We have a new family member, a Norwich terrier mix whom we’ve named Francesca. She will be 3 years old in August and weighs only 19 pounds. Like most terriers, she has a high energy level, especially when there are squirrels in the vicinity.

We adopted her from the same place we got her “brother,” Django. Tracy’s Dogs is a San Antonio nonprofit that rescues dogs from high-kill shelters in Texas. On May 21, they transported 63 dogs to Monroeville, PA, all of whom that had been adopted by folks in the area.

It is probably not unreasonable to refer to dogs as family members. A recent series of five studies by David Rubin and his students looked at misnaming, in which a person incorrectly calls a familiar other person by someone else’s name. Approximately 1700 participants were asked to recall instances in which they were misnamed or had misnamed someone else. In most cases, people are misnamed with the name of someone else in the same semantic category, i.e., a family member misnamed as another family member, a friend as another friend.

As an aside, the researchers reported 42 instances of misnaming involving pets. All but four of the pets were dogs. In 41 of these cases, the dogs were misnamed as family members, or vice versa. Although participants reported living with cats almost as often as dogs, only dogs were involved in misnamings, suggesting that dogs are regarded as family members while other pets are not.

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Our New Family Member, Django