Liam 
A blue dog is weather you can pet. Stand one in daylight and the coat turns out to be a sky just before rain: slate, steel, a silver edge where the sun catches it. That is why the best blue dog names sound like a forecast — Slate, Squall, Nimbus, Storm — words that carry
The first objection is fair, so let’s deal with it before anything else: a hawk is not a pet, and you cannot simply go out and name a wild one. In the United States, wild hawks are protected by federal law. A named hawk usually belongs to a licensed falconer, a rehabilitation center, or a
From the vet’s side of the fence, an ostrich is not a joke with feathers. It is a patient the size of a small horse, with a neck like a garden hose, legs built like stilts, and a kick that really can hurt — a forward kick, from legs that make up a huge share
Before: Dash and Spot. They are the names everyone reaches for, and they are not wrong — a cheetah is fast and spotted, and both words say so in one syllable. But they are also the names every other cheetah already has. After: the names zoo keepers actually choose. When the National Zoo named its
Sort first, name second. A chameleon name goes wrong in three predictable ways, and all three are decided before you reach any list: the wrong species, the wrong sex, or the wrong idea of what the animal is doing. Start with the species. Veiled, panther, and Jackson’s chameleons are three of the most common pet
A black horse stays black. A bay horse stays bay. A grey horse does neither — it is born bay, black, or chestnut, and then it spends years turning itself pale, sometimes ending up looking almost white. A white horse and a grey horse can look identical in a field and still be different animals
“A horse is a thing of beauty… none will tire of looking at him as long as he displays himself in his splendor.” Xenophon wrote that in On Horsemanship in the fourth century BC, and he was writing about Greek horses — the same horses that carried Alexander, pulled the sun across the sky in
“Girth Vader.” That is the whole pitch, really. Two words, one round belly, one dark coat — and a nickname that was already waiting in the barn before anyone wrote it down, because the horse supplied it. Funny horse names work backwards from ordinary names: you don’t pick the joke and hope the horse grows
In 1879, breeders in the Dutch province of Friesland opened a studbook for their own horse: black, heavy-maned, high-stepping, with feathering down its legs. That book still decides what counts as a Friesian today, and it is the reason naming one is different from naming any other black horse. The breed behind the book is
In spring 2016, two capybaras named Bonnie and Clyde got out of their enclosure at Toronto’s High Park Zoo. They were caught, eventually, and later had three pups — but for a few weeks they were the most famous escapees in Canada, and their names were perfect: a joke that turned out to be true.