What We Mean When We Name Them

For three days, the kitten had no name. She had a cardboard carrier, a vet appointment, and a litter box set up in the bathroom. But no name. We kept calling her “the kitten” or “the little one” or sometimes just, ”Hey, you!\” We attempted a dozen names. Nothing fit.

I have seen this happen before, with friends, neighbors, and even my dog. We think naming will be easy and even fun. Then the animal gets to the house and suddenly every name we thought of feels wrong, be it too cute, too serious, too human, or not human enough. We get stuck with a decision that, to be fair, doesn’t really matter that much. The animal literally could not care less. But for some reason, we do.

There is something about naming that makes the relationship feel even more real than just signing the adoption papers. A name turns “a cat” into “my cat.” This is our first act of creativity for caring for this animal. Our first time putting something of ourselves onto this animal. It could be a cat that shares our home for the next decade or more. It matters to us to get it right, no matter what ‘right’ means.

Some people come up with pet names for their new pets while still en route to the car. They say they prefer that approach because they find waiting for the name to come to them to be frustrating. The rest of us go through a phenomenon that is a bit like an audition. We are careful to see how the animal is acting (bold, shy and cautious, or completely unpredictable like a two day old kitten) and how these names would fit them. To us, the names are important and we spend a lot of time assessing and thinking up the best name. Mabel? Zeus? Fit the bill?

Naming pets can be highly personal and individualistic. People name their pets Tom, Jim, or some names that do not exist in their head, like, but do exceed the realm of logic, ie, naming a cat Potato. Those names come from inside jokes and haphazard decisions that make sense to the person and not to the world, or people around them.

Remembering that time before finally settling on a name becomes very difficult, strangely enough. The time before name, where the pet essentially did not exist becomes hard to believe. These names fit the animal like a glove, and the only perplexing aspect comes down to why they were not thought of sooner.

With our kitten, the name that stuck was a bit of an enigma to us. It indeed came from nowhere. It was just an offhand comment by my husband while the kitten was playing with a string. Just like that, the name had to just be Iris. There was no need for us to put thought into it.

The way we name other species is the first of a million miniature translations we will be doing. Other species do not need names to understand the world. We need names to help anchor our explanations, to tell other people what we mean. For instance, if we want to justify waking up to check on a creature we have no connection with, we would want to say “Iris” rather than “the cat” or “the creature.”

Iris is about a month old, and we have been calling her that for two months. Iris comes to people about fifty percent of the time, which I consider good for a cat. The name has become ordinary, and I remember that name has now lost any meaning to the sound. But for some reason, I remember those first three days…the quiet weight of the decision, the odd feeling of not knowing what to call her yet.

What we named her was the first thing we gave her that was completely ours to give.