The 37 Dog Problem: Not a Sherlock Holmes Mystery
If you learned that your dog has the same name as the dog that lives down the street, that probably wouldn’t completely rock your world. You’ve probably encountered plenty of pups named Fido, Spot, Rover, or even Stormaggedon: Destroyer of Fire Hydrants.
While there’s no harm in a whole community bursting with dogs who all happen to share the same name, you probably wouldn’t want that kind of duplication under your own roof. It’s chaotic enough when a father and son share a name—neither one knows who’s in trouble when Mom bellows it in that unmistakably doom-laden tone. Now picture a trio of dogs all perking up at once, each convinced the summons is meant for the other two. You’d have confusion, tail-wagging panic, and at least one innocent pup pleading for mercy.
There are many things one might reasonably expect to limit the number of dogs sharing the same name. Human imagination, for one. Common sense, for another. Possibly even the occasional copyright lawsuit from Disney when the seventy-third “Pluto” trots onto the scene. What you likely wouldn’t expect is that the American Kennel Club—the very registry meant to impose order on canine chaos—runs into a hard wall at exactly thirty-seven. Not thirty-six. Not forty. Thirty-seven dogs per breed may share a name, and then the system throws its paws up and refuses to go further.
Why thirty-seven? Because of a Roman numeral problem. A database problem. A problem so gloriously specific that it could only have been created by someone staring directly into the abyss of software development and whispering, “Aye, that’ll do.”
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The AKC Naming Rules: Simplicity Meets Bureaucracy
Officially, the American Kennel Club (AKC) permits exactly 37 dogs of each breed to be registered under the same name. If you want to name your new adorable whippet “Finn,” you may do so—but so may dozens of other hopefuls. The way the AKC keeps all the Finns straight is by appending Roman numerals to their names, counting upward with increasing resignation:
- Finn (the original)
- Finn II
- Finn III
- Finn IV, V, VI…
- Finn XXXVII
That last one—XXXVII—is the magic cutoff. After that, the AKC can’t (or won’t) go further.
The Roman Numeral Catastrophe
This, as it turns out, is not an aesthetic decision. No shadowy committee sat down and declared, “No dog shall bear the name Finn XXXVIII, for that is simply too silly.” The truth is both better and dafter: deep in the dusty bowels of the AKC’s registration system, the field for Roman numeral suffixes was originally limited to six characters.
Why six? Because someone in the 1980s or so thought, “Surely no dog name will ever require more than six Roman numerals,” which sounds exactly like the kind of optimistic engineering that also gave us floppy disks and the Y2K problem.
And indeed, Roman numerals behave nicely until you hit thirty-seven:
- I (1)
- VIII (8)
- XV (15)
- XXVIII (28)
- XXXVII (37)—six characters
- XXXVIII (38)—seven characters, and therefore forbidden like feeding the dog under the table while Mom isn’t looking
In other words, the AKC can count your dog’s names only as far as a Roman numeral that physically fits into the old database field. After that, it shrugs, closes the ledger, and says, “Sorry… No more dogs by that name are allowed.”
Yes, This Means Certain Names Are “Name-Locked” Forever
Popular dog names are surprisingly vulnerable to this limitation. Consider classics like:
- Max
- Bella
- Luna
- Duke
- Lucky
- Shadow
Once thirty-seven of each name exist in a breed, no new dog may register under that same name again. Somewhere out there, a hopeful owner is trying to register a dog as “Duke,” only to receive a politely bureaucratic message saying, in essence, “We’ve enough Dukes to run our own parliament, thanks.”
A Few Fun Facts While We’re Here
- The AKC explicitly forbids owners from adding their own Roman numerals. Only the AKC may assign them. Which means somewhere in their offices is a person whose job it is to decide when a dog becomes “VI” instead of “V.” A noble calling if ever there was one.
- Dog names can be up to 50 characters long (including spaces). This explains the heroic tradition of owners calling their dog “Moose” at home while the papers describe it as “Champion Sir Moose of Highland Meadow the Third.”
- Clubs in other countries have their own peculiar rules. The Fédération Cynologique Internationale (FCI), for instance, likes to change the required first letter of registered dog names each year by country. Some years you get “Z.” Breeders do not enjoy “Z years.”
- Thoroughbred horses have a similar problem. The Jockey Club tracks names so carefully that once a horse becomes famous, their name is retired permanently. There will never be another Secretariat, Ruffian, or Seabiscuit. Dogs, meanwhile, apparently get thirty-seven tries.
The Lesson in All This
There’s something beautifully human about discovering that a multi-million-entry national dog registry is ultimately constrained not by genetics, breed standards, or common sense, but by a Roman numeral field in an aging computer system. It’s a classic reminder of how institutions, much like terriers, can be defeated by the smallest of things.
And until someone decides to widen that field to seven characters—or ditch Roman numerals altogether—we live in a world where the number of dogs named “Finn” is governed by the architectural choices of a programmer who likely never imagined it would become the topic for an article written by a blogger who was sweating to make a deadline.
But here we are.
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