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Dog Behavior: What Happens When Dogs Prefer Human Beds?
Dogs aren't solitary animals the way cats are. They have spent most of their evolutionary history living with families of dogs. When night fell, they all curled up next to each other. Sleeping close together kept them warm. It made them happy and secure. Now that they live with people, they want to continue this time-honored and comforting ritual.
More important than comfort is closeness. Dogs get lonely when they sleep by themselves in a laundry room or basement. It's the company that makes the bed the place to be. Some people want their dogs on the bed and encourage them to jump up. The praise dogs get for coming aboard is probably all the motivation they need to do it every night.
Left to their own devices, in fact, quite a few dogs would choose to sleep near the bed, but not in it. That king-size mattress offers the ultimate in comfort, but there's a lot of activity up there. People roll around. They shove with their legs. They hog all the covers. A lot of dogs start out on the bed at the beginning of the night and wind up on the floor. They may come up for the closeness, but they'll climb back down for more serious sleeping.
The Power Of Height
There's another reason dogs gravitate to the bed, one that has nothing to do with comfort or closeness. Imagine a small executive who sits in a very large chair. That's how dogs perceive the bed. In their world, height is power. A shy, retiring dog, for example, will be very careful about raising his head so that it's higher than a more-assertive dog's.
An assertive dog, on the other hand, will stretch his whole body upward in order to appear taller than he is. Sleeping on the bed automatically adds a few feet to a dog's stature, and that can be quite a perk.
There's nothing wrong with indulging a dog's quest for upward mobility. You have to be careful, however, that he doesn't take advantage of what he perceives as his privileged status. He may start lording it over other pets - growling when the cat dares to climb up, for example. Some dogs go even further. “Since I'm as tall as the people," their thinking seems to go, "I'm allowed to grumble when they push into my spot."
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