Hey baby, what’s your name?

The time arrives each fall when after months of talking about the members of a given year’s birth class as “so-and-so’s cria,” we actually get down to the nitty gritty of naming these little buggers for real. For the most part that task falls to yours truly with Jen and Kim chiming in now and again. It’s a process I enjoy the majority of the time, though one which is admittedly made much easier in years when we are genuinely excited about the crias in question. I will freely admit that there are times when coming up with original sounding names for a list of 50 to 60 crias can feel like pulling teeth. You can always tell when the old naming well is getting dry when we come up with such zingers as “Senor Blanco,” an animal whom ironically we found out–in the show ring no less–had a fawn spot hidden on the side of his blanket. Oh well.

Thankfully some of these little guys and girls will name themselves, almost by default. We have, for instance, held to a tradition now for many years of naming an impressive female born of a given maternal line (though only after the passing of their deceased matriarch) after that line’s “grand dam” in question. So it is that we will have CCNF Prestige (her dam, Pristine was PPPeruvian Prestige’s final cria) and CCNF Jesusa (dam chalice Chalice was one PPeruvian Jesusa’s only white kid born here) being officially dubbed in short order. For the rest of them it is often a case of word association and play as well as simple derivations of the names of one or both parents. I am of course not the least bit averse to musical, literary, or mythological references and it’s fairly common for those sorts of names to run in streaks: if I have a Telemachus there is probably an Ajax, a Paris, a Hector, and a Menelaus not too far behind. You get the idea. In the end, I find that when I latch onto a theme it’s easiest to just embrace it and go with the flow. To a point at least. CCNF Senor Blanco II, even after the white boy year we’ve just had, is really not going to be an option!