The Naming of Cats... and Dogs... and Lizards... And...

 I'm currently reading Our Dogs, Ourselves by Alexandra Horowitz, and just finished up the chapter devoted to the naming of dogs.  I really enjoyed reading it; I love naming pets... children... cars... houses... if it can have a moniker, I want to give it one.  (At this writing, my car's name is Flora.)  

Disney

And that got me thinking about all the names of all the pets who have shared my life so far, in my 50+ years on this spinning planet.  Each one has a story.  Each one has an image implanted in my memory, even if, in some cases, it's a bit faded with age.

Mopey and Dopey were my first pets - a pair of goldfish, fantails, who lived in a glass bowl.  It was not suitable habitat for these fish, I now know... but I remember them fondly,
orange and black, wiggling about in the water.  I have no memory at all of their demise.  They were named not by me or my then-toddling sister, I think, but by my mother.

After that point, all the other living creatures who passed through our home have, in some small cooperative part at least, been named by me.  Those animals who lived with me as an adult, of course, were mine to name from the first.  

Riley and my son Daniel on Halloween

I'm ashamed to say that I don't remember all the names of all my pets.  The gerbils, who I bred and raised for show as well as for pets, were rather too numerous to remember - at my peak, I had about 30 - though do I have the pedigrees somewhere, and my first show gerbil, Mask (or more formally, Autumnglory Storybook Masquerade) is lovingly remembered as my favorite.  The fish were arguably more decoration than companions, and I had a long string of Bettas as an adult (all cared for with properly filtered and heated tanks, thank you) whose names are lost to me... at the moment, we have one goldfish, Wiscash, who stubbornly refuses to die, and a pleco named Feebas.  And some pets, sadly, have become just nameless snapshots of memory... I distinctly recall having more than two parakeets, but I cannot recall more than two names.

Some pets stayed for a relatively short time (I'm thinking of Pirate, the Miniature American Shepherd who was just too much dog for our moderately-active family to manage and returned to his breeder to be instantly rehomed, and the Rankin's bearded dragons Steve and Irwin, who started out as classroom pets, had all the personality of a pair of sticks, and were passed along to a more appreciative reptile collector).  Others stayed for many, many years (my first cat, Lollypop, lived to be a grand, if frail, old lady, as did our first family dog, Kris).  But each of them had a distinct name, however long they were with me, and they remain with me in memory.

Here is a list of my pets' names, insofar as I remember them.

Unknown goldfish and my son Daniel

FISH: Mopey, Dopey, Spike, Spike II, Spike III, Wiscash, Feebas

BIRDS: Parakeets Blue Sky and Pegasus

CATS: Lollypop, Tiggy, Ian, Fox, Alex, Loki, Opie, Disney, Willow, Autumn, Skimble

DOGS: Kris, Sebastian, Cricket, Quentin, Riley, Wilson, Nevin, Pirate, Ariel

RABBITS: Kilroy

GERBILS: Too many to name.  Mask was the first, and the favorite.

RATS: Mithril the Silver, Trickster, Pippin, Aspen, Merlin Peeps, Scout and her 9 babies, Eeka Rat, BooBoo Rattie

REPTILES:  Steve & Irwin (Rankins Bearded Dragons), Higgins (Russian Tortoise), Jarvis (Leopard Gecko), Figment (Bearded Dragon)