This writer had a dog, Bubba. For years, he would bark at her when he felt it was time for bed. Sometimes it was 8:30 PM, other times it was later. But he was insistent, and persistent: he'd stand by the stairs, give her a meaningful look, and bark until she went up with him. He'd fall asleep on the bed and she could stay up as long as she wanted, just as long as she stayed on the same floor.

Now a new study shows that people who sleep near their dogs don't experience disrupted sleep.

Here's more:

There’s no feeling in the world like cuddling up at night with your pooch, even when we think they’re messing up our sleep by hogging space, stealing covers and yapping at random sounds.


A surprising new study found that people who sleep near their dogs don’t experience disrupted sleep. If anything, the University of Toronto researchers discovered, we humans are the ones disturbing our dogs’ sleep.


And we feel safer sleeping with our dogs, hinting at “a deeper evolutionary history” between humans and dogs, said study co-author Ming Fei Li, who was a graduate student of evolutionary anthropology during the research.

Activity trackers similar to Fitbits monitored the nighttime activity of 25 human volunteers and their 38 dogs in southern Ontario to monitor how each affected the other’s sleep. The study, which was published Wednesday in PLOS One, was conducted during the COVID pandemic as part of a larger project comparing the activity patterns of socialized wolves and domestic dogs.

Turns out we disrupt their sleep, and they still are loyal to us. We do not deserve dogs.

Quite possibly.

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Cats absolutely do not care about you or your sleep.

It's interesting how their brains and evolution work.

We hope you oblige him, Kyla.

Very good of them.

Heh. Well played, Senator. It's an improvement for NBC.

Who wouldn't let their dog sleep on their bed? This writer had to put Bubba to sleep last December and she's missed him every day since.