Around the end of the year (or the start of a new year), it’s not unusual to see lists appear. Popular names for boys and girls are always a favorite… but did you see the lists of popular names for pets?
The ten most popular names for dogs and cats were collected by VPI — Veterinary Pet Insurance. The company insures more than four hundred thousand pets around the United States, and scoured their database to find the most popular names for pets in the past year. (Since they only looked at their clients, the lists might be a bit skewed. Still, 466,000 pets is a pretty good sample of the population!)
The ten most popular names for dogs:
- Max
- Bailey
- Bella
- Molly
- Lucy
- Buddy
- Maggie
- Daisy
- Sophie
- Chloe
Human names are pretty popular for pups, it seems.
The ten most popular names for cats:
- Max
- Chloe
- Tigger
- Tiger
- Lucy
- Smokey
- Oliver
- Bella
- Shadow
- Charlie
Some of the names made both lists — like Max, Bella, Lucy, and Chloe. And I personally would have counted Tiger and Tigger as variations of the same name (not as two separate ones). But I do think it’s interesting that the dogs had pretty much all human names for their most popular ones… and cats had a few non-human names. At least I don’t know many humans named “Shadow” or “Tigger”.
VPI employees also picked out fifty of the most unusual dog and cat names, and voted for the top ten for each species. Working at the cats-only boarding facility, I know how weird pet names can be! We’ve had guests named “Squad Car” and “Count Catula”. Among the unusual names VPI found were “Sparklemonkey” and “Spatula”.
I’ve never had to pick out a name for my pets — they all came from the shelter with a name that I kept using. (Though in Moose’s case, he picked out a new name.) How did you decide what to name your pets?