Apakah kuda anda punya nama?

"Does your horse have a name?"
We Westerners give names to everything, even inanimate objects: Big Blue; the Eiffel Tower; Herbie.

We also give names to our animals. Even the ones we shoot into space. The Albert series (Albert I, Albert II etc.) were a series of rhesus monkeys and mice launched by NASA in the early days of space programs. "Laika" was the name of the dog launched by the Soviets in a Sputnik 2, which was the first animal to orbit Earth. Her original name was Kudryavka (“Little Curly”).

Giving names to animals seems very natural to us Westerners, since we communicate with them. Or think we do. Indonesians typically don't give their animals any names. The Cidomo (Indonesian horse-drawn cart) drivers don't have names for their horses which I find bewildering, since they work as a team together every day and they DO communicate.

Do you remember the peasant in “Dances with Wolves”, the one who takes John Dunbar (Kevin Costner) to his prairie post, and who keeps talking to his mules in a funny voice: “Hoh, little Jim...” Yes, well, Cidomo drivers would give this guy odd stares.

Cognitively speaking, as soon as you give something a name, it becomes something else. So, a horse with a name is something else than a cat without a name. Which you wouldn’t argue with. And is not a horse with a name also something else than a horse without a horse-shoe? And now, in this string of formidable Socratic dialectic, the final stroke: is not a named horse (e.g. Jolly Jumper) a different thing to a nameless horse (insert: horse without a name)?

I wondered thusly, what does a name do for an animal’s self-perception and identity? Do Western cats have - because they have names - different identities and perceptions of themselves than Indonesian cats?

In the wild, surely animals don’t call each other by names. They do communicate. But do they verbally address one another by names, or just by the sound and intonation of their voice? So have we Westerners in fact alienated our cats and dogs from themselves by giving them names that are unnatural to them? Have I forced onto my dog the idea that he could be a “Jerry” when in fact he is a “Jim”?

Sorry, Jim.