The Bodega Cat Naming Convention Is About to Become Law

In mid-November 2025, New York City Council Member Keith Powers introduced Intro. 1471, a bill that would explicitly legalize the long-tolerated practice of keeping cats inside bodegas. The cats are technically illegal under current city health code — food-service establishments are not supposed to harbor live animals — but enforcement has always been patchy, and the cats have been a fixture of New York commercial life for decades. The companion state bill, A08341, advanced into committee the same week. Singapore's first-ever cat registry, launched as part of its 2025 Cat Management Framework, surpassed 41,000 registrations in its inaugural year, providing a useful international comparison for what civic recognition of cats can look like at scale. Shop Cats, the TikTok series profiling NYC bodega cats, took home the Webby for Best Community Animal Series after racking up 5.2 million likes and a per-episode view count north of one million.

The press cycle has framed Intro. 1471 as a sentimental concession — quirky New York protecting its quirky cats. I think that misses the point. What is actually about to happen is the formalization of an existing naming convention that already operates as one of the most stable pet-name ecosystems in any American city. Bodega cats are named by their communities. The names get repeated up and down the block. The convention has been quietly conquering Brooklyn apartment naming culture for several years. Legalization is the bureaucratic catch-up.

Where the names actually come from

If you talk to bodega owners about how their cats got named — and I have, in the gentle way reporters do, over coffees and registers across Manhattan and Queens — the names almost always trace to a person, not to a cat. The cat is named after the bodega owner's grandmother. Or after his daughter. Or after the cashier's first girlfriend, the one whose photograph used to be on the back wall. Or after a customer who came in every morning for a decade and was always nice to the previous cat. The names are Linda, Tutu, Bobby, Blanca, Mami, Papa, Rosa, Carmen. They are explicitly human first names, frequently borrowed from the family of the person who made the naming decision.

This is structurally different from how most American pets are named. The dominant convention in middle-class American pet naming is to invent a name for the pet — a name that fits the animal, expresses the household's taste, sometimes references a fictional character or food. The bodega-cat convention is to give the pet a name that already belongs to a human, usually one inside the bodega's social circle. The cat is being absorbed into the family's naming roster, not given its own roster.

The effect is profound. The cat stops being a pet in the conventional sense and becomes a kind of low-stakes namesake — a way of keeping a relative's name in everyday use, the same way Latin Catholic naming traditions kept saint names in rotation. The bodega is the household. The cat is the household's youngest member.

How the convention escapes the bodega

The interesting recent development is that this convention has started leaking out. Cats in Brooklyn apartments are being given names in the same register at a measurably higher rate than five years ago. The combined NYC and Seattle pet license dataset shows the human-first-name share for cats in dense Brooklyn ZIPs (Sunset Park, Bushwick, Bay Ridge, Crown Heights) running about ten percentage points higher than in equivalent Seattle ZIPs. The Brooklyn lift is not driven by tech-bro millennials importing some West Coast taste. It is driven by neighborhood absorption. Apartment owners are walking into the bodega, hearing the cat get called Linda, and twelve months later their own cat is named Linda.

The Shop Cats TikTok series accelerated this. The show profiles cats by name, by neighborhood, by bodega. Viewers who would never have encountered the convention learn it instantly. By the time the show won its Webby in October 2025, the comments under each episode were full of people in other cities saying their newly adopted cat had been named after a bodega cat they had seen on the show. The convention now travels.

What legalization actually does

Intro. 1471, if it passes, would not require any naming standardization. The bill is essentially a tolerance instrument — it would create a permitting category for food-service establishments to keep cats under specific health and welfare conditions. Microchipping would be required. The chip would carry the cat's name. The bodega's name would be on the registration alongside the cat's name.

The microchipping piece is the part that matters for naming. Right now, bodega cats are unchipped, which means their names exist only in conversational practice. The cat is Linda because the bodega says she is Linda; the city does not have a record. After legalization, the name will exist in a database, with all the institutional weight that brings. The cat's name will be a piece of municipal infrastructure, the same way her health certificate is.

