It’s been two months and I’m still catching heat over my scraggly stray’s name choice.
After this puppymill Pug arrived, amid a flurry of demodectic mange and fleas, my son had promptly christened him “Billy.” In the way only an eleven year-old who sees no evil growing on skin can do, he took one look and uttered the two mundane syllables.
But they didn’t stick. Between the deformed limbs, the bulbously deviated eyes, the strange, collapsed feet and his flourishing parasitism, “Billy” was not meant to be. After a few days of this child-enforced, farce of a name game, the true name was uttered quite by accident. This time there was no disputing it: he was a quintessential slumdog. So “Slumdog” it is and will forever be.
The moral of the story? Never let a child name a family pet. Not unless he’s willing to take on the dirty work, too.
Yet there’s more to this story than how one pet came to bear his true name and the cautions that inevitably attend childhood impulsiveness. It’s to do with how we make lifelong decisions that affect how we bond to our pets.
I mean, does a name like Slumdog mean I’ll never take him seriously? That he won’t be as much a member of the family as a Sophie Sue or a Vincent? That he’ll get away with silly behavior based on his ridiculous name?
After all, every one of my pets before Slumdog has borne a human-style name...not an epithet used to describe a low-caste citizen of Mumbai. Even my chickens are named after the mythological Harpies and Furies.
But does what’s in a name really matter? Or does it all ultimately come down to the same thing once the name is just a name and the personality–– the true soul of the animal––is revealed over time? I wonder.
