Too much pressure, that’s what!

Piper is the first well-bred dog we’ve owned, so the prospect of picking her registered name and call name was suuuuuuuper daunting. The only requirement from her breeder was to keep their kennel name (HySpire) as the first part of her registered name. There was no naming theme to the litter, but Judy from HySpire mentioned that we could look at the names of her sire (“Rapper” – GCH Hyspire Bohemian Rhapsody From Breckin) and dam (“Peri” – CH Ch Picadilly Hyspire Hidden Paradise) to see if we were inspired by anything there.

Since word play is totally my jam, Ben and I played around with legacy names for a few days. We scoured the lyrics of Bohemian Rhapsody and briefly considered HySpire Anyway The Wind Blows with the call name “Windy.” Meh. We loved HySpire Paradise RhapCity, but the only call name we could come up with was “Rose” (for Axl Rose) and that never sounded right. Boo.

So then we decided to reverse engineer the process and pick a call name first. After all, this is the name that we’re going to use every single day. We knew we weren’t going to breed the pup (she’s on a limited registration), and we weren’t currently active in any dog events, so her registered name was way less important.

So then I did what I always do when I can’t make a decision and I researched the heck out of call names. I found some good advice about picking something with two syllables and staying away from names that sound like commands.  I knew from our 13 y/o Lab Rylie that traditional spellings (like Riley) are always better than cutesy ones (oops!). At the end of the process, I was most inspired by the article “How To Pick The Absolutely Perfect Name For Your Pup” by Lo Lankford at BarkPost. The advice “Name Based on Looks” combined with “Pick Something From Your Childhood” led to a clear winner: “Piper” – Hyspire the Charmed One.

Wait, what? Oh, I skipped a few steps there? Let me make the connection. Pips is a female black Lab, so we thought a witchy name would fit her well.  I LOVED all things witches growing up, so Ben and I started going through the names of famous women accused of witchcraft. This was…um…a bit of a bummer, so we moved on to fictional witches which is where we struck paydirt. Watching episodes of the late 90’s TV show Charmed was my reward for making progress on my Masters thesis, and Piper Halliwell was my favorite of the three (eventually four) sisters, collectively referred to as “The Charmed Ones.” And that is how Piper got her call name and her registered name.

Fun fact: I found out later, while researching Piper’s 5-generation pedigree in more detail, that there was one bitch who was very accomplished in performance sports (as opposed to conformation, because everyone else in the line is uber-pretty). That bitch’s official name was SHR UACH GRCH Endeavor Piccadilly Pipe Dream JH NA NAJ RN WC CGC. What was her call name? You guessed it: Piper. If that’s not meant to be, I don’t know what is.