Britain’s Queen Elizabeth has named her two new puppies with nods to her past — and happy family memories.
Her new dorgi (a cross between a dachshund and a corgi) was named Fergus, for Fergus Bowes-Lyon, a hero uncle who died during World War I in 1915, according to The Sun.
The second pup, a corgi, was named Muick, after Loch Muick on the queen’s Balmoral estate in Scotland, a favorite getaway spot for the family.
“Both name choices are extremely poignant and dear to the Queen,” a source told the newspaper.
Both dogs were gifts, but the Brits have been mum about the source.
The 94-year-old queen has owned Welsh corgis and dorgis all of her adult life, and has often been photographed and filmed with a gaggle of little dogs at her feet. At one point, she reportedly owned eight of the sassy, short-legged herding dogs.
The queen’s corgi, and eventually dorgi, obsession began in the 1930s, when her father bought the family’s first Pembroke Welsh corgi, Dookie.
All of her corgis, until the new pup, were said to be descendants of her corgi Susan, given to her by her parents on her 18th birthday.
The queen’s beloved dorgi Vulcan died in December, leaving her with just one other dog, another dorgi named Candy. The last of her purebred corgis, a Pembroke Welsh named Whisper, died in 2018.
Before the pups arrived last month, the word was that Candy would be the queen’s last dog.
She “didn’t want to have any more young dogs,” Monty Roberts, equine (and sometime canine) adviser to the queen, told Vanity Fair in 2015. “She didn’t want to leave any young dog behind. She wanted to put an end to it.”
That bothered Roberts. “I have no right to try to force her into continuing to bring on young puppies if she doesn’t want to. That isn’t my right,” he said.
“But it still concerns me. Because I wanted her to believe in her existence until she’s no longer here, because she’s just too important to the world to contemplate checking out.”