Kiyomi Lowe regularly hears people mispronounce her name or sometimes forget it altogether. “I get Naomi, Kaiomi and sometimes Kimmy,” she said. She doesn’t mind: “I’ll respond to anything.”
She is less forgiving when friends and acquaintances forget the name of her dog, a shar-pei. “I understand Bruno a lot,” she said. To which she replies: “‘No, it’s Brutus!’ The dog doesn’t care. But I take care of the dog.”
Ms. Lowe is a stylist at Al’s Barber Shop, a popular six-chair salon in Boulder, near the University of Colorado campus. One recent morning, she struck up a lively conversation with her fellow stylists and several clients about a delicate question: Should you be responsible for remembering the name of a friend’s pet? What is the label?
“It’s a great question,” said Jen Himes, a hairstylist, who admitted that she sometimes got the name wrong, which pained her. “I’ve gotten a lot of pet names wrong. I’d say, ‘How’s Pookie?’ And they’d say, ‘It’s Rufus!’ or whatever.”
“Most people laugh,” he said. “But some people say, ‘That’s offensive.’”
Ultimately, he added, there’s a pretty good way to determine whether you’re obligated to remember a pet’s name. “It depends on how important the pet is to your friend,” he said.
In the barbershop (which turns out to be the journalist’s usual one) there was general agreement with that assessment. The conversation revolved primarily around dogs, which, several people said, differ from other pets in that they are taken for walks and out of the house, so they deserve more name recognition than more private animal companions.
“That’s cat discrimination!” Mrs. Himes objected. She laughed and suggested that she wasn’t that worried about it. Even she doesn’t always stick to the name of her own tuxedo cat, Cosmos.
“I call her Kitty,” he said.
Al’s Barbershop is owned by Al Urbanowski, who identified another key factor in determining whether you should remember a friend’s pet’s name: how important that friend is to you. Urbanowski, 58, still remembers Whiskey, the name of his best friend’s dog when he was 9 years old. Urbanowski now lives in a neighborhood full of dogs, he said, and his passing relationship with neighbors makes it difficult to remember names. of dogs and humans alike.
Your interpersonal connections change with age, he noted, and that changes what you can and should be responsible for remembering. When he was 25, Urbanowski said, the dogs joined the walks and other social outings he took with friends and were a big part of those friendships.
“When I started having kids, dog names weren’t coming off my tongue,” she said. Remembering a dog’s name “is still a priority, but it was relegated.”
The barbershop group said that some responsibility fell on the person trying to remember the name of their friend’s pet, but that some responsibility could also fall on the pet-owning friend, who could choose a name that was easy to remember.
“The funnier the name, the easier it will be to remember,” Lowe said. “Like Derek.”
Is Derek memorable? Yes, she insisted.
“Luke Skywalker,” Himes offered, remembering the name of a client’s dog who stayed with her.
“Big Tuna,” said Madisyn Crandell, a stylist at Al’s, referring to the name of one of her mother’s two English bulldogs. (The group considered the other, Lucy, to have a less memorable name.)
“Doug,” said Jason Owens, who stood loyally nearby as his 11-year-old son, Ryder, got his hair cut. Doug was the name of a friend’s Corgi. “How can I forget a name like Doug?” Owens said. But maybe I’d forget Doug if it were a person’s name, he added.
Recently, the Owens family’s Rottweiler, Derby, died. Mr. Owens said that most of his friends did not remember Derby’s name, but they did remember his nickname, Cheeky.
“She was the sweetest dog,” Owens said. “Dumb as a rock, but the sweetest dog.” He didn’t care at all if his friends also called Derby a fool. “I’d say, ‘Yeah, you’re right: She’s dumb as a rock.'”
Others have trouble forgetting the name of a forgotten pet. Christian Huerta, a greeter at Al’s with a pit bull mix named Frida, had a friend who repeatedly called his dog Freya his name. Huerta devised a plan.
“I texted her several times when she came and said, ‘Frida is excited to see you,’ like I was saying Frida,” Ms. Huerta said. “And my friend said, ‘Freya!’ And he was upset.”
Mrs. Huerta reflected on that. “Maybe it’s not that bad,” she said. “Maybe I’m too sensitive.” She then compared it to forgetting something more important, like a birthday.
“I guess it bothers me because I love my dog so much,” she said.