Gender Names for Pets
There was a time when I had trouble with the gender of my pets. People often wondered why we had chosen the particular names my pets had. Every instance has a perfectly logical explanation. It was the quantity of the misnomers, I think, rather than just one little misnaming. Let me explain.
First, I worked with a friend of the family, named Tom, oddly enough, who had a farm cat that, as farm cats often do, had produced a litter of kittens. The hobby farm now had more felines than mice, so he was giving the litter away. He offered me one, and after consultation with my other half, and in spite of the fact that we had a slightly deranged golden retriever, we decided to adopt one of the kittens. We told Tom that we wanted a tom cat, however, as getting a tom fixed—or broken, as the case may be—was generally less expensive than breaking a female cat.
Tom brought this little ginger cat to work one day. I don’t think he was old enough to leave his mother, or if he was the constant attention of my two young sons was more than the kitten could manage, and he immediately came down with some sort of malady for which the vet prescribed amoxicillin. Anyone who has had a child with a bacterial infection knows about the thick, pink stuff called amoxicillin. And it looks the same for a pet.
Now, when cats don’t like the taste of something, they had a curious reaction. They appear to foam at the mouth and smack their lips together, trying to rid their taste buds of the foul substance. With amoxicillin, then, our kitten foamed pink, which drooled to the floorboards. He tried to wash himself, which moistened his head. Alex, the deranged golden retriever, decided to lend a hand and lick the cat about the head until he was soaked. Alex was happy to provide this service even when the kitten was not drooling pink foam.
This all took place in the 80s, at the height of Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom County comic strip. One of the most memorable characters that inhabited Bloom County was Bill the Cat, who was dead, and looked every bit of it. We got a good look at our new kitten after an amoxicillin dose, with his sodden head, pink, foamy drool and overall less-than-vigorous appearance and decided ‘Bill’ would be the perfect name for him.
Bill recovered from his infection, survived Alex’s moist attentions, and grew into a healthy moggy. A couple months after his recovery, he was having a nap on the sofa, relaxing belly-up, as only contented dogs and cats can do. The family was having soft drinks on the front porch, and I was returning from the kitchen where I had secured refills for everyone. I looked fondly at our contented cat, snoozing away in blissful surrender, when something caught my eye…or failed to catch my eye, really. I delivered the drinks and returned to our slumbering puss for a closer look. Yes, it did appear that our tom, Bill the Cat, seemed to be missing a couple of vital body parts, requisite in all healthy males. Bill had no balls. ‘Larry,’ I called to my husband, ‘this cat seems to be missing a couple testicles.’ Larry wandered into the living room, certain that as a woman, I probably didn’t appreciate that not all gonads were large and obvious. But once he got a good look, he had to agree that our tomcat was definitely a tomasina cat.
There was the problem now with the name. Larry suggested that we had to change her name. But she had already learned to come running to the name she had, we were used to it, and I rather liked it. So she remained ‘Bill.’ We decided her real name was Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, and she was travelling incognito. Then the boys asked, ‘Are we going to let her have kittens?’ ‘No!’ Larry and I responded in stereo. ‘We weren’t going to let her have kittens when we thought she was a boy, so why should we let her have kittens now?’ We gave Tom some remedial lessons in gender identity amongst kittens and started to save to have Bill spayed.
Before we could save up all that was required—we were poor university students with a mortgage and two children—a neighbourhood cat that was allowed to wander about at will became obviously pregnant. Sometime, perhaps in a previous life, this cat had seen better days. She bore possibly the ugliest calico pattern I have ever seen in a cat and was the veteran of many fights, with a bit of both ears missing. She had been pregnant so many times, that her belly was stretched to within a few centimetres of the ground. Considering all this, the boys decided to call her ‘Uggo Mother’. Who can understand the workings of young boys’ minds? So Uggo Mother became pregnant, and then disappeared. A couple weeks later, it became obvious that her nursery for this birth was under our house. In a week or two more, one fluffy grey and white kitten began to venture forth. This kitten was as beautiful as his mother was ugly, but he was terrified of humans, and if we attempted to approach, he would scoot back under the house. Thinking he looked about weaning age, we started to bribe him out with diluted evaporated milk, then bits of tinned tuna. He still didn’t want to have anything to do with us, but would stay out of his hidey-hole long enough to devour our offerings. Uggo Mother must have determined that he was able to look after himself, or that we would take over that job because she disappeared again—perhaps to love and fight some more.
