My Animal Naming Genius

A couple posts ago, I described a situation about one of the cats we'd adopted disappearing. Thankfully, Balls has returned. But I mentioned in the post who I'd sometime describe how he got his name. And since Country got such a good laugh out of the name, I thought maybe you guys might enjoy the full story.

You see, when these four cats started roaming around, 2 pairs looked very similar. One pair was the same color of grey, very alike in build. The other pair also resembled each other in size and had the same type of coloring, the white and dark patches that you might see on a Holstein cow.

M had trouble telling them apart, and just took to calling them the "Grey cats" and the "Patch cats." The grey cats were both female (mother and daughter likely) and the patch cats were a male and female (brother and sister). You could tell the grey cats apart, even though they were alike in their build, one was significantly larger. So this helped me differentiate them. The patch cats it was more difficult, since they were so much alike. So I did what I thought would be perfectly normal, I just looked for the teabag.

For the life of her, M couldn't figure out how I was so unerringly able to identify which was the boy and which wasn't. Though there were other traits that allowed me to tell the difference depending on how they were standing, this was the sure-fire clincher.

One day, finally exasperated on how easily I was able to tell them apart, asks, "How in the hell are you doing that?! You always know which one is the boy cat!"

Since the cat was presently in my lap, I decided to demonstrate my amazing feat of acuity. Grabbing and lifting his tail with one hand, and pointing to his furry nether regions with the other I said, "Why honey, it's simple. Just look for the balls."

And thus, a cat's name is born. Even though he doesn't have em anymore.