Everyday Life with a Dog – the Sleeping Corner
Posted by Dog Supplies Advice in Dog Supplies Tips, tags: dog care, dog sleeping corner, dog supplies, dog supplies advice, Dog Supplies TipsEveryday Life with a Dog – the Sleeping Corner
The dog’s bed-the spot where it sleeps at night and rests during the day-also should be in a quiet corner and away from drafts. If you live in an apartment, the bed should not be in the hallway or next to the door, where the dog may assume the role of watchdog for the entire building. A dog spends not only the night but also much daytime in its bed, unless it has taken to lying on a soft armchair, for dogs prefer not to lie at floor level. To keep your dog from taking over all the chairs you can give it its own. Put the dog’s blanket on one chair, less to protect the upholstery than to make the dog feel that this chair belongs to it.
If you live in a house with a yard, the dog’s daytime resting place can be near the door. After all, you want your dog to let you know when strangers approach.
In the summer dogs love to lie outside the door or on a balcony, where they can nap or watch the world. But there should be a blanket to keep the dog off the cold floor.
At night dogs love best sleeping in a bedroom. There are understandable reasons for this. Conditioned by its ancestral wolf past, a dog always wants to be close to its humans and feels banished if locked out of the bedroom. This is not true if you have two or more dogs. They can form a pack of their own and sleep together somewhere else. To let one of several dogs sleep in the bedroom is wrong: This dog would feel so favored that the whole dog hierarchy would be upset.
It is absolutely essential that a dog whose owners work and are away from home all day be allowed to sleep with its humans. Such a dog’s bed belongs in the bedroom. The compromise solution of separate bedrooms if one half of a couple refuses to sleep with a dog in the room leads to the dog ’s becoming much more attached to the person in whose bedroom it sleeps. Keep in mind, after all, that the night is the longest stretch of time the dog spends close to its people. Closeness here means physical proximity but not necessarily physical contact.
A dog in the bed. Most dog owners deny that their pets sleep with them, but the real picture is somewhat different. I read the following figures in a recent survey: Forty percent of the dog owners let their dogs get on the bed (only the foot end, of course!); 20 percent would like to share their beds with the dog but don’t for hygienic reasons; and the rest find the idea of dogs on beds disgusting. It’s all a matter of opinion.
If basic hygiene is observed and the dog has had all necessary vaccinations, there is very little danger of transmission of canine diseases to humans.
The danger of infection increases rapidly, however, if the rooms and the dishes used by dogs are not cleaned regularly and carefully.
My personal view: I am in favor of letting a dog in the bedroom if it sleeps on its own chair or mattress. But I don’t like dogs on my bed; it’s too uncomfortable. I also object to a dog basket in the bedroom because, first of all, a basket is hard to keep clean and, secondly, because it creaks if the dog moves during the night.
I put a second water bowl next to the bedroom door in case the dog gets thirsty at night. The occasional nocturnal lapping of water doesn’t bother me.
Fluffy and Grandmother’s Bed
Fluffy is a beagle who is allowed to sleep on his owner’s bed. When the family went away on a trip, Grandmother agreed to look after the house and Fluffy. She let him sleep in the guest bedroom with her but refused to have him up on the bed. Grandmother remained firm in spite of Fluffy’s whining and begging, and she threw him off the bed when he jumped up on her feet. The second night he scratched at the door. He evidently needed to go out. Grandmother got up and put on her bathrobe. As she walked toward the door, Fluffy dashed past her, leaped into the empty bed, snuggled up against the wall, and refused to be budged. From that night on he shared his dogsitter’s bed.
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