Tonight, we registered our little boy with the AKC. Incidentally, we actually have full registration, but I don’t think that we’ll be taking advantage of all of that.
As part of this, we get the option to name the dog. Obviously, you know the name that we’re calling him, but we wanted to give him a full name. We didn’t have the right to use the breeder’s kennel name in his name, but that’s OK because we really weren’t planning on giving him a “kennel name” anyway.
All right, so what’s his name, you ask?
London Cartwright German.
As I’ve mentioned in a previous entry, London is named after Jack London, one of my favorite authors. Initially, I wanted to have his second name be one of London’s dog names. But after looking around, all we could find were Buck (from Call of the Wild), White Fang, and several Inuit and other native names that I didn’t really like well with London. So I finally decided to look up Labrador itself, and found the town of Cartwright. It’s the sixth-largest town in the province of Labrador, and I liked the way it sounded against London. So Cartwright it was!
I was kind of hoping you were going to say it was because of the legendary Bill Cartwright of the Chicago Bulls, or possibly Nancy Cartwright, aka Bart Simpson. But I guess that will work too.
Where is Kelly’s input in naming the dog?
Essentially, it’s a trade-off. I got to pick the breed and name this one, and she gets to pick the breed and name the next one that we have. I asked her if she was OK with the name, though.
An additional note: his middle name was almost Mackenzie, after a river in the Yukon that London wrote some of his stories around, but I finally nixed it because it’s more of a girl’s name.