Subject: The Art of Naming a Dog - NYTimes.com
From: "Eric Schwerin" <[email-masked]>
To: "Hunter Biden" <[email-masked]>, "Kathleen Biden" <[email-masked]>, <[email-masked]>, "Rob Walker" <[email-masked]>, "Joan Peugh" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 4 Apr 2013 14:22:39 -0400

Eric D. Schwerin
Rosemont Seneca Partners, LLC
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/04/garden/the-art-of-naming-a-dog.html?src=dayp&_r=2&&pagewanted=print

You Named Me Brutus? Really?

What to name the new puppy?

For our family, choosing a name was neither simple nor swift. After all, it had taken my daughters a decade of whining and deliberating over breeds that wouldn’t aggravate the allergy-stricken (me), just to get to the point of agreeing to get a Havanese.

And because I am the family research queen, I found a way to make the process even more complicated. A little research elicited a lot of information.

I found lists of the most common dog names. A Web site with thousands of names, sorted into categories like “cool,” “cute” and “unusual.” And countless dos and don’ts from self-anointed dog-naming experts.

It was an art. A science. Serendipity. Intuition.

There were phonetics rules. And rules that ignored phonetics, instead placing a premium on achieving family harmony. And, of course, there was a simmering debate: Whose needs should the name serve, yours or the dog’s?

One of the most consistent pieces of advice I found was to stick to names of one or two syllables, which quickly catch a puppy’s attention.

People seem to drift in that direction anyway. At a recent puppy training class, I met Gracie, Nigel, Sasha and a schnauzer mix whose name was the perfect marriage of 21st-century preoccupations and ür-dogginess: Browser.

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.

The four-syllable Gentleman Jack, of Cedar Grove, N.J., defies this rule. When Lauren Meyer, a stay-at-home mother who owns a Labradoodle, first saw a picture of him, she wanted to call him Jack, because she thought he looked like a frisky rogue. But her son insisted on a name with a little more class. At the time, he was a student at the University of Virginia, whose guiding spirit is the gentleman-scholar Thomas Jefferson. Also, the dog is whiskey-colored, and Gentleman Jack, it should be noted, is a brand of Jack Daniel’s whiskey.

On occasion, the name expands to six syllables. “When he’s bad,” Mrs. Meyer said, “we call him Gentleman Jack Meyer.”

Another piece of advice: To help the puppy distinguish its name from ambient noise, choose something with a sibilant consonant or blend (an “s,” “sh” or “zh”) or, better still, a crisp, commanding consonant (a “k” or hard “c”).

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.”

Mrs. Vela recalled grooming a beagle named Tank. Some customers apparently don’t look under the hood, so to speak. After the session, she informed the dog’s owners that Tank was a Tinker (as in Tinkerbelle). Acceptance was hard.

“The husband and wife still each call the dog by a different name,” Mrs. Vela said.

But at least they abide by the rule.

SOME EXPERTS ALSO ADVISE picking a name that ends in a long vowel or a short “a.”

“Simba?” I asked my daughters. “Lobo? I know, let’s call the puppy Orca!”

“Jovi,” they snickered, after Jon Bon.

Martin Deeley, a Florida trainer and executive director of the International Association of Canine Professionals, said he prefers names that end in a long “e,” like Benny or Dolly. “I think it gives a nickname a loving touch,” he said. “Sweet becomes Sweetie.”

He also recommended making sure the name could not be confused with a command. That eliminated names like Kit, which sounds too much like “sit,” and Beau, which sounds like “no” (the Obamas obviously ignored this rule in naming their dog Bo).

Another caution: Try to avoid the most popular names. Consider the canine traffic jam that could ensue at the dog park when a pack of owners starts calling their Maxes and Busters.

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.

As Alexandra Horowitz, who teaches animal behavior and psychology at Barnard College, said: “There’s a dog in my neighborhood named Harbinger. It’s clever, but they weren’t planning practically.”

Still, Dr. Horowitz, who wrote “On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes,” a new book that examines city streets from the perspective of both dog and human, is a rule-breaker herself.

“I like names that I’m willing to say repeatedly,” she said, “because you find yourself often conversing with your dog.” Her dogs have had names like Pumpernickel, Finnegan and Upton.

AND FINALLY, the admonition that will set off the most howls: Avoid human names.

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.”

“What about Sheldon?” asked my 14-year-old, ignoring the monks’ advice. “He’s my favorite character on ‘The Big Bang Theory.’ ”

“No!” my husband and I barked.

This may be the most difficult rule to follow. As Mrs. Vela said: “Especially older people and people without kids. They are upfront: ‘These are my children.’ I groom a lot of Bobbies, Stellas and Joeys.”

Dr. Horowitz takes issue with the monks’ rule as well. “Human names are fine,” she said. “I don’t think a dog cares if it’s named for us. It’s more that we’re finding a way to give the dog an identity, to draw a place for it in our lives.”

Mr. Deeley agreed: “I think the name is overplayed in training. I want dogs to concentrate on the command instead.”

“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.”

Mary Cody can attest to that. Ms. Cody, the founder of Aunt Mary’s Doghouse, a volunteer rescue and adoption program in Hope, N.J., named her deaf Australian shepherd Dumia, the Hebrew word for silent, and the dog follows her everywhere.

She has named hundreds of dogs, and said she tries to make sure each name speaks to the particular dog. “I’ll try a name and sometimes it’s a dud,” Ms. Cody said. “When I call ‘Nick!’ he’s like, ‘Yeah, what?’ ” she said, referring to an Akita mix. “But when I call him Louie the Lip, he comes running.”

BY NOW we were armed with almost too much information. So we decided to focus on the puppy himself.

The Havanese originally flourished in Havana, and it is often described as a big dog in the body of a little one. When we finally met ours, he was not quite four pounds, but friendly, playful, curious, indefatigable. He had a comically endearing personality.        

Such a funny little guy, we thought. And that’s how his name came to us. O.K., so it’s a human name — that of a comedian, a Marx brother.

It’s also a Spanish word that, used affectionately, can mean “little guy.” It satisfied my compulsive research requirements, with a hard, crisp sound and a final long vowel.

And when we call him — “Chico!” — he cocks his head quizzically and then races over. Sometimes we don’t even have to use his name.