Dog owners, be honest. Do you let your dog sleep in your bed? Apparently almost half of us owners share their beds with pets, and a study by Canadian researchers at the University of Toronto has found that people sleep better with a dog snuggling up with them: it makes them feel safer and more relaxed.
I have to confess that I really didn’t want to join this trend. For the vast majority of our dog’s three years with us, she has slept in her crate in a separate room. We were very strict about the crate training at the start because we were determined to reduce the risk of separation anxiety.
When they’re puppies, dogs learn how to live in the human world, making it a crucial time to introduce the concepts of traffic, weeing outside, and sleeping in a separate room without screaming your head off. And so that is what we did.
It worked like a charm and Mona is a wonderful, even tempered, snuggly cockapoo who is only mental when we’re outside and there’s a ball involved. When the night winds down she will trot to her crate with little fuss, wait outside for a goodnight kiss, and then curl up inside until morning. She waits patiently until we get her and then heads to the bedroom for a quick morning cuddle. And we got to keep our bedclothes (relatively) dog detritus free.
I’d like to say we did this also for hygiene reasons. Owning a dog makes you desperately familiar with just how much of their paws are stomping through, and their noses are sticking into, piles of the most disgusting items you’ve ever encountered. To let that on your bed, where you honk your little shoos and dream your little dreams, is to desecrate that. It’s foul.
But the muck of a dog never bothered me that much. And so when Mona began her recent campaign of attrition, I could only hold out for so long.
Mona’s secret weapon is that she’s a real snuggler. Whoever goes to bed first (normally me) will be joined by her where she will curl up in your legs and sigh dramatically about her long hard day of not contributing to the mortgage. As you wind down from a long day, feeling the soft warm weight of your pet against you is one of the most soothing, life-affirming ways to drift off.
We would cherish these moments, but would always take her to bed at a certain point before lights out. The bed was ours – she could visit but not stay. And so one of us would coax her away and she would trot off with little fuss, awaiting our morning reunion.
This worked for a long time. And we were all happy. Then she got her trump card: the summer of endless heatwaves, where it felt genuinely irresponsible to pop her in a small hot box. So she got to sleep in the bed a night or two. To sprawl out and help cool her down. But since then she has been more and more reluctant to leave, guilting us for daring to disturb her sleep. And because we are weak, small people worn down by the exhaustion of a home renovation, we let her stay.
Which is how a day became a week, and then a month. But the shine has firmly come off the apple.
Every night I fall asleep with a heart full of love and harmony, and every morning wake up cold, disturbed and resentful. Because that study is wrong – I may fall asleep feeling safe and relaxed but in the middle of the night the bed becomes a warzone. She sleeps like a stone in the most inconvenient spot, preventing us from stretching our legs or cordoning off our duvet.
She will not move no matter how often you resentfully jab her with your foot, until you are drifting off again. That is when she will decide to start aggressively licking her paws, scratching her ears or going for a late night wander around the mattress.
By morning, she will be innocently dozing right in the middle of us, unbothered by the chaos she has borne. And because I am a sucker I will pet her once again, resolving to end this cycle come bedtime.
The fact that arguments against dogs in beds are compelling should help my case to undo this new arrangement. As Primrose Freestone, associate Professor of clinical Microbiology at the University of Leicester puts it to me: “Dogs sleeping on beds is a real hygiene risk as dogs are well known to carry human bacterial pathogens in their mouths. Therefore bedding that has had dogs even touching it needs washing much more regularly than that of human only inhabitants.”
Freestone recommends washing the sheets and blankets every two days in hot 60oC water plus detergent as this temperature kills bacteria. “Without the pet contact, such bedding needs only a weekly wash for most people,” she adds, “so an incentive to keep the dog off the duvet.”
But I’m pathetic and I just can’t say no entirely. And so, armed with this burden of laundry and a hostile night’s sleep, my wife and I have reached a compromise. The dog can sleep in the bed every other night. I would miss her if we never slept together, but I cannot keep waking at 3am trying to weasel my legs back under my own covers. I have to take a stand.
And more importantly, she has to know who’s boss. When we tried to take her to her crate the other night, she was a full on brat, refusing to move from the bed and then stonewalling outside her crate. The next day she huffed and puffed like she’d been betrayed.
We will welcome her back with open arms – as long as she remembers it’s our bed, not hers.
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