Something Weird Is Happening With Dog Names
I recently found myself thinking about the dogs I know. More specifically, about their names: Among the dogs in my inner circle, there is a Murphy, a Norman, a Gus, a Gary, and a Gracie. The common factor? These could all be names of people.
Not being a dog owner myself, I wondered if this trend existed more widely, and, if so, what had caused it. How did we get from naming our Labradors and Pomeranians things like Fluffy and Toto to christening them with names like Jake?
Data on dog names reveals some interesting patterns. The top dog names in 2023 were Charlie and Max for boys, and Luna and Bella for girls. These names were also among the top 200 names for babies in 2022. This shouldn’t be surprising, as dogs today are treated essentially like children—not left alone for too long, given puzzles and entertainment to make sure they are stimulated, and even written into their owners’ prenups.
The most-cited data on the history of dog naming comes from Hartsdale Pet Cemetery—purportedly the oldest pet cemetery in the U.S.—established in 1896 in Westchester County, New York. It’s the final resting place of more than 80,000 pets, ranging from your average dog, cat, bird, and rabbit, to a lion cub that once lived at the Plaza Hotel and a Bengal tiger. In 2021, there was a study of data from Hartsdale looking at 25,000 names of cats and dogs from 1905 on. They determined the most popular dog name for each decade, which progressed from Queenie in the 1930s to Lady in the 1960s, to Max, which was the most popular dog name from the 1980s–2000s. Like Bella and Charlie, Max is also a popular baby name, and has stayed in the top 250 names since 1986.
But before that, traditional dog names were either cuter (Dolly), intimidating (Hercules), or more descriptive of dogs’ behaviors (Scamp) or appearance (Beauty). Laika, the dog the Soviet Union sent into space on Sputnik 2, has a name derived from the Russian language word for “bark.” You see the same trend in pop culture dogs of the 20th century. Pups like Old Yeller and Lassie had more distinctive doglike names, but they also filled more distinctively doglike roles: Though they were beloved members of the family, they were tasked with ensuring their owners’ safety—protecting Arliss from a bear cub or getting help when Ruth was in a car accident. In other words, they acted like dogs, and were often named as such.
The dogs of recent cinema have more human names and have become characters in their own right—take Arthur, the adventure-racing teammate of Mark Wahlberg in Arthur the King (2024), or Marley, the rambunctious inspiration for Owen Wilson’s hit newspaper column in Marley & Me (2008). In the past 20 years there’s also been a trend of making movies told from a dog’s perspective. Audiences now not only want to see dogs in their entertainment, they want their entertainment to personify them. A Dog’s Way Home (2008) and The Art of Racing in the Rain (2019) star Bryce Dallas Howard as adventuring pit bull Bella and Kevin Costner as daredevil golden retriever Enzo, respectively. These dog characters have human voices and human desires. Bella says things like, “[The] tiny piece of cheese filled me with such a strong feeling—like I was safe and happy and warm all at once. It was love.” The movie translates recognizable dog behavior into narratives crafted for humans, and their names followed suit.
But how did human relationships toward dogs shift so much? How did dogs go from helpful defenders to “fur babies” belonging to their “pet parents”?
The concept of dogs as companion animals—with whom humans have emotional connections outside of hunting or guarding—is not new. In the early 20th century, archaeologists uncovered a grave in western Germany with a man, a woman, and a dog, whose remains date back to the Paleolithic era and provide some of the earliest evidence for domestication. We also know that in Roman times, there were graves for dogs with epitaphs on them.
Dogs started to take on more human roles in the 19th century. Katherine Grier, the author of Pets in America, says that when middle-class culture started to emerge, raising a pet became linked to the idea of raising a child. Americans “developed a set of attitudes that I call the domestic ethic of kindness,” she told me. “That made pet-keeping crucial to raising good children.” Around this time, the philosopher John Locke was gaining prominence. His tabula rasa theory—the idea that everyone is born a blank slate and only made good or bad through experience—meant that parenting was increasingly important. Though Locke did not specifically advocate for pet ownership, he connected poor treatment of animals with poor treatment of humans. As he writes in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, “One thing I have frequently observed in children, that, when they have got possession of any poor creature, they are apt to use it ill … the custom of tormenting and killing of beasts will, by degrees, harden their minds even towards men.” So, as middle-class Americans thought more about raising good children, dogs became a tool for kids to practice being kind and taking care of something. Pet ownership took on moral baggage and became something a good middle-class family just “does.”
By the mid-20th century, dogs had become increasingly vital to the nuclear family. Perhaps the most classic examples are the Dick and Jane books, where you have siblings Dick, Jane, and Sally, along with Mother and Father; Spot, their dog; and Puff, their cat. But in the 1970s that kind of nuclear family started to fall apart with declining wages, the feminist movement, and an increasing emphasis on individuality. Single-adult households and divorces increased, and pet ownership did, too. One study from Health for Animals shows that a large part of this increase comes from millennials, who are more likely to have children later in life and now account for a third of all pet owners—the largest proportion of any generation. For some, owning a dog has taken on some of the importance that being a family and raising children used to have.
Another large influence on pet ownership is the changing economics of the pet industry. James Serpell, author of In the Company of Animals, told me that in 1980, there was a key scientific finding that catalyzed an explosion of growth in the pet industry: A Ph.D. student named Erika Friedmann published a dissertation that showed there was a higher survival rate among heart attack sufferers if they owned pets. This idea—that there may be medical benefits to having a pet—launched a whole field of human–animal interaction studies. The paper also attracted a lot of federal funding, and funding from the pet industry. Serpell said it’s now pretty common for pet companies to bankroll research studies or to back nonprofits that advocate for pet ownership. There’s a cycle where the pet industry spends money to market enhanced understandings of pet ownership, which then causes people to spend more money on their pets, which then leads to more money going back to the pet industry.
The effect of this cycle can be seen in the increasingly familial relationship people seem to have with their pets. A recent AlphaWise survey found that 69 percent of respondents “strongly agree” with the idea that their pets are important members of their family, 37 percent would incur debt to pay for their animal’s medical expenses, and 29 percent would put their pet’s needs before their own. This has only intensified with the pandemic—time and money spent on pets has spiked since 2020.
What does that mean for pet naming going forward? Dogs could start getting official middle or last names, or, if we’ve learned anything from trends in human names, dog monikers might get even weirder and more wild. Celebrities have been naming their kids things like Pilot Inspektor and Moxie CrimeFighter for years, so it’s no surprise their dogs are being bequeathed names like Zeppelin, Porky Basquiat, and Cappuccino Houston. Maybe my next furry friend will be called Aircraft or Bologna Spaceship, but until then, I think I’m fine with Bella.
