New Delhi: Humans don’t let sleeping dogs lie, literally. No canine complaint this; it’s new research that says so. People could be responsible for stirring their dogs up in the night rather than the other way around, says a paper titled ‘Who is disrupting whom? Examining the nighttime activity patterns of humans and their dogs’, published in PLOS One.
The paper is based on research conducted on 25 people along with 38 dogs who either lived in or near Ontario, Canada; some of the 25 participants had more than one dog. The 25 included 21 women, with the average age of the group about 39 years.
The dogs were either Huskies or Malamutes, and between two to 12 years of age at the time of the study. The sleeping of the humans was tracked with sensors on their wrists while the dogs had sensors in their collars. Both humans and dogs were monitored for four weeks.
The researchers who worked on this peer-reviewed study are Ming Fei Li, Lavania Nagendran, Christopher Kiru, Lauren Schroeder and David R. Samson, all from the Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto Mississauga.
Human movement precedes dog movement more often
The study investigated human-dog dyadic movements (dyads)—coordinated physical actions shared between a pair—and found that night-time activity in humans and dogs was linked, but the pattern differed across pairs.
A majority (61 percent) of the dyads showed a significant association between human and dog nighttime activity, the study said. Within this 61 percent, a greater proportion (45 percent)—almost half of the group—showed that human activity preceded dog activity within a five-minute interval. A much smaller proportion—18 percent—showed that dog activity preceded human activity. In 36 percent, the activity happened within a minute of either the dogs or humans. One percent of the group returned inconclusive data.
These findings suggest that movements of sleeping humans and their dogs are connected. For example if a person changes their position in the night while sleeping, their dog may move too. The findings are not definitive, but do point to a larger picture of inter-connectedness. In other words, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks but you could be making them switch sides in their sleep.
The research further found that just sleeping in the same bed with a dog or dogs does not significantly affect the duration or the type of the human’s sleep.
The researchers also found differences in the way people described how they slept and what the tracking device recorded about how they actually slept.
Out of the 25 participants, 12 participants, or 48 percent, said that their dogs had interrupted their sleep while the other participants did not report any interruptions.
Where the dog slept, in bed with the human or somewhere else, was not linked to the human’s quality of sleep. At the same time, people who had multiple dogs reported that they had poorer sleep compared to the people with fewer dogs. This suggests that people’s experiences are subjective.
The researchers further noted that sleeping with a dog has benefits which go beyond physical rest. No less than 72 percent of the group said sleeping with a dog provides them with comfort or a sense of security even if the dog moves during the night.
More research needed
This study indicates that night-time movement is no one-sided process in which dogs disturb their humans. Rather, human movement is linked to that of the dog or dogs during the night.
These findings have certain limitations too. The study was done with a smaller group of people in southern Ontario and there were just two types of dogs who participated in it. Applying results of this study across dog breeds and households could be barking up the wrong tree.
Also, data for the study was collected during the COVID-19 lockdown when people’s schedules may have been different as there were multiple restrictions in place at the time.
Finally, the devices used to measure movement did not explain why it happened in the first place, and whether that caused wakefulness.
The researchers added that further studies in this domain could also video record as well as monitor the noise along with the wearable devices to better understand the shared sleeping space between humans and their dogs.
What the study points to right now is a relationship that continues to reflect in night-time activity, and that the experience of sleeping with a pet dog may be different from what movement measurements alone reveal.
(Edited by Nardeep Singh Dahiya)
Also Read: A dog’s day out — how a labrador, indie, and retriever spent their Manali vacation