What Your Pet's Name Reveals About Your Attachment Style

My rabbit is named Money. I want to be clear that I did not choose this name because I value money above emotional connection, or because I wanted to project a certain personality onto a small animal who cannot have opinions about finance. I named him Money because he arrived during a chaotic period of my life, someone made a joke, and the name stuck before anything more considered could take its place. Now I use it with the same tone most people reserve for names like "sweetheart" or "little guy." It has become, without any intention on my part, a term of endearment.

But here is what has genuinely puzzled me since: what does the name Money say about how I relate to him? And more broadly — is there something real in the idea that the names people give their pets reveal something about the psychology of the relationship?

Attachment Theory and Human-Animal Bonding

Attachment theory, as John Bowlby developed it in the 1960s and 1970s (Attachment and Loss, Vol. 1, 1969, Basic Books), describes the emotional bonds humans form with caregivers — bonds characterized by seeking proximity under stress, using the attachment figure as a safe base for exploration, and experiencing distress at separation. The theory was originally about infant-caregiver relationships, but subsequent research has extended it in two directions: to adult romantic relationships and, more recently, to human-animal bonds.

The question of whether people apply attachment dynamics to pets is not trivial. John Archer's influential 1997 review in Evolution and Human Behavior — "Why do people love their pets?" — documented that many pet owners describe their animals using language and emotional frameworks that closely parallel how people describe primary human relationships. The grief people experience at pet loss is, clinically, similar in intensity and duration to grief at human bereavement. The pet is, for many people, a genuine attachment object — not a substitute for human connection but an independent object of attachment in its own right.

Alan Beck and Aaron Katcher's Between Pets and People: The Importance of Animal Companionship (1996, Purdue University Press) found that the human-animal bond activates many of the same physiological and psychological mechanisms as human social bonding: reduced cortisol, increased oxytocin, a sense of being understood without the burden of articulation. These are not trivial effects.

Pet Naming as an Attachment Signal

If pets are genuine attachment objects, then the way we name them — the ritual of assignment, the choice of what to call this creature we have taken into our lives — might carry some information about the quality and orientation of the attachment we are forming.

I want to be careful not to overstate this. Name choice is influenced by many things that have nothing to do with attachment psychology: aesthetic preference, humor, the name that the previous owner used, what your partner wanted, the animal's appearance at the moment you met it. Money is a case in point. And yet, when you look at naming patterns at scale, some meaningful clusters emerge.

Humanization Names: Charlie, Luna, Max

The dominant pattern in contemporary pet naming is humanization: giving pets names drawn from the human name pool. Luna, Charlie, Bella, Max, Daisy, Cooper — these are names that in previous generations belonged exclusively to people and now are distributed across dogs and cats in enormous numbers. In the NYC and Seattle licensing data that powers NamesPop's pet names section, humanized names consistently dominate the top rankings, with the most popular dog and cat names overlapping substantially with what were popular baby names five to ten years earlier.

James Serpell, in his 2003 paper on anthropomorphism in Society and Animals, argues that anthropomorphic projection — attributing human characteristics to animals — is not a cognitive error but an evolved social strategy: the same mental systems that allow us to model other humans' minds get recruited to model animal minds, because forming social bonds with animals had adaptive value. Naming is one of the primary acts of anthropomorphic projection. When you name your dog Charlie, you are not just labeling him — you are placing him within the social category of beings who have names like Charlie, which is to say, people.

From an attachment standpoint, humanization naming could signal what attachment researchers call a "secure-base" orientation: the pet is conceptualized as a genuine social companion, worthy of the same identity markers given to humans. This is not pathology. It is, in most cases, simply an honest account of how deeply people bond with their animals.

Ironic and Joke Names: Sir Biscuit, Money, Lord Fluffington

Then there is the category my rabbit belongs to: the ironic or joke name. Sir Biscuit the Chihuahua. Professor Wigglesworth. Money the rabbit. These names are interesting because they accomplish something psychologically complex: they signal attachment through its apparent negation. The joke name says "I am not being earnest about this" while the act of giving the name at all — and then using it daily, affectionately, for years — says the opposite.

This is not avoidant attachment. It is more like the affectionate teasing that secure attachments produce in humans: the person who genuinely loves someone is often the same person who gives them the most ridiculous nickname. The irony is a vehicle for warmth that bypasses the self-consciousness of earnest sentiment. You can say "Money, come here" without ever having to own, out loud, how much you care about the small animal you are summoning.

Functional Names: Dog, Cat, Buddy, Fluffy

The third pattern is what I would call functional naming: names that describe the animal's species, role, or appearance without making any claim about personality or social status. Dog. Cat. Buddy. Fluffy. These names are less common than they used to be — which is itself a data point about how the human-animal relationship has shifted — but they still exist, and they may signal something different about the relationship's orientation.

This is where I want to resist the temptation to psychologize too quickly. Some functional names are chosen by practical people who simply do not find pet naming interesting, not by people who are emotionally unavailable to their animals. Some are placeholders that became permanent. And some do reflect a more distanced relationship — the farm dog named Dog who serves a working function, or the inherited cat named Fluffy who was not chosen by the current owner.

What the NYC and Seattle Data Shows

When we built the pet names section of NamesPop using NYC Dog Licensing data and Seattle Pet Licenses data, one of the things I looked at was the distribution between humanized names — names that also appear in SSA baby name data — and names from outside the human naming tradition. The balance has shifted dramatically over the past few decades. Human names now account for a large majority of the most common pet names in both cities, and the traditional pet-specific names (Fido, Rex, Spot, Rover) have become rare enough to feel almost vintage.

There are also breed-level patterns that suggest something about the owner-animal relationship. Small dog breeds — the Chihuahuas, French Bulldogs, and Malteses of New York City — tend to receive either highly humanized names or elaborate ironic formal names (the Sir and Princess constructions) at higher rates than large working breeds. This tracks with research suggesting that small dog owners are more likely to relate to their dogs as social companions or quasi-children, while large breed owners (especially working breeds) more often maintain a somewhat more functional relationship orientation.

The Naming Ritual as Bonding Mechanism

One underappreciated dimension of pet naming is that the act of naming is itself a bonding mechanism, independent of what name is chosen. The deliberate assignment of a name — the consideration, the trying-out, the settling on — is an act of recognition: I am acknowledging that this creature has an identity, and I am participating in constructing it. That act creates a relationship, regardless of the name's content.

This is why people who care for animals with existing names often feel a pull toward keeping the name even when they find it aesthetically unpleasant. The name, by that point, has become part of the animal's identity as understood by the human — changing it feels like a small violence.

What Money Taught Me

The longer I live with a rabbit named Money, the less I think the name says anything definitive about my attachment style. What it says, if anything, is that attachment can form through unexpected routes — through a joke that became a habit, through daily care that outlasted whatever mood produced the name, through the simple fact of proximity and attention over time.

The name Money does not describe my relationship with this rabbit. The relationship exists independently of the name, and would exist if I had called him Theodore or Bartholomew or Charlie. The name is just the form the relationship took at its first externalization.

That said: if you named your dog "Sir Reginald Von Fluffsworthy the Third" and you cannot say his name without smiling a little, I think that tells us something. Not about your attachment style, exactly. Just about you.