afaik canine is the zoological term for dog. It could be more discriptive like telling you somehow that it is a police dog or armored dog but i wouldn t like that over z-9 cause that sounds better and since igot the pun i never forgot the refference. It wearing a kevlar vest isn t something i deem worthy to be in the name. Theres a lot of other atributes to other monsters that might be of use to know that are not in the creatures name. I am not sure why it confuses you but i simply remebered what it is … hm maybe renaming them manualy is a solution? I didn t check whether the names are hard coded or not so maybe its rather easy.
The police canine unit is often abbreviated to K-9 for radio codes and such. That’s what the pun is based on.