breed German shepherds and are renowned for their dog training books. In a 2012 newsletter, Brother Christopher Savage explained their objection to human names. “Sometimes, without realizing it, owners who give their dogs human names are more likely to fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing their pets,” he wrote. “In our experience, that is a formula that invites big problems.”
But don’t go in for anything trendy or overly witty. Pick something enduring, that you and the dog can live with, one hopes, for a decade or more. Mr. Deeley, who has been working with dogs and their owners for nearly 40 years, laments the fact that this generation of parents tends to allow the children to name the dog. Thus the perpetuation of names inspired by Saturday-morning cartoon characters. Or a certain yellow Labrador of his acquaintance, whose family allowed their 6-year-old to saddle with the moniker Freckles.
“What does a name mean to a dog?” he continued. “ ‘Hey, look at me?’ ‘Follow me?’ ‘I love you?’ ‘You’re in trouble?’ Or ‘I’m lonely and I missed you?’ Dogs read body language and how you smell to them. It’s about your voice and your energy, not whatever you call him. You can make contact with a deaf animal.”
Top 100 Unique MALE Dog Names– Unusual Male Dog Names
You got yourself a dog and now it’s time to choose a nice name for your new friend. But what if you choose the wrong name? Name that doesn’t fit your dog? Or a name your dog will not like? Don’t worry, there is a solution. I am a dog owner for almost two decades, named dozens of dogs myself, and over the years I came up with a list of rules new dog owners should follow when choosing their dogs’ names. If you follow those simple 10 tips naming your dog will be easy and fun.