Researchers at the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM) have explored how co-sleeping with your dog may impact your sleep – and vice versa. A paper recently published in PLOS One by UTM department of anthropology students Ming Fei Li and Lavania Nagendran looked into the evening activity patterns of humans and their pet dogs. The research is part of a larger study by the pair, relating to evolutionary activity in dogs. They found that humans’ interrupted sleep impacted dogs more than vice versa. “We found that humans woke up first, followed by dogs, more frequently than the other way around,” Nagendran told CPNews.ca in a Zoom interview on Oct. 13. The data didn’t look at what specifically disrupted the sleep, though Nagendran said that could be a good follow-up study. While the study didn’t find evidence that people slept better with a dog, Li said the findings suggest that there are a lot of psychological benefits to having a dog around, like feeling secure. “We found that just having dogs on the bed did not affect sleep at all,” she said. “However, survey respondents said they felt safer with their dogs.” The study also considered if there were other human co-sleepers, but found there was no effect with that factor. Methodology The researchers looked at a total of 25 humans and 38 dogs, as several of the human participants had more than one canine. All the study participants were given an actigraphy sensor, a research-grade health monitor like a fitbit. Human participants wore them on their wrists, while the dogs wore them on a collar. At the end of the one-month study, the human participants filled out a questionnaire. The researchers only accepted participants who had a husky or a malamute, which are breeds closely related to wolves. A quarter to a third of participants allowed the dogs to sleep on the bed all the time, while the others allowed some of the time, or didn’t allow at all. “That’s how we were able to control for co-sleeping between humans and dogs,” Li said. The researchers admit that their findings could vary if they focused on different dog breeds, and there’s much more that could be studied. “It’s such an area for growth in this study,” said Nagendran. Human and dog behaviours connected Ultimately, the study found that nighttime behaviours of humans and dogs are correlated, more often than not. “When humans move, we see our dogs move, and vice versa,” said Nagendran. “So that’s really nice to see because we do share such a close bond with them. We share our routines and it could be either way. We might be inventing our pet’s routines, but it might be the other way around too.” For Li, expanding the comparative scope of their finding is the most exciting part. “We have data on other groups of dogs in very different environmental context,” she said. “There is incredible diversity and variation in the nighttime activity of dogs. …they’re super adaptable and just because dogs behave one way indoor, in Ontario homes, it doesn’t mean that this is reflective of the entire species or even the breed.”
