There is one breed in our dataset where Teddy is the most popular name, full stop, ahead of every other entry: Poodles. Teddy ranks #1 among Poodles in our NYC and Seattle data with 277 entries. The reason is essentially visual — the modern doodle-and-poodle aesthetic is engineered to look like a teddy bear, and owners are completing the metaphor in the name.
The teddy-bear feedback loop
Theodore Roosevelt refused to shoot a tied bear on a 1902 hunting trip in Mississippi. A political cartoonist drew the moment. A Brooklyn shopkeeper used the cartoon to license a stuffed bear toy and called it "Teddy's bear," and the name attached itself to the entire category. From that point on, "teddy" became a generic term for soft, cuddly, slightly oversized stuffed animal — and the affection register baked into the word has never left.
Modern grooming styles for Poodles, Goldendoodles, and Bichons explicitly reference the teddy-bear aesthetic. There is a grooming cut called the "teddy bear cut." Owners who pick that grooming style are often picking the name in the same week. The name is doing visual work — it is announcing what the dog is supposed to look like, which is a living version of the toy. Once you notice this you cannot un-notice it. The Poodle data point is the cleanest evidence we have that owners name dogs to match the dog's grooming choices, not the other way around.
The grandfather name, repurposed
Teddy is also a grandfather name in the human register — short for Theodore or Edward, both of which were peak baby names in the early 20th century. Theodore is now climbing again in the SSA data, currently top-20 for boys, which means a lot of small children are being called Teddy. Pet owners do not seem to mind. The Teddy on a Poodle and the Teddy in preschool coexist, partly because the doubled-T register lands as warm in both contexts. Compare with how owners avoid Charlie when there is a Charlie in the family — the avoidance instinct kicks in there, but not for Teddy. I think it's because Teddy reads as a nickname for a stuffed animal first and a person second, in everyone's head.
This is also one of the few top-10 names where the cat-side performance is essentially zero. Teddy ranks far down the cat tables. Cats don't get teddy-bear names because cats don't read as teddy bears. The visual logic that drives the Poodle pattern simply doesn't apply.
One observation about the baby-name version
The Theodore-shortened-to-Teddy pattern is a generational marker. Parents who pick Theodore in 2025 are picking a long, formal name and accepting that the kid will go by Teddy for most of their childhood. That formal-then-shortened pattern is also how a lot of pet owners feel about their dogs — "his full name is Theodore but we call him Teddy." The baby Teddy page has the SSA detail; the pattern is doing similar cultural work in both populations.