Anyone else never name thier pets?

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When I was a late teenager (long before I knew of AS) I purchased a pet cockatiel and owned it several years before I had to give it away due to my apartment restrictions on pets.

I never gave it a name and just referred to it as "the bird." I didn't neglect it and taught it to talk and play, but everyone thought it was weird that I never named it.

I just didn't see the point to giving it a name, its not like it could understand it own name anyway.

Anybody else feel the same way, or am I the only one?

I name all my pets, and they all respond to their names. I name them with real names though, I hate pet names. Unfortunately, two of my current pets were not named by me and have pet names.

i didn't particularly want to name mine because it inexplicably felt kind of weird to me to me naming an animal like a person or after an inanimate object, or some crazy made up name, but i ended up naming mine with some reluctance anyways just because my other siblings named theirs and i didn't want to seem weird.
Although my first two already came with names so it saved me the trouble of having to haphazardly name them myself.
Like when i was 5, my grandma gave me a cat already named "Matty/Maddy" (sp?) & some time after that, one named "Socks". Those were my first 2 cats. Now long dead.

I have always named my pet ussually based off my obsession or tv or book show charictors I loved. though I have been having trouble comming up with names latly I have a cat named Lorien but we call her Kitten because she is still a small cat

All of my pets that i have named, have non-animal names, on the exception of 2, one is a cat named "Neko" which is cat in japanese and a chicken named "Turkey" however that was a poultry joke that no one else got... My other cat's name is Oscar and my chinchilla's name is Vincent.

All of my pets are given original names except for my plecostomus, which I named "Plecostomus."

It's very important to me that my pets have names, because the very mention of a name brings an individual's personality and history to mind. The night before I picked up my two cats from the animal shelter I spent hours thinking of what their names should be, which was hard, because I didn't know them. And then when I told people what to call them, their names were just labels, I suppose. But now, six years later, when one of their names is mentioned, a flood of images and memories is brought to mind, and each name carries real meaning.

For me, having multiple pets and talking about them, having names for them is important in terms of efficient communication, but if I had one bird, I don't see any difference between calling it "the bird" or "Tweety". Eh.... well maybe I do, since it bothers me to see smart animals with demeaning names like "Fluffy", but calling an animal by whatever species it is doesn't strike me as demeaning at all.

what's a plecostomus?

our fish don't have names

Freshwater algae sucker

I love those, my biology teacher had those in the class tank back in high school. They can get quite large, with the largest I've seen being a foot-long Plecostomus (or Pleco for short) inside a Jamaican supermarket fish tank with Tilapia.

Niceee.

i used to have some fish, but just like betta fish, guppies, ghost shrimp, goldfish, etc.
Betta fish are incredibly low maintenance

i've also had: parakeets, a hamster, several cats, i've caught some Alligator Lizards, salamanders, and frogs (all just local species) and kept those before, etc.

Plecostomus is coool ! !! I really like fish, btw. I have a pet hampster, Mavis.

I don't know why others name (or don't name) any given pet.

Molecular_Biologist: maybe because you respect/love them as an animal, not necessarily a pet, the latter of which implies owernship; hence naming.

I had a goat that I never named. He died at a young age though :[ I wouldn't name fish or hermit crabs.

As a kid my cats always ended up getting named by some other family member. I could never do it for some reason. I'd always call/think of him/her as "cat." Since there was only ever one at a time there wasn't any confusion who I was talking to or about. If I had a pet now I suspect it would remain unnamed. In a way I feel like, "what if I'm wrong? What if that's not his/her name?" LOL. I guess it would be a lot easier if they told me.

That reminds me of the movie Untamed Heart, when the girl asks the weird guy what his dog's name is, and he replies that he doesn't know, the dog never told him.

In my experience, though, you give an animal a name and that's what they become. Just as people grow into their names. At first it's just a name, and then when you know the person or animal, it means something when you hear the name spoken. Even on this message board reading a screen name or seeing an icon can evoke a sense of who this person is if you have read many of his or her posts.