Do you name your dog's toys?

My spoiled dog Kitsune probably has more toys than some small children have. I rationalize his giant box full of toys by telling myself that at least Kitsune actually plays with almost all of the toys he has. Kitsune has so many toys that we couldn't find a toy box big enough to hold them all, and so eventually resorted to painting a card board box to match the colors of our bedroom.

Probably the first toys Kitsune learned to recognize by name were his "balls", which we use to refer to good old fashioned tennis balls. But then the longer we had Kitsune, the more types of balls he seemed to collect. He has plush balls, balls with squeakers in them, a soccer ball that Kitsune likes to push around the house, and I'm probably forgetting some. Don't even get me started on all the other types of toys he has - from plush squeaky toys to rubber chew toys, Kitsune has quite the impressive toy collection.

Eventually we got to the point when Kitsune had singled out a few special toys from the crowd as his favorites. We started referring to these toys by name, to differentiate them from all his other toys. For example, the squeaky teddy bear you see in the picture at the top of this hub is one of Kitsune's favorites, and somewhere along the line became known as "Ted Bear".

At first, only the few special toys had names. But then we started to noticed that Kitsune seemed to be learning the names we gave each of his toys. We'd ask him if he wanted to play with "T-Rex", and he'd trot over to his toy box, dig through his mountain of toys, and carry his plush t-rex toy over to us to play with. The more toy names he learned, the more of his toys we named. Until finally we got to the point we're at now, where pretty much every single one of Kitsune's vast collection of toys has it's own name.

I had company over the other week and we were playing with Kitsune, and without even thinking I named one of his toys and asked if he wanted to play with it. It was only after I got some strange looks that I realized that maybe I did sound a bit crazy referring to my dog's toys by name. I began to wonder just how crazy I am. So I'm posing the question to fellow dog owners, and owners of other types of pets too if they'd care to chime in. Do you have names for your pet's toys? If you do, is it because your pet seems to know his/her toys by name, because you needed a way to distinguish between different toys, because you thought it was cute to name them, or for some other reason? Would you think it was weird if you went to someone's house and they had a name for each of their pet's toys? Don't be afraid to offend me when answering, I freely admit to being a bit crazy - especially where my dog is concerned. And now if you'll excuse me, Kitsune and "Zorbex" the plush alien apparently want to play!