Every year, VPI puts together a list of the most popular names for dogs and cats. Their data comes from pet insurance claims that VPI receives in a given year. The 2012 list also includes the most popular names for birds and exotic pets.
What did you name your pet? It’s not quite the same as naming a child. One would never dream of naming their son “Fido”, but it has become a common name for a puppy. You probably wouldn’t name your cat “Fido” though, because people see that moniker as a good name for a dog.
VPI is a company that sells pet insurance. They have been around for a long time. In addition to selling policies and receiving claims, they do a couple of unique things every year. One is the Hambone Award. Pets who did something that resulted in a bizarre insurance claim (and lived through it) can be nominated for the award.
The other fun thing that VPI does is create a list of the most popular pet names for each year. In order to determine the most popular pet names, they sort through their database of more than 485,000 insured pets. They have a list of the top ten names for dogs, the top ten names for cats, and the top ten names for birds and exotic pets for 2012. VPI had this to say about the choices for pet names in 2012:
As the list above shows, pet owners continue to prefer human names for their furry friends. Each of the top five dog and cat names were among Babycenter.com’s 100 most popular baby names of 2012.
I’ll leave you to read the full list at VPI’s website. The most popular name for a dog in 2012 was Bella. I suspect this may have been influenced by the Twilight movies. Bailey was in second place, followed by Max, Lucy, and Molly.
The most popular name for a cat in 2012 was also Bella. This was followed by Max, (up from third place for dogs). Rounding out the top five were Chloe, Oliver, and Lucy (which dropped from four to five when it moved from dogs to cats).
What about birds and exotics? For this group, the most popular name in 2012 was Charlie. In second place was Buddy. Third on the list was the name Bella (which was the most popular name for both dogs and cats in 2012). Max was in fourth place, (but in second place for cats and third place for dogs). The fifth most popular pet name for this category of pet was Angel.
Image by Dixie Wells on Flickr