A dog in your house changes the resident bacterial environment significantly!

[Threegoofs]

Cool stuff from an interesting author.

With the advent of rapid DNA analysis, we can now detect many more types of microbes than in the past by plating them out and growing colonies in a dish.

What these researchers have found is that the presence or absence of a dog in your house tremendously changes the entire bacterial milieu within the entire house - bacterial samples from TV screens or pillows, for example.

It looks like having a dog (and presumably, any pet) changes a whole lot of other things about the environoment, to the amount of IgE pregnant women have (may play a role in allergy development in babies), to the presence of a dog in the house changing your gut microbes, which may play into health.

I think this kind of research is really a the forefront of a new type of science - the science of microbiological ecology.

Dogs Make Me (and You) Wild: Ten Effects of Dogs on Dog People

 

[RabidAlpaca]

I could've told them that. My dog sleeps and drools all over the place. My house is teeming with little black hairs and dog microbes.

 

[sawyerloggingon]

All I care about is my dogs make me smile.

 

[clownboy]

The writer omits a key factor in the discussion of microbe count and the rest (a factor that he mentions and then forgets) - indoor versus outdoor dogs. When I grew up in the old dark ages, dogs were not allowed in the house. That was community wide. They were outdoor animals. People had dog houses for them - remember those?

As far as the allergies go, doesn't comport with my own life experience. Allergies were a rare thing in my mountain community. Only saw them with any sort of regularity when we moved down to the valley. In fact decades ago I recall a study that found that a large percentage of people developed allergies within a few years of moving to the Sacramento Valley. So I'm not sure this has much to do with dogs.

However, right this moment, of all the people I know with children - EVERY household that has a dog or dogs the children are riddled with allergies. In none of the households where there are no dogs, or cats for that matter, are there any childhood allergies. So, in my personal experience indoor pets lead to more incidences of allegies.

 

[longview]

If you read Guns, Germs, and Steel, it may be better for your health to have animals around.
Aside from that, I like my dogs.

 

[MoSurveyor]

Cool stuff from an interesting author.

I really liked The Wild Life of Our Bodies! Recommended reading for anyone interested in this kind of thing or biology in general.

 

[MoSurveyor]

If you read Guns, Germs, and Steel, it may be better for your health to have animals around.
Aside from that, I like my dogs.

As long as you're not allergic to the animals as some people are.