What Are The Rules Around Naming Dogs In France?

If you’re a pet owner, you likely had a lot of fun (or frustration!) naming your pet. Do you go silly and call them something like pancake or do you go aggressively normal and name them something along the lines of Barry?

The choices are endless and while it obviously isn’t anything like naming a child, there is a certain weight to it as you are literally naming an animal that lives in your home.

It’s all very surreal if you think about it too much – which you shouldn’t.

Anyway, it turns out that in France, your choices are a little more limited as there are actually naming conventions around naming dogs over there. Sacre bleu!

In a recent video on her TikTok account, travel influencer Roya did a skit of two people discussing a dog and the year in which he was named. In the skit, the ‘French’ person assumed that her dog Peanut was born in 2019 because his name begins with the letter ‘P’.

It turns out that the dog was born in 2020 and, therefore, should have been named something beginning with the letter ‘R’.

Is this all making sense to you?

Yeah, same, I was a little lost. So I did some digging to find out what exactly was behind this convention.

According to Connexion France, this actually goes back to 1926. Since then, dog owners who hoped to register their pedigree dogs have had to name their dogs in accordance with the Société Centrale Canine in its Livre des Origines Français (LOF) which means naming them from the letter of the year they were born.

This is because the Société Centrale Canine has responsibility for keeping track of the genealogy of pedigree dogs and this rule was brought in to simplify the listings of these pups as sometimes owners would delay registering their dog at birth, making registers not-quite accurate, with older dogs appearing after younger dogs.

Since the introduction of this rule, the letters for each year have cycled through the alphabet with some exceptions. The letters K, Q, W, X and Y are left out due to the scarcity of names.

As for the French dog name letter for 2024? It’s V! As one commenter said on the original TikTok, “Can’t wait to name my dog Vulva this year ❤️”