Hi Joe -
I hear what you are saying. But if you don't have a horse named Dobbin, you probably have plausible deniability? :-)
One time I met the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Jane Smiley. She told me how someone got mad at her for a character in her book _Horse Heaven_.
The reader thought that she was writing about a real person he knew. But Smiley had made the whole thing up out of her imagination!
It is ironic that in trying to fictionalize the story I inadvertently hit on a one-syllable name that already belonged to a hot springs denizen.
My apologies.