Names for pets

Meet Mummy, one of my room-mates. She is so-called because she has borne two little ones. I wonder what she was called before she became a mom??

This brings me to the subject of pet names. I think that pets - cats or dogs - should have names that aren't human names. Call me anal, but it has to be. We are different species.

I always do a double take when I hear of pets that have been given human names like Mary or Wong Kim Cheong. Don't you find that weird?

This is why through history, dogs have commonly been called Rover, Spot, or (less imaginative) names like Blackie, Brownie or Snowy (often used also for rabbits, gerbils, hamsters or guinea pigs also).

My human has heard of someone's cat named Katmandu. Quite creative, huh? My own name, suggested by my human's husband, has never - and I hope never - been used on a human. It incorporates a pun. [See my first post in this blog.]

I was called something else before when I first lived with my male owner, but I don't remember what it was now. When I was rescued by Auntie J, she named me Arkle, after my somewhat spastic meow. I do sound like "Arrr, arrr" though I'm also capable of a full-throated cat's meow, like the best of them.

My human and her husband thought Arkle a dumb name, so began calling me Nookie and after a while, that stuck. I answer to that now.

Her sister had a cat too, a tabby named China, after having been rescued from a Chinatown street. But China is gone now, either lost or dead. More on him in another post soon...

My human's own previous cat - yeah, I wasn't her first - used to be called TC. The name would unfailingly raise the question, "Oh, what does it stand for - Top Cat?", to which my human would put on a deadpan face and reply: "No. It stands for The Cat".

TC, a beautiful persian-tabby mix in silver grey, is dead now. He died at age four of some acute stomach infection that left him bleeding internally. Till today, my human says the vet did wrong by just treating the symptoms - pumping poor TC with antibiotics, putting him on a drip...

What about tests? Why not do some tests to find out why he's so sick, my human asked the vet, to which he confessed he didn't know what he was dealing with, so he "didn't know" which test would be relevant.

This blog has been named Top Cat - what people often thought he was called - in his memory. He really was one.