Meanwhile, Deranged Alex, who hated all male persons who were not family members—mail deliverers, the guys who collected the rubbish, UPS delivery men, the gas metre reader, you name it—was still with us. Should any of these service people be female, he was perfectly happy. But let one of them be male and approach the house, he would bark, run about the house madly and try to chew his way through the fly screen on any open window or door. We ultimately had to get Phenobarbital from the vet to administer on garbage pick-up day so he wouldn’t explode. But that didn’t solve the problem for surprise visits. One of the results of one of these surprise visits was a large hole in the fly screen door to the back porch.
It was through this hole that our under-the-house guest decided to venture, taking up residence under the hide-a-bed there. Bill made friends with the kitten, perhaps having some feline presentiment that her days as a potential mother were numbered. In fact, although she had never been a mother, she permitted the kitten to nurse, so they were both quite content, spending much time, basking in the sun on the back porch.
If the kitten were going to become a permanent member of the menagerie, I thought we should know a bit more about it, and of course, it should have a name. It was growing into a beautiful little cat with grey tabby-like markings and medium length hair. It had beautiful green eyes and a long, fluffy tail. However, in order to assign a proper name, one needs to know the unnamed’s gender. The kitten was still the better part of wild, permitting only Bill any contact or grooming. But I caught it just as it was racing for its refuge under the hide-a-bed, whereupon I attempted to detect its gender. The kitten, though, proved to be quite upset about its capture, demonstrating its feelings by attempting to lacerate my forearms. I was determined not to make the same mistake we’d made with Bill, so I endured the attack and had a close look.
The newest member of our family appeared to be female, so I let her go, and she raced for the hide-a-bed. So what to name her? The boys offered the obvious choices: Kitty, Fluffy, and the like. Their father suggested ‘Little Kitty’, which I considered out of the question. But it seemed a good compromise with the boys’ suggestion of ‘Kitty’. So I gave up my more exotic ideas that incorporated foreign words that reflected his origins under the house, and thought we should settle for ‘Kitty’. But I offered one more compromise. If her real name were to be ‘Little Kitty’, why not call her ‘Li’l’ for short—it could even be ‘Lilly’—instead of ‘Kitty’. That was acceptable to all.
Not long after Lilly’s christening, I injured my back and was forced to miss several days of work. Doctor’s orders were to stay flat on my back, so I made a nest on the living room sofa, wrapped myself in my favourite chenille robe, and intended to catch up on my reading. About mid-morning, the first day of my recovery period, Lilly ventured out of the back porch and crept up on the arm of the sofa where she sat quietly near my feet. Thinking I might persuade her to come closer, I threw the end of my robe’s sash-belt near her and slowly drew it towards me. As any cat would respond to a moving object, Lilly leaped to the end of the belt and pounced on it repeatedly as I drew nearer. However, once she realised she was getting too close to me, she would race for the other end of the sofa. I was home for three days, during which we played this game frequently. Gradually, Lilly delayed her retreat more and more until she was close enough for me briefly to stroke her head. Then I was permitted to stroke her body.
After my return to work, we still played the game in the evening until the kitten spent time allowing me to scratch behind her ears, even settling on my lap for several moments—as long as I was wearing the robe. One evening, whilst Lilly was spending an extended time on my lap, my mind flashed on the fiasco of Bill’s gender identification, and I thought I would have another look at Lilly’s nether regions. She was quite relaxed, so I lifted a hind leg, and saw, to my horror, testicles. The boys and their father were gathered in the living room, watching television. I announced my findings that Lilly was in fact a male, but after the drama of finding out that Bill was a girl, no one was too concerned that now we had a male cat named Lilly. The boys’ father was still a graduate student, so we saved up more money for a feline vasectomy for Lilly.
