it is National sleep awareness week and as we know getting good sleep is important so how is sleep affected when you let your pets sleep in the bed with you Dr Carly Fawn a board-certified applied animal behaviorist from Best Friends Animal Society joining me now via Zoom to talk more about the pros and cons of sleeping with your pets welcome hi thank you for having me so let's start with the good what are some of the health benefits of letting your pet sleep with you in the bed so arguably ther
e are a lot of health benefits there's been some research conducted in this area um but it this process of sleeping which is called co-sleeping with your pet um and introduce more oxytocin flow within your your system which can help with depression insomnia decreased loneliness and it could potentially help with your sleep okay I'm hearing good things so far so what is the best way to introduce your pet your cat or your dog to sleeping in the bed with you do you have suggestions definitely so it
depends on the animal you'll hear me say this a lot it's all about the individual individual person the individual pet in front of you um but initially if your dog or cat is a little shy or unsure about the bed then I always like to use uh treats building those positive relationships between the bed you being on the bed with them and associating these tasty positive treats you know to entice them to get onto the bed with you so does it matter the size too what if you have a really big dog what
if you have small dog does it make a difference it does that's a great question so for smaller dogs or dogs that have longer backs like dachshunds or basset hounds we recommend some having some stairs to get onto the bed rather than jumping on and off because that could cause some injury even with larger dogs you always want to pay attention to that and make sure that they're doing to well we never want to force a dog or cat to sleep with you but what if they are hesitant should you just stop ri
ght there to that individual animal front of you and really listening to them and looking at their body language and if they're not comfortable Don't Force It we never want to force an animal to do something that they are telling us but via their body language that they don't want to do that so when is it a time where you shouldn't have your pet sleep with you so one instance that comes to mind in this domain is if you're if you're if your pet typically a dog um tends to guard resources then you
might want to defer from having them sleep on the bed with you because they could enchants with that they could be guarding the bed from you they could be guarding the bed from someone else joining the bed with you so you just really want to pay attention to their body language and the signals that they're giving you and again just don't push it what are some of the signals you're saying when it when they're guarding is it growling is it what is it yeah it could be growling it could be really t
ense for dogs it could be and cats it could be really tense body posture um low ears for the cats same thing for the dogs dilated pupils just clear really clear stress signals like that that you want to pay attention to and make sure that your pet is enjoying what you're hoping to enjoy as well what if they're enjoying it too much what if they're a bed hogger well you know that that gets into the quality of sleep and again so for that it depends on the individual human how much do you want to sh
are your bed with your dog or cat I'm sure we've all seen those memes and the pictures where that humanist position in so many different ways with the animals surrounding them it's a dog's bed or the cat's bed instead of the human okay you're the expert question is do you co-sleep with your pets and how many okay so I have one dog and one cat Unfortunately they do not get along so my dog loves his crate and he sleeps in his crate at night and my cats my cat School run of the house and sleeps wit
h me but there are nights that I'll sleep in the guest bedroom with my dog he does love to snuggle oh my gosh the the animals do really run the household thank you doctor so much for your time and wishing you all the best sleep you can find a pet to adopt by the way or Foster at bestfriends.org and if you need to snuggle there you go that's the resource thank you so much doctor thank you we'll be right back
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