Too Cute by Half

I’ve always been in awe of breeder friends who come up with clever litter themes and accompanying registered and call names for their dogs. I have friends who excel at this — Andrea Jordan Lane, I’m looking at you — and I never cease to be amazed by their creativity. 

I’m not usually as witty when naming dogs. I tend to revert to the familiar: names that evoke in me certain feelings, or remind me of people, movies or books that I love. Sports is a consistent source of names, and sports-themed movies. Over the years, almost all the boy names have come from football or baseball, or “Bull Durham.” 

Of course, naming a dog after a real person, especially an athlete, carries some risk. You can never be sure when they might disgrace themselves, and their sport, or just prove themselves to be a jerk. Grateful to this day I stayed away from “Brett,” “Herschel” and “Gaylord.”

I will never understand, then, why anyone would want to attach a controversial name, much less a vulgar one, to a beloved family companion. And yet, it happens every day. AKC even had to write a rule about it. Even had to come up with a list of names you cannot use (which has to be constantly updated). Even had to explicitly say, you cannot include “obscenities and words derogatory to any race, creed or nationality or transliterations of such words.” 

Really, people?

You have to actually be told this? 

As AKC works harder and harder to ease the registration process, to improve efficiencies and execution of online registration (and push registrants to online usage because processing of paper registrations is time-consuming and costly), one glitch in that process for all of us is created by the crowd that tries to name a dog using an offensive term. If the word or term has not yet been flagged in the system as banned, then the registration goes through. But then staff has to manually engage in the time-consuming task of capturing the improper registrations and changing the names. 

Such is the case with the trending catch phrase “Let’s Go Brandon.” For those gentle readers who have mercifully remained in the dark about it, just know it’s a euphemism in conservative popular culture for a profane slur directed at the president. It started at a NASCAR race in early October when a reporter was interviewing the race winner — Brandon Brown — and the crowd in the background starting chanting, “F*** Joe Biden.” The reporter either misheard or deftly chose to ignore the chants, and instead, said to the driver, “You can hear the chants from the crowd, ‘Let’s go, Brandon!’” Social media took it and ran, and an expletive leveled at the president was born.

So I guess it should be no surprise that this current popular lack of culture has found its way into our dog show world.

But my question is, why?

Who names their dog with a vulgar expression, even if it’s couched in what some people think is a clever, innocuous phrase? And especially if someone plans to show a dog, why do you want that name to appear in the show catalog, or, worse, flashed at the bottom of the television screen on Thanksgiving Day for all the world to see? If you don’t care what it says about you, you should care what it says about our sport.

The AKC says that the standard for conduct prejudicial in our sport is whether a family attending its first show would be likely to decide that, after witnessing the incident, the sport was not for them. I dare say that pretty much any family, regardless of politics, on seeing that name in a catalog, would hit the exits with their kids and never return. 

But beyond that, why does anyone want to attach to a beloved and innocent dog – who goes through life reflecting all of our potential good and none of our bad, who greets every day with an unwavering capacity for unconditional love despite our seemingly unyielding ability to hate, and who will never on our worst day sees anything but the best in us – a vulgar, profane, obscene or derogatory name? 

The AKC can block the name and force a change; sadly, it can’t do anything about the poor dog’s owner.