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Sleeping with your pets can lead to disease

Sleepy Dog
Sleepy Dog

Web Watch knows a number of people who have no problem encouraging their pets to sleep with them in their beds every night.  We’ve even seen our friends cuddle up with their dogs on the family room doggy bed to take a nap.  (We’ve seen the same people take a nap on doggy bed without their dog too, so maybe this isn’t such an unusual situation for them.)

But professors at the University of California-Davis school of veterinary medicine say that SLEEPING WITH YOUR PET MAY NOT BE AS GOOD FOR YOU AS YOU MAY THINK.

After researching all sorts of pet diseases, they’ve found that sleeping with your pet may lead to the transmission of all sorts of diseases or system disorders… including bubonic plague. 

Seriously.

The professors did backtrack a little bit, saying that such incidents were likely to be rare, and that “the benefits of having a pet… far outweigh the negatives”.  Calling the bubonic plague a “negative” is a bit optimistic, in our opinion.

Of those households with a pet, anywhere from 14% to 62% let their dog or cat sleep with them.

Which brings up a different point — Web Watch stayed at a hotel recently that welcomed pets, to the point where the room we stayed in even had a pet bed for their four-legged guests.  We wonder how many of the pet guests stayed in their pet bed versus joining their owners in the main hotel bed.

And if the pets did sleep in the person bed, we have to wonder how often the hotel does a “deep clean” to ensure that their bed linens and mattress aren’t infested with fleas, pet dander, or other icky pet stuff.