Unconditional Love, Trans-Conditional Love, and the Human-Companion Animal Bond

Recently I was reading a very well-researched study of human-animal interactions and couldn’t help noticing how often both researchers and those surveyed used the phrase “unconditional love” to describe a cherished quality of a companion animal. As surely anyone with any interest in companion animals knows, that phrase crops up in the mass media so frequently that most of us could write the articles or conduct the interviews ourselves:

Interviewer: “And what is it about Ipswich that you like the most?”

Owner: “It’s his unconditional love for me.”

In the midst of all of this certainty, I found myself in a very awkward position: I had no clear idea what the phrase means. And given that a web search for articles that include both “animals” and “unconditional love” yielded 37,400 hits, it seemed that the time had come for me to figure this out.

First of all, what exactly did I know about unconditional love? Well, I knew that unconditional means without conditions or absolute. Because presumably we couldn’t attribute something to our pets that we couldn’t express for them ourselves, this raised the question: Do most pet owners place any conditions on their pets? Of course we do. Whether we admit it or not, we expect them to respond to our shared physical, mental, and emotional environment in what we consider an acceptable manner. For example, most of us expect our pets not to destroy our belongings, keep us awake all night barking or yowling, or harm us or visitors to our homes, among other conditions.

But what about our pets: Do they put conditions on their relationship with us, too? We can never know for sure, but it seems reasonable to assume that they do. Because living with us keeps these animals from meeting many of their physical, mental, and emotional needs themselves, they probably either would expect us to fulfill these for them or to provide them with the wherewithal to do this for themselves. If we couldn’t or wouldn’t, the behavioral and/or medical problems that would result most likely at least would undermine if not destroy their relationships with us. After all, displaying unconditional love requires a certain amount of energy and animals unable to fulfill their most basic needs may not have that to spare.

Based on these observations, it appears that the love we and our pets share isn’t really unconditional. However, I don’t consider that necessarily a bad thing for several reasons. For one, only when we recognize any conditions or limits that we place on our relationships with our pets can we do what needs to be done to make it as easy as possible for ourselves and them to fulfill these. For another, knowing any conditions or limits our animals might experience allows us to respond more quickly to changes that might challenge their limits and undermine our relationship. Whereas others might tolerate their pet’s attacking visitors as a symbol of their unconditional love—”We love Sparky so much, we don’t care what he does”—those who acknowledge their limits as well as their pets’ will seek ways to understand and relieve the stress that results in the negative animal behavior.

Having apparently dismissed the concept of unconditional love because it may lead us to disregard legitimate human and animal limits to the detriment of the relationship, let me hasten to add that my rumination on this subject also led to me conclude that I truly do believe that a very special human-companion animal love can and does exist. However, unlike unconditional love that leads some to deny the existence of limits, I’m referring to a love that acknowledges and transcends these. Unlike the concept of unconditional love so often attributed to animals, this knowledge-based trans-conditional love is bi-lateral, flowing from the owner to the animal as freely as it does from the animal to the owner. Even better, because it’s based on knowledge as well as emotion, it creates a mutual respect for each other’s needs that leads to an awareness of those conditions we both inevitably have. And that mutual respect and awareness for each other, in turn, compels each of us to strive to be better than we each would be alone.

That kind of love makes sense to me.

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