This week I have a dilemma. It’s a puppy that does not yet know its name and I have been trying to put it on the animal.

In other words, I have the age old problem once addressed by John Cleese on whether you acquire an animal or it acquires you.

Cleese in another clever reflection on animals wondered how you never saw a ‘guide cat’. He said that the animals were as different as chalk and cheese, in that a dog was docile and could be controlled, while a cat was still a native beast and could not be controlled. If you happened to give someone a ‘guide cat’, you were likely to find the owner half way up the curtains.

This business of naming cats and dogs has become quite fraught. For instance, when we were growing up we had a cat called Granny.
She was buried in the back garden under a plum tree with a cross over her, which read simply ‘Granny’ . . . I often wonder if people were shocked at this burial in the back garden of a granny. But her daughter Black Mom also lay in this favourite spot, so christened because of her colour.

The business of naming pets has become difficult, and there should be no presumption that because we have named one, as Cleese said, that you are in any way the controller of the situation.
For instance, we had another cat called John the Baptist, but this animal – named after one of the great prophets of the Bible – was hardly an advert for good living.

You see, John the Baptist occasionally disappeared for up to two weeks and came back looking rather penitent after maybe two weeks on the ‘ran tan’ with the lady cats in the neighbourhood.

He would return minus the tip of an ear or his snout, lie about the place in the sun and ‘feeding up’ on his return to the amorous background in our back garden.

You may wonder how he got the name ‘John the Baptist’ – well, a brother of mine gave him the name when he saw him one day sitting on the window sill eating flies and bees and spiders to his heart’s content.

He remembered in the Bible stories, the real John the Baptist had lived on locusts and wild honey and so gave this creature – who was anything but a saint – the name of the prophet who had met Jesus in the desert.

I don’t think of the naming of the Tomcat was in any way blasphemous. For us, John the Baptist had a real personality that came out at times when he was outstretched. In other words, the glint in his eye and the sureness of claws became positively dangerous when he was hunting.

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.