The third cat that joined our family did so under some disagreement. The boys ‘found’ a black and white kitten with little white feet and encouraged her to ‘follow’ them home. However, the boys’ father insisted we had enough pets, and the little black and white kitten would not be permitted to join the family. This did not stop the boys and I from feeding her kitten kibble, ensuring she had water, and letting her spend the night in the house when their dad was away on business trips. The boys had learned their lesson in gender identification, too, and decided not to let their parents participate in any way. They christened the kitten ‘Socks’, for her little white feet, which in the end was an excellent choice. This, by the way, was some time before the presidential Clintons acquired a Socks for the White House. It was confirmed that Socks was a female, the boys’ father relented and allowed her to join the menagerie. Now that we were out of school, we had a modest disposable income, and when Socks reached the appropriate age, she was taken to the veterinarian’s for the appropriate sterilisation.
The animal population of our household stabilised its numbers after Alex proved to be too deranged to live in the city, and he moved to a friend’s in the country. Then we moved into a newly built home and the boys discovered the world of aquariums at a neighbour’s. The neighbour even gave them each a small tank with a few of his fish for Christmas. The cats weren’t interested in the fish, and I became quite interested in the keeping of tropical fish. So the family gave me a 25-gallon tank for my birthday, and I proceeded to collect exotic fish like elephant fish and cichlids. I acquired a gold severum (Heros severus) that was quite beautiful and named it Wanda, after the movie. Now, severum are sexed by noting the shape of the dorsal fin of mature fish, so I recognised that Wanda might one day turn out to be male (which indeed he did).
But about this time, friends began to take note of our girl-cat named Bill, our boy-cat named Lilly and our gold severum male named Wanda. I had a perfectly good explanation. When our youngest son was about six weeks old, his father had a vasectomy. So, I explained to those who wondered about my ability to discern gender that I would permit no mature creature to live in my house with working gonads. This had the added benefit of fixing early in our sons’ minds not to live at home too long.
None of these problems would have occurred, I suppose, if I had adopted my father’s belief that naming animals with human names is repugnant (although he did allow us to have a Chihuahua/Fox Terrier mix we named ‘Tina’).The boys are now grown, and our pets have gone to domestic animal heaven. Bill and Lilly lived into their early teens, and Socks lived to the ripe old age of 18. Our eldest has a Rottweiler named Duchess, but she had that name when he adopted her. My youngest works long hours, so doesn’t have a pet. They have yet to give me grandchildren, but I am relatively confident that those children’s names will be appropriate.
First, I worked with a friend of the family, named Tom, oddly enough, who had a farm cat that, as farm cats often do, had produced a litter of kittens. The hobby farm now had more felines than mice, so he was giving the litter away. He offered me one, and after consultation with my other half, and in spite of the fact that we had a slightly deranged golden retriever, we decided to adopt one of the kittens. We told Tom that we wanted a tom cat, however, as getting a tom fixed—or broken, as the case may be—was generally less expensive than breaking a female cat.
Tom brought this little ginger cat to work one day. I don’t think he was old enough to leave his mother, or if he was the constant attention of my two young sons was more than the kitten could manage, and he immediately came down with some sort of malady for which the vet prescribed amoxicillin. Anyone who has had a child with a bacterial infection knows about the thick, pink stuff called amoxicillin. And it looks the same for a pet.
Now, when cats don’t like the taste of something, they had a curious reaction. They appear to foam at the mouth and smack their lips together, trying to rid their taste buds of the foul substance. With amoxicillin, then, our kitten foamed pink, which drooled to the floorboards. He tried to wash himself, which moistened his head. Alex, the deranged golden retriever, decided to lend a hand and lick the cat about the head until he was soaked. Alex was happy to provide this service even when the kitten was not drooling pink foam.
This all took place in the 80s, at the height of Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom County comic strip. One of the most memorable characters that inhabited Bloom County was Bill the Cat, who was dead, and looked every bit of it. We got a good look at our new kitten after an amoxicillin dose, with his sodden head, pink, foamy drool and overall less-than-vigorous appearance and decided ‘Bill’ would be the perfect name for him.
