All dogs go to Heaven

Unconditional love is a lie.

The playbook for dealing with the death of a pet is limited.

My world has witnessed several moral pet revelations of late. There was the death of an excessively treasured pooch that hit my sister-in-law straight after the deaths of aged cats in my mother and brother in law’s household, retrospectively. On the flip side, my mom adopted a puppy! Add to that several SDYD clients weathering pet passings, as others celebrate new adoptions.

A lot of what is said in both ends of the pet ownership spectrum is the same. Good life; hero; joy; special; love and loved; and my favorite: Unconditional love.

This is the one that hangs me up.

It should be known I am a pet owner – to the extreme. My partner and I have five special needs cats and one especially cute pup: Benedict (you may have heard of him). I grew up in a family of horse and dog breeders; Robert, my better half, on a small, family, no-kill farm. I came to our relationship with a cat and dog in tow; he had just lost his senior feline. The care and eventually demise of my pets were massive in how we learned to trust and love each other. Those emergencies, hard choices, incremental wins, and experiences were a crash course in emotional and domestic compatibility and understanding.

I cannot have children. Not new news, however, its necessary information to any understanding of the place animals hold in our household. Robert and I both approach intimacy in relationships with difficulty. Our pets are many times a bridge, or byway, into our having candor and demonstrating vulnerability to and with each other. Purposeful and beloved, I am happy and unabashed in the power I feel for each one of my six-creature comforts, the ones that came before, and the ones the future do and shall bring.

That said: Unconditional love is bullshit, and no one really means it.

We hold massive conditions over our pets. And they do for us, too.

We withdraw from a pet once they demonstrate an action or habit undesirable. Did your pet: Shit in the house? Eating of a shoe? Biting of a baby? Not heel, come, or stilling too close? We do the same when our pets show an emotion we prefer not to address – fear or aggression towards an inconvenient stimulus (i.e. a neighbor or scooter rider), for example.

To that end, our pets judge us as well. They hide if we yell or strike them. They pout when we travel, piss in the shoes of a new lover they deem competition, come to those who feed them and shun those who do not. Dogs can hold nearly lifelong grudges against those who enact violence against their loved humans or even other animals.

Conditionals WILD on both sides. So why do we say it is otherwise?

Because pets do judge us for what we do, but not who we are. And that feels like an ease in condition - it is- but not entirely.

The only persons who judge for who we are – are bigots. Humanism is not a give and take economic discourse. Relationships however, with other humans, too often are. We yearn to be seen and affectioned beyond our circumstance justly. Enter our four-legged friends.

Coming home a dollar, or many, short, and too many hours older. Jogging between errands and work and therapy and doctors and dates and gyms and friend the wet eyes of a cuddly critter who says in one long and hungry look – I see your essence, mama. Not your job or the school you go or went to, not the shit your mother told you or what that bad boss says. The ex: I am glad they are gone because I get all of you. Fill my bowl, scratch my head, let me on that couch and walk me on a schedule and we are golden.

You read that? There are conditions there…

What is a relief is the true vision; it is reality and clarity. Not lack of condition, silly.

We need conditions as we necessitate judgement. Conditions are elemental to health. They are about knowing where we stand and who we stand for and, thereby, by. A body that asks nothing of us is not a body at all. What only ‘appears’ as a lack of condition is the specificity and simplicity of the terms.

Building this out: If you find yourself in a relationship you think of as highly or suffocatingly conditional, I wonder if it is so because the specifics are either milky or exaggerated? When the bars by which measures are made are ever changing and unreachable, failure is the only option. These terms and tenets aim to prevent success, judging our characters and stigmatizing who we are, and are seen.

I love and encourage accountability: that is what keeps us safe. That is how we know where we stand. In a professional sense, it is specificity in our job descriptions, as they evolve of course, and transparent check ins on those. In personal relationships it comes up less about communicating doing, but in how we do so. Add on to that the bounds and terms of engagement. Socially, conditions arise positively around civility and fail in profiling and assumptions.

Question: Should we judge our pets?

Answer: Yes!

Reason: To keep them safe.

Love is an interpretation. It can only be offered and not gaged. Your role in owning an animal (I use that word. “owning” as it is understood in a generalized American interpretation of the persons/pet economy, not because it is ethical!) is to keep said animal safe in body and spirit. To seek an emotional return on that is a sin. Our ability to interpret what love looks like from a pet is so skewed, I strongly encourage each of you to offer the fauna in your lives an architecture of compassion and reliability to food, walks (as species applicable), grooming, and physical attachment openness. There are times when their receipt of that will feel like love and others where it may fall short. That is a ‘you’ thing, and it is also your job to see it as so.

Ending here with a transparency bookend: my pets like and likely love my husband more than me. He is massively more liberal with food and his person than I am. I do the grooming, cleaning, healthcare, schedules, purchasing of supplies, cleaning of the home, and he does the play and cuddles. Our pets listen to me – creepily so – and are “well behaved” in my presence but have more fun with Robert. That is a fact and the same as with our human relationships. Robert is more likeable; I am more reliable. The task is acceptance of that. And how we can learn from each other. I could be softer, and he more stern. I might let go and he might level up. Either way, we both provide safety. And in a World of (fill in the blank) these are conditions to count on!