Picking a name for your new puppy.

Life with two Guide Dog Puppies at the same time is rather hectic. But Riggs will soon be starting so then we will only have him home over the weekends which will make things a bit easier. In the mean time the two pups are loving each other's company and Daisy is settling down nicely.

In this post I want to talk a bit about the naming of the Pups that comes through the Program. Obviously, since we "took over" Daisy from a previous Puppy Raiser, we had no input into her name.

So when a new litter arrives the Puppy Raisers that will be taking a Pup into their loving homes are identified. They then have the opportunity to submit a list of names for approval. There is a catch though. Each litter is assigned a letter or letters of the alphabet. We would thus call all the Puppies in Daisy's litter the D-Pups. All her sibling's names would then start with a D. In the D-Pups the names are Daisy, Disney, Dino, Dante', Denver and Dixi.

Here's the newly born D-Pups with their proud mom Whitley (Who obviously comes from a W-Pup litter). One of those snuggly bums is our Daisy!

So, you have your letter and now you have to submit 4 to 5 names for approval. The admin staff makes sure that there is not a current working dog with the same name, to avoid confusion. The name must also be short and easy to pronounce as it is important for re-call training.

Our Riggs is from the QR Litter (Difficult letters gets combined) and is named after Detective Riggs from Lethal Weapon fame. Riggs has 3 brothers named Rocco, Ringo and Ronnie and a sister Raffi.

In the past any Donated dogs had the P and G letters reserved so these letters were normally skipped when a litter was born. The reason was P stood for Present and G stood for Gift. These days P and G is included in the normal naming sequence with Z reserved for Donated Dogs. This is mainly because there are not many Donated Dogs anymore and since Z is a difficult letter to find names for it makes sense to use it.

And there you have it. I'm ending this post with some Riggs and Daisy cuteness.