I talked to my mom on the phone today. She said they have a new foal on their ranch, a dark brown horse colt with white feet and a big star on his face. She asked me to help them come up with a name for it, and I’d love to except for the fact that they live 1,132 miles away.
See, I really think that to concoct the perfect name for a horse or pet, you have to get to know it just a little bit and see what characteristics jump out at you, or what feelings are invoked in you when you’re around the animal. From a distance, the foal could be “Star” or “Duke” but if you’re actually standing by his stall watching those white feet flashing around in play, names like “Disco” or “Sinatra” will pop out of nowhere and stick.
My horses have all been easy to name. I named my sorrel mare after my favorite flower, Daisy. Louis L’Amour inspired the name Milo for our Appaloosa gelding, because the horse in the painting on the front of his Western novel “The Man From the Broken Hills” looks a lot like our gelding, and the main character of the book is named Milo Talon. And our mare Cricket came to us already named.
If you’re naming a foal that’s to be registered, the best thing to do is come up with a catchy blend using the registered names of the sire and dam. My wonderful childhood horse, Rudy, was a son of Watch Joe Starlite and Tasha Jo, and we wanted his registered name to be Double Jo Jack. But somehow things got botched down at AQHA, they mixed up a couple of our name choices into a conglomeration, and he ended up with a set of papers that read “Jack Frost Double” which makes no sense at all. It surely didn’t prevent him from becoming a first class cowhorse, though! He was nicknamed Rudy after Rudy Gatlin, of the Gatlin Brothers country music group, and that suited him very well.
Whatever it is that makes you happy…whether it’s a breeze-blown field of daisies, the picture on the cover of a Western novel, or a member of one of your favorite music groups—the perfect name will attach itself to your horse. Just get to know the horse a little, and the name will appear like magic.
Hmmm….Magic. Great horse name, there.
