With the growth of the blog and the rise of social media, I now receive more than 1,000 messages a day on average in various forms and am sorry to say I cannot read most of them. For years, I was able to answer every one. This is a loss. Communications from readers are valuable to me and helpful.  I try and scan them once or twice a day. Technology gives and takes away, this is it’s tragedy.

This morning, I woke up early and saw 120 messages waiting in my Facebook queue – Facebook doesn’t seem to grasp the dangers of too much connection – and I read the first one. It was from a person named Rebecca, and her profile photo was a bunch of hearts. She wrote me that she had just finished “A Good Dog,” my book about my border collie Orson. “I just read how you killed Orson. Shame on you. The ego to think that you can just take a life…He loved you, he trusted you, you betrayed his trust. I will be burning all your books that I own. You have broken my heart. Unimaginable betrayal.”

I’ve gotten many such messages since I decided to euthanize Orson and write a book about his life and that decision. I rarely answer them, but sometimes, I have learned, it is good to answer them as long as it is not in a spirit of anger, a defensive impulse. It clears them somehow, helps me affirm my self to remain grounded in the face of such hostility, one of the things the Internet, sadly, requires. The message got me to thinking about Valentine’s Day and the spirit of love. I wrote Rebecca back: “I am sorry to receive such a hateful message, Rebecca. Please don’t burn books in the name of Orson. You don’t want to stand with the people who kill ideas they don’t agree with. You did not love Orson any more than I did. I wish you peace and compassion and my wish for you is that you never write such an awful thing to anyone else in the name of kindness.”

I doubt I will ever hear back from Rebecca, people who write messages like that rarely want a discussion. I hope it will encourage her to think about the hearts she puts up on her profile photo and what they mean and the meaning of love when it comes to animals. I believe the love of animals and people are a reflection of one another. Love is love, and if you can’t love a human being or empathize with him or her, then I do not believe you can really love an animal. If you cannot love an animal and treat him or her humanely and with compassion, then you cannot love yourself or another human being. In my mind, I have learned it is the same thing.

In the animal world, it has become common for people to attack human beings in the name of loving animals. For me, this is a corruption of animal love, an exploitation of them to make us feel better about ourselves. Love is not fractional, not proportioned out in slices that make me comfortable and only when we like what we see and hear. True love is not that conditional, not for us any more than the dogs and cats we love us in that way. I am either loving or not, a hard thing to do and be in our world.

I believe anger and abuse breaks the heart of the abuser as well as the victim. As I have learned this lesson, I have begun to learn how to love.

And I have learned this: once the heart is comfortable abusing one, then it will sooner or later abuse the other. How we treat our animals, how we treat one another is ultimately the way we see and treat ourselves. I have always been at ease with my decision to put Orson down after he harmed three people, and I do not need the approval of Rebecca or others or feel the need to explain it. If the book doesn’t make my feelings for Orson clear – I believe it does – then no Facebook message will do the trick.

Valentine’s Day is a good time to consider what love really means. It speaks to compassion, empathy and a generosity of spirit. It is not confined only to the people we agree with. It cannot be applied to animals but not people. It does not live hand in hand with hatred and anger. When I see the hearts in  Rebecca’s profile, I see my task is treat her with compassion. She means only good. My job is to wish her peace and compassion. In that way, her message is a gift to me, a reminder of what it means to be a human being in love.