Bill recovered from his infection, survived Alex’s moist attentions, and grew into a healthy moggy. A couple months after his recovery, he was having a nap on the sofa, relaxing belly-up, as only contented dogs and cats can do. The family was having soft drinks on the front porch, and I was returning from the kitchen where I had secured refills for everyone. I looked fondly at our contented cat, snoozing away in blissful surrender, when something caught my eye…or failed to catch my eye, really. I delivered the drinks and returned to our slumbering puss for a closer look. Yes, it did appear that our tom, Bill the Cat, seemed to be missing a couple of vital body parts, requisite in all healthy males. Bill had no balls. ‘Larry,’ I called to my husband, ‘this cat seems to be missing a couple testicles.’ Larry wandered into the living room, certain that as a woman, I probably didn’t appreciate that not all gonads were large and obvious. But once he got a good look, he had to agree that our tomcat was definitely a tomasina cat.
There was the problem now with the name. Larry suggested that we had to change her name. But she had already learned to come running to the name she had, we were used to it, and I rather liked it. So she remained ‘Bill.’ We decided her real name was Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, and she was travelling incognito. Then the boys asked, ‘Are we going to let her have kittens?’ ‘No!’ Larry and I responded in stereo. ‘We weren’t going to let her have kittens when we thought she was a boy, so why should we let her have kittens now?’ We gave Tom some remedial lessons in gender identity amongst kittens and started to save to have Bill spayed.
Before we could save up all that was required—we were poor university students with a mortgage and two children—a neighbourhood cat that was allowed to wander about at will became obviously pregnant. Sometime, perhaps in a previous life, this cat had seen better days. She bore possibly the ugliest calico pattern I have ever seen in a cat and was the veteran of many fights, with a bit of both ears missing. She had been pregnant so many times, that her belly was stretched to within a few centimetres of the ground. Considering all this, the boys decided to call her ‘Uggo Mother’. Who can understand the workings of young boys’ minds? So Uggo Mother became pregnant, and then disappeared. A couple weeks later, it became obvious that her nursery for this birth was under our house. In a week or two more, one fluffy grey and white kitten began to venture forth. This kitten was as beautiful as his mother was ugly, but he was terrified of humans, and if we attempted to approach, he would scoot back under the house. Thinking he looked about weaning age, we started to bribe him out with diluted evaporated milk, then bits of tinned tuna. He still didn’t want to have anything to do with us, but would stay out of his hidey-hole long enough to devour our offerings. Uggo Mother must have determined that he was able to look after himself, or that we would take over that job because she disappeared again—perhaps to love and fight some more.
Meanwhile, Deranged Alex, who hated all male persons who were not family members—mail deliverers, the guys who collected the rubbish, UPS delivery men, the gas metre reader, you name it—was still with us. Should any of these service people be female, he was perfectly happy. But let one of them be male and approach the house, he would bark, run about the house madly and try to chew his way through the fly screen on any open window or door. We ultimately had to get Phenobarbital from the vet to administer on garbage pick-up day so he wouldn’t explode. But that didn’t solve the problem for surprise visits. One of the results of one of these surprise visits was a large hole in the fly screen door to the back porch.
It was through this hole that our under-the-house guest decided to venture, taking up residence under the hide-a-bed there. Bill made friends with the kitten, perhaps having some feline presentiment that her days as a potential mother were numbered. In fact, although she had never been a mother, she permitted the kitten to nurse, so they were both quite content, spending much time, basking in the sun on the back porch.
If the kitten were going to become a permanent member of the menagerie, I thought we should know a bit more about it, and of course, it should have a name. It was growing into a beautiful little cat with grey tabby-like markings and medium length hair. It had beautiful green eyes and a long, fluffy tail. However, in order to assign a proper name, one needs to know the unnamed’s gender. The kitten was still the better part of wild, permitting only Bill any contact or grooming. But I caught it just as it was racing for its refuge under the hide-a-bed, whereupon I attempted to detect its gender. The kitten, though, proved to be quite upset about its capture, demonstrating its feelings by attempting to lacerate my forearms. I was determined not to make the same mistake we’d made with Bill, so I endured the attack and had a close look.
The newest member of our family appeared to be female, so I let her go, and she raced for the hide-a-bed. So what to name her? The boys offered the obvious choices: Kitty, Fluffy, and the like. Their father suggested ‘Little Kitty’, which I considered out of the question. But it seemed a good compromise with the boys’ suggestion of ‘Kitty’. So I gave up my more exotic ideas that incorporated foreign words that reflected his origins under the house, and thought we should settle for ‘Kitty’. But I offered one more compromise. If her real name were to be ‘Little Kitty’, why not call her ‘Li’l’ for short—it could even be ‘Lilly’—instead of ‘Kitty’. That was acceptable to all.
