Animal Diaries Archive

What's in a name?

26 January 2007

We all may be familiar with Shakespeare's quote; "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet," and the obvious truth in it, but that doesn't mean we don't put a lot of thought behind the names we give our baby animals! Having a constant cycle of new babies coming our way while the older animals head home to the farm means that we're always having to come up with new names, and people frequently ask us where they come from and who gets to decide on them. And, well, the fact of the matter is that we get our name inspirations from just about everywhere! Take for example our most recent arrivals, a litter of six very individual piglets.

'Wilbur' was an instant name choice for the holiday season, so one of our little ones was named after the piglet in EB White's 'Charlotte's Web', which is of course a current film being shown at the cinemas!

'Winkle' the piglet was a dedication to keeper Tony's grandfather, named after a character in the stories he used to tell.

'Jet' could apply to almost any piglet, because they're all so speedy when the dash about! But we found a piglet to whom the name could apply doubly, being jet black all over.

'Jamie' and 'Timmy' were named after good friends of keeper Barbara. The human 'Jamie' (James) eats about as slowly as the piglet Jamie takes his bottle! While Timmy the piglet wolfs down his meals as fast as his human counterpart.

'Wanda' is the final piglet, an homage to the film 'A Fish Called Wanda', a comedy of the early nineties that's quite popular amongst our staff.

As you can see, giving names to our new baby animals can be a lot of fun! But of course we are always open to suggestions, so if you ever come by Kids Zoo and have a good idea for an animal's name, feel free to suggest it to us! You never know, you may well read about an animal with your name some time in the future.