How He Was Named

When I found our puppy on-line, his breeder had named him Tundra which means ‘a treeless plain of arctic and subarctic regions’. This was sort of appropriate since he was mostly a vast white region… he has very few dark spots on his body. However, we hated this name with a passion. It just didn’t flow from our mouths. It seemed awkward saying it. So we renamed him and called him… Newman! Paul Newman had the most beautiful blue eyes and Steve thought that naming our blue-eyed baby ‘Newman’ would be fitting. But we tried that for a few days, and that didn’t seem to flow either… So we held a sort of contest within the family to come up with the best names for this puppy that so badly needed an identity (even though he’d never know the difference since he couldn’t actually hear us call out his name). We came up with all kinds of names. I spent hours on the internet searching for rare and masculine names; something that would be appropriate for an exceptionally large 4-legged creature. We had a list of over 20 names and then by a show of hands we narrowed it down to 10… and then down to 4 names. And then the pressure was on. There were 7 of us voting and the name that got the most votes was gonna be IT!! I couldn’t take it anymore. For days we’d been calling him Newman or puppy. And quite honestly, puppy felt better than Newman – and I knew puppy wouldn’t cut it for long… So we did another show of hands and there were 2 names that tied; Zeus and Zander. Personally, I really wanted Zander to win. It is Greek for ‘Defender of the People’. I thought that was sweet and everyone else thought it was questionable… because how would a deaf dog defend its people?? So, needless to say, Zeus won out. In Greek mythology Zeus is the‘God of all Gods’.