More Awesome Than You!

Another thread reminded me that I wanted to ask this.

I have been told that changing first names of any sort in SimPE is a VBT. I have like three wolves/dogs in my neighborhood named Alegra. I would like to change that, but I'm not quite sure how to go about doing it, since the features that work to change sims names don't seem to work for pets.

Advice?

Doesn't the lot debugger have an option to change names?  You will need to be in debug mode, and then shift click it.  This is probably a safe thing to do since it's awesome.

That only works for the selected sim.  How are you going to select a stray animal?

Add stray to household by whatever means desired, change its name, and then give it away to a townie (which would make it a stray gain)?

Alternately, wait for someone to come up with a pet-renamer that works on strays, or a selectability hack that works on strays. But I'd think the above method should work.

That still doesn't tell me how the name is actually changed. How does adding it to the household let you change it's name? Not that I would do this method. That would be silly for even the handful of strays/pets I want to have names changed.

There's an option to change a pet's name when you take him/her to the mirror.

No, you need to make a phone call to change a pet's name. It is with the option  to register a new breed.

No hack is needed to change a pet's name, you can rename any pet you have with the phone, the Lot Debugger is not needed.