One nice thing about not being a commercial success is that I can change my mind about things as I gain more knowledge and experience. I can say “Whoa, was I wrong about that! This makes ever so much more sense!” without losing sponsors or watching the value of my empire plummet. Nor do I have to worry about offending my groupies because a) I don’t have any and b) those independent thinkers who do follow my work know I often put a different spin on bond and behavior topics. For better or worse—depending on your view—that spin may change when I read a new study or book, or interact with a client or animal who doesn’t support my existing belief structure.
Last month when I did a workshop on the role of the human-animal bond in the prevention and treatment of canine behavioral problems, it dawned on me that I’d done it again. The definition I was using for a quality human-companion animal bond was once again not the same one I’d used in the past. This wasn’t one of those dramatic “Oh, my God, what was I thinking??!!!” transformations that’s accompanied by the exhilaration that occurs when you realize that some new definition doesn’t contain all those annoying little details you had to ignore to make the old one work. My new definition of the human-companion animal bond simply represents the evolution and expansion of my old one.
Early in my career in my hippy and post-hippy days, I defined the bond as love. If the love was there between human and animal, the relationship would be good. Thanks to some excellent reality therapy from my clients and patients, I realized that this wasn’t the case. Love wasn’t enough. There were people and animals who loved each other very much who were not experiencing a quality relationship with each other.
At that point I discovered there were two possible reasons for this. One was that our definition of love was wrong. When I delved into the subject it became clear that for as much as we use the word “love,” there’s no more agreement on what it means any more than there is on the meaning of aggression. So if, for example, a person defines love as showering an animal with specific gifts—such as fattening treats or activities beyond the animal’s capacity—and the animal gratefully accepting these, that love might work against the formation of a solid relationship. Then there are all those people who define a loving animal as an obedient one, regardless how much stress obeying those commands may place on the animal.
This led me to conclude that highly personal, subjective, and sometimes flat out arbitrary and capricious definitions of love were such a common human response that using love as an indicator of a quality bond was iffy at best.
The second reason why love didn’t guarantee a quality bond is that all the love in the world isn’t much help if we don’t have a clue regarding the proper way to relate to an animal.
As I pondered this valid attack on my bond = love definition, I decided that the solution was to add knowledge to the definition. And once again, if you read some of my past writing or attended any of my seminars during this period, the need for knowledge played an increasing role in my definition. During that phase my thinking went like this: The more we know about what’s physically and behaviorally normal for our animals as members of a particular species as well as individuals, the easier it will be to be attuned to their needs as well as our own.
I still believe this and have since added the importance of knowing ourselves in order to have a quality relationship with an animal. Like our animals, we humans all have needs and limits, too. The more we honestly acknowledge these up-front, the better our chances of establishing a stable and equitable relationship with members of another species.
During this same period I solidified my thinking that a bond is not a guaranteed positive relationship that we humans create with an animal. Quite the contrary, any time human and animal share the same space, a bond will exist. The only exception to this that I can think of would be the unlikely case in which an animal and a person who were both physiologically and/or mentally incapable of acknowledging the existence of the other happened to wind up in the same place at the same time. But for the great majority of humans and animals, some kind of relationship will exist. It might be stronger or weaker, good, bad, or ambivalent, but it will be there.
Not only that, the relationship is bilateral. It doesn’t just flow from the superior human to the inferior animal. It goes both ways and the exchange may be equitable with both giving and receiving equal amounts. Or it may be skewed in one direction or the other. Some people may give far more than they receive from their animals and some animals may give far more than they receive from their owners.
This brings my evolving definition of the human-animal bond up to the present. When I looked at the combined effect of the more romanticized definitions of love, the lack of solid knowledge about our animals’ and our own needs relative to them, and the common disregard for the bond’s inherent bilateral nature, words like “fear,” “anxiety,” and “stress” came to mind. And needless to say, those words have come up increasingly in my commentaries and podcasts, as well as in communications with clients, seminar participants, and those in my mentoring program. But what I realized as I was preparing for the bond seminar last month is that all of these detrimental states arise from a lack of trust. Moreover when problems arise, that lack of trust between human and animal is more often than not bilateral, i.e. it’s mutual.
In spite of the billions we Americans spend on veterinary care, training, pet food, and a mind-boggling array of all things pet, and regardless how much we may toss the word “love” around, many of our relationships with animals are governed by fear. We often don’t trust ourselves to create a mutually rewarding relationship with an animal. Some, maybe many of us also don’t trust the animals’ desire or ability to create rewarding relationships with us. That takes us back to that lack of knowledge as well as a willingness to let animal-care professionals assume that responsibility for us. At the same time as we talk about our great love for our own animals and even animals in general, that lack of trust and fear bubbles just below the surface. Every time our pets eagerly accept a treat, it raises the dark specter of some Other with an even better treat luring the animal away from us. We want to think the dog would prefer us to a hunk of food offered by a stranger, but then we remember how readily Spot ignored us and focused on the trainer demonstrating how powerful those treats were…
Nicoli Machiavelli offers some profound insight into the simultaneous existence of love and fear in his bookThe Prince: they can’t co-exist. He’s right about that. The two emotions produce quite different, physiologically exclusive responses. And because the two can’t co-exist, we have to choose. What Machiavelli wisely, but disturbingly points out is that because we must choose, we’ll choose fear because it’s the safer of the two. Not the best choice, but the safest.
Of course, Machiavelli wasn’t referring to how people relate to their companion animals, but I see evidence of this phenomenon every day. As soon as we give into the fear, we create a barrier of distrust between ourselves and our animals that will interfere with our achieving a mutually rewarding and fulfilling relationship from then on. Unless that mutual trust is there along with the love, knowledge and everything else, there will be a bond, but it won’t be nearly as good as it could be.