A good name is the most important thing a person or a business can possess. I’m not naming names, but do you think that 7UP® would have been as popular if they’d have gone with the first choice for the popular soda which was Bib Label Lithiated Lime Soda? Would as many people eat Cheerios® for breakfast if they’d have insisted on calling them Cheerioats, which was their initial intention? Would Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer have made the Hit Parade if author Robert May would have gone with Reginald or Rollo, two other names he was considering? Would I have won a Pulitzer by now if my name would’ve been anything but Pitts?

I’m really into names and I think it all got started when we lived in Australia for a year. In the Land Down Under, they name everything and I do mean everything, from their cars to their houses. Our car was a forerunner to the automobile called a Holden made by Ford and we named it Whitey Ford after the famous Yankee pitcher. Following their example, we named the house we’ve lived in for 40 years Blue View because we see mostly ocean and sky.

I liked the cattle business better when we had a lot more small producers and fewer big corporations and absentee owners. Small ranchers frequently name their animals humorously, not so much with bigger players with 4,000 head. Besides, the conglomerates have HR departments to discourage naming animals with monikers that might offend people, like Monkey Face or Buzzard Breath. 

My wife and I named a lot of our cattle like Stewie and Burrito because that’s what they’d both end up in. A cow with a swinging bag when she ran we called Milk Shake and a really fat cow we called Crisco®, which I’m sure never would have got past the HR folks. We also had cows named Last Chance, Bartholomoo, Stumpy (sheared-off horns), Frisbee (she was hard to catch), Paint, Seven and a Quarter (picked out of a hat), Molasses Mouth (ate more than her share of supplement) and Hoffa because we never could find her although she always raised a big calf.

I’ve heard of lots of great names for horses like Root Canal, Leather Lip, Filbert (a real nut), Tid Bit and Mars (because he was from outer space). I had a friend who lovingly called his horse Hog, but we called our hog Pancakes because that’s what we used to lure her back to her pen after she broke out again. I adhere to the old saying “never name something you intend to eat” so for the most part we didn’t name our sheep although we did call our best ram Studly. Over the years we had several ewes we called “Corduroy” because that’s what they looked like after I got done shearing them.

One time at the coffee shop we went around the table remembering the funny names we’d given our dogs such as Doorstop (that’s all he was good for), Frank Furter (a Dachshund), Scraps, Serena (she loved to chase after tennis balls), Chewy, Epoxy (he’d stick to you through thick and thin), Truck Stop (liked to pee on tires), Ali (a Boxer), Speedbump (because he was always in the way), Del Monte® (he ate out of cans), Jet Lag (because she slept a lot), Downboy and Alimony (because the dog was all the guy got after the divorce).

A few humorous canine names would really fit dogs that can’t stay home: Gettysburg (because it forgot its address), The Philanderer and Boomerang (because the pooch kept coming back no matter how far away you left it the last time.)

Interestingly, none of my rancher friends could ever remember naming a cat but I’ve heard of some doozies like Meow Tse Tongue, F. Cat Fitzgerald, Santa Claws, Hunter and Copycat.

Heck, we even named our two turtles. One we called Easter because it only came around once a year and we never could find Abracadabra.