Berkeley appears 65 times at rank 1586 on neutral-gender pets — a place name that has drifted into pet naming, almost certainly through the Bay Area university city's cultural cachet. Owners who name a dog Berkeley are typically signaling California identity or academic affiliation, sometimes both.
The Place Name Pipeline
American cities and universities generate pet names with some regularity — Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Austin — and Berkeley sits in that set with a particularly strong identity. The University of California, Berkeley's reputation for progressive culture and academic excellence gives the name associations that owners in the Bay Area, in academia, and in progressive-political spaces find meaningful. It's a place-name that carries an ideology lightly.
Sound and Breed Fit
BERK-lee is two syllables, ends on a bright vowel, and has a confident, slightly formal quality. The name works on medium-to-large dogs with an intelligent, alert temperament — Golden Retrievers and Border Collies fit the academic-intellectual register well. Berkley with a K spelling also appears as a variant in registries. The human name comparison is at /names/berkeley.
The Counter-Reading
Berkeley carries political associations that are legible to people on both sides of that association. In the Bay Area, it's neutral or positive. Elsewhere, it may read as a deliberate political signal. Owners who choose it outside California are making a more conscious statement than those within it.