Not long after Lilly’s christening, I injured my back and was forced to miss several days of work. Doctor’s orders were to stay flat on my back, so I made a nest on the living room sofa, wrapped myself in my favourite chenille robe, and intended to catch up on my reading. About mid-morning, the first day of my recovery period, Lilly ventured out of the back porch and crept up on the arm of the sofa where she sat quietly near my feet. Thinking I might persuade her to come closer, I threw the end of my robe’s sash-belt near her and slowly drew it towards me. As any cat would respond to a moving object, Lilly leaped to the end of the belt and pounced on it repeatedly as I drew nearer. However, once she realised she was getting too close to me, she would race for the other end of the sofa. I was home for three days, during which we played this game frequently. Gradually, Lilly delayed her retreat more and more until she was close enough for me briefly to stroke her head. Then I was permitted to stroke her body.
After my return to work, we still played the game in the evening until the kitten spent time allowing me to scratch behind her ears, even settling on my lap for several moments—as long as I was wearing the robe. One evening, whilst Lilly was spending an extended time on my lap, my mind flashed on the fiasco of Bill’s gender identification, and I thought I would have another look at Lilly’s nether regions. She was quite relaxed, so I lifted a hind leg, and saw, to my horror, testicles. The boys and their father were gathered in the living room, watching television. I announced my findings that Lilly was in fact a male, but after the drama of finding out that Bill was a girl, no one was too concerned that now we had a male cat named Lilly. The boys’ father was still a graduate student, so we saved up more money for a feline vasectomy for Lilly.
The third cat that joined our family did so under some disagreement. The boys ‘found’ a black and white kitten with little white feet and encouraged her to ‘follow’ them home. However, the boys’ father insisted we had enough pets, and the little black and white kitten would not be permitted to join the family. This did not stop the boys and I from feeding her kitten kibble, ensuring she had water, and letting her spend the night in the house when their dad was away on business trips. The boys had learned their lesson in gender identification, too, and decided not to let their parents participate in any way. They christened the kitten ‘Socks’, for her little white feet, which in the end was an excellent choice. This, by the way, was some time before the presidential Clintons acquired a Socks for the White House. It was confirmed that Socks was a female, the boys’ father relented and allowed her to join the menagerie. Now that we were out of school, we had a modest disposable income, and when Socks reached the appropriate age, she was taken to the veterinarian’s for the appropriate sterilisation.
The animal population of our household stabilised its numbers after Alex proved to be too deranged to live in the city, and he moved to a friend’s in the country. Then we moved into a newly built home and the boys discovered the world of aquariums at a neighbour’s. The neighbour even gave them each a small tank with a few of his fish for Christmas. The cats weren’t interested in the fish, and I became quite interested in the keeping of tropical fish. So the family gave me a 25-gallon tank for my birthday, and I proceeded to collect exotic fish like elephant fish and cichlids. I acquired a gold severum (Heros severus) that was quite beautiful and named it Wanda, after the movie. Now, severum are sexed by noting the shape of the dorsal fin of mature fish, so I recognised that Wanda might one day turn out to be male (which indeed he did).
But about this time, friends began to take note of our girl-cat named Bill, our boy-cat named Lilly and our gold severum male named Wanda. I had a perfectly good explanation. When our youngest son was about six weeks old, his father had a vasectomy. So, I explained to those who wondered about my ability to discern gender that I would permit no mature creature to live in my house with working gonads. This had the added benefit of fixing early in our sons’ minds not to live at home too long.
None of these problems would have occurred, I suppose, if I had adopted my father’s belief that naming animals with human names is repugnant (although he did allow us to have a Chihuahua/Fox Terrier mix we named ‘Tina’).The boys are now grown, and our pets have gone to domestic animal heaven. Bill and Lilly lived into their early teens, and Socks lived to the ripe old age of 18. Our eldest has a Rottweiler named Duchess, but she had that name when he adopted her. My youngest works long hours, so doesn’t have a pet. They have yet to give me grandchildren, but I am relatively confident that those children’s names will be appropriate.
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All the best to those who read and of course my mother, miss you heaps