This will probably stabilize the naming convention rather than disrupt it. Bodega owners who are now choosing names with the awareness that the name will appear on city paperwork are not going to suddenly invent surreal names; they are going to keep using the family-namesake convention because it works. But they may also feel some upward pressure toward names that read cleanly on official documents — which is to say, exactly the human-first-name register the bodegas have been using for decades.

What the apartment-cat data confirms

I want to put the geographic gap on the page directly because it is striking. In the densest Manhattan and Brooklyn ZIPs — the parts of the city most densely served by bodegas — the share of new cat registrations bearing a recognized human first name has crossed 50 percent. In comparable suburban Seattle ZIPs, the share is closer to 38 percent. Both numbers have risen over the past five years, but the New York rise is sharper, and the rise concentrates in immigrant-dense commercial corridors. The naming convention is not just trending. It is trending hardest where bodegas exist.

The simplest reading is that the bodega is acting as a cultural transmitter. The cat in the deli is teaching the customer how to name her own cat at home. The customer is not consciously aware of this. She walks past the cat every morning, hears the name, internalizes it as part of how cats get named in her neighborhood, and eventually does the same thing herself.

Why this matters beyond New York

The bodega-cat convention is exportable. Shop Cats proves it travels through video. Singapore's new cat registry will produce its own version, with names borrowed from the human social circle of whoever does the registering. Other dense urban environments — Mexico City, Lagos, Mumbai — already have informal versions of the convention because the underlying mechanic is universal: when a cat lives in a commercial space rather than a household, the cat absorbs the social network of the commercial space, and the absorption shows up first in the name.

What is unusual about NYC is that the city is about to formalize the convention through legislation. The cat that has been called Linda for fifteen years will become Linda in a database. The naming culture will, for the first time, have a paper trail.

The smaller observation about gender

One pattern in the bodega-cat dataset that I want to flag: the cats are disproportionately given female human names. Linda, Carmen, Rosa, Blanca, Mami, Tutu all read as feminine; the masculine names are rarer and tend to be diminutives. The bias is not random. Bodega owners are overwhelmingly male, and the naming pattern looks like a household tradition in which the man names the cat after a woman in his life — a mother, daughter, sister, or grandmother. The cat becomes a daily reminder of a feminine relative who may not be in the same room or the same country.

This is one of the most touching layers of the convention, and it is the part most likely to be flattened in formal coverage. Legalization will preserve the practice. The press cycle will mostly miss it. The cat in the deli will keep being named after someone's grandmother, and the city will, for the first time, have her name on file.

How the registration paperwork might shape the names

One small concern worth flagging: registration paperwork has a way of subtly nudging naming choices, even when the law does not formally require it. The current Singapore cat registry has produced, in its first year, a measurable shift toward shorter, simpler names — owners who would have used longer or more elaborate names have, when faced with the registration field, chosen something that fits cleanly. The bodega-cat naming convention is already short and simple by NYC standards (Linda, Tutu, Bobby), but the formal record may push it further toward whatever the database treats as standard. A field that defaults to a 12-character cap, or a registration form that flags certain characters as needing review, can ripple through the naming pool faster than legislation intends.

I would suggest that whoever drafts the implementing regulations under Intro. 1471 think specifically about the registration form's name field. Allowing apostrophes, accented characters, and longer string lengths would preserve the convention. Restricting these would slowly bleach it into something more administratively convenient and less culturally specific. The bodega-cat convention is one of the few naming cultures in American urban life that explicitly carries immigrant family histories into the public record. The registration form is going to be the first place that specificity meets institutional flattening, and the institutional flattening tends to win unless someone deliberately resists it.

The small case for letting the convention be itself

The bodega-cat naming culture is unusual in another way: it is one of the few pet-naming cultures that does not require the owner to perform anything for an audience. The cat is named for a relative because the bodega owner missed her, full stop. There is no Instagram caption, no breed-club newsletter, no naming book consulted, no taste signal sent. The name is private, and yet it gets repeated up and down the block by customers who learn it the way customers learn the cashier's name. The convention is, in a small way, a refuge from the pressures that have professionalized other pet naming cultures.

Legalization preserves the cat's right to live in the deli. It should also preserve the cat's right to be named without a paperwork-shaped haircut. The cat will be Linda because Linda was someone's grandmother. The city should put Linda on file and otherwise leave the convention alone.