Dogs need more than love

Well, depending on how we define "love".

I feel my stomach drop every time I hear someone say “all dogs need is love”. It is a wonderful idea. (I love love.) But even wonderful ideas cause harm.

Love how we often define it—as a feeling first and foremost—isn’t enough. The narrative that it should be hurts dog guardians who are doing their best and still struggle. If love is all a dog needs, and you feel overwhelming affection for your companion and try to show them that, but you find yourself dealing with behavioral problems or fear or other issues, then… you must not be loving them right?

I felt this way with Scout. I loved her from the minute I met her and that love grew the longer we lived together. That love survived our darkest, hardest days—the ones where she screamed at the top of her lungs and nearly pulled the leash from my hands reacting to another dog, the ones where I cried in public (and then in private for good measure), the ones where I withered under the glare of owners with more composed pets. My love for her was a good and necessary start. You could argue it fueled me to do the other work our successful, harmonious relationship required.

But my love was not alone enough.

Dogs need love, and they also need understanding of species-specific behaviors and natural instincts. They need clear communication (based on a recognition that they don’t inherently recognize human speech patterns and abstract language). They need fulfillment. They need risk assessments. They need guidance.

We could group these needs under the umbrella of love—action-oriented love, love as a verb—but I still can’t get comfortable with the “all they need is love” mantra. It is always a gut punch. The word “all” makes it sound so simple, so easy, like something you should be able to give without breaking a sweat. “Just love them!” a well-intentioned social media commenter implores about a behavioral case waiting in a shelter. “All they need is love!”

“Yes,” I want to reply. “Love and hours of training and a willingness (not to mention ability) to adjust your daily routine to their current capabilities and and and…”

I never know precisely how to talk about this. One of the reasons I continue to struggle revising my Paws and Reflect book manuscript is that I can’t quite figure out how to strike the balance of this message: I love Scout more than I ever thought possible, and that love has not solved our problems. That love has sometimes made life harder than it needed to be. And while thousands of people related to my Instagram post on ways “my dog has helped and hurt my mental health”, hundreds also berated me for it. They tried to reinstate my greatest fear: I am the problem. The only problem. The always problem. All dogs need is love, and if I struggle with mine it is because I am failing at this obvious task (and not, you know, because of the inherent difficulties in asking dogs to adapt to the modern human world or setting unfair societal expectations or facing the fascinating-and-frustrating reality of nature and nurture or five dozen other confounding variables).

Life with dogs is absolutely about love. It is also about education, and access to resources, and considering how our behavior affects other creatures… including humans on the other end of their own leashes.