It Was Once A Bed; Now It’S A Barnyard

A gentleman never discusses with whom he sleeps, but this rule of etiquette is suspended when it comes to those bed partners who bark and meow and snuffle and generally shed all over the duvet cover.

I refer to our dog and our cats. If you thought I was talking about something else, well, I congratulate you on your imagination, but it’s time to get your mind out of the gutter and back into the real world, where the most exciting thing that happens most nights is that our bedmates purr like locomotives two inches from our noses, or insist on being let outside at 3 a.m. because they need to go pee on a fence post.

I didn’t realize how many other people have this problem until we were at a dinner party, admiring our hosts’ charming little pug dogs. At some point, the husband remarked that these cute smash-mouth dogs didn’t seem quite so charming at 5:30 a.m. when they were walking across his face.

The conversation paused and the rest of us looked at each other, relieved that someone else had admitted to the same guilty secret. We thought we were the only ones so weak-willed as to allow animals into the bedroom.

“So, you let them sleep on the bed, do you?” asked one guest.

The host gave the same story that the rest of us do when we are forced to admit that our bedrooms double as menageries. He said that they never intended to let the dogs sleep on the bed, but one time one of the little fellas was under the weather and feeling lonely, and they let him in just that one time and before you know it, both of them had taken up permanent residence in what they must have thought was their own little personal luxury doggie motel, complete with queen-sized bed and down comforter.

He shouldn’t have been so apologetic about it. Soon after this I read in Dr. Marty Becker’s column on the Pets page that seven out of 10 Americans allow their pets to sleep in bed with them. Dr. Becker positively celebrated the pet-bedroom connection.

So this is nothing to be embarrassed about, but like most husbands this doesn’t stop me from pretending that it’s all my wife’s fault. If I had my way - my tough, manly, unsentimental way - our cats would be banished from not just our bedroom but from the entire residential wing of our palatial hovel, and our dog would be sleeping outside in his doghouse, by God, because he’s a dog and that’s where dogs belong. I am deadly serious about this. If I had my druthers, that mutt would be outside every night, unless the weather was chilly or rainy or partly cloudy, or if he was standing at the back door the way he does, making little “I’m lonely” whimpering sounds and breaking my heart and making me feel like an uncaring heel who doesn’t care about the well-being of his old fuzzy pal, who never did one thing to deserve this and asks for nothing more than a bit of warmth and companionship.

I will say this, I have drawn the line at letting the dog actually sleep ON the bed. He is restricted to the floor next to the bed, partly because of my tough no-nonsense policy, and partly because the dog weighs 90 pounds and would have to be lifted on with a forklift. So he sleeps loyally at the side of our bed, never causing any trouble at all except for those times when he snores, licks himself compulsively, or becomes loudly flatulent.

The cats, however, have the run of the comforter. Once again, I have established a few tough but fair guidelines. They creep anywhere near my face, they get thrown off the bed. They drape themselves across my feet, they get kicked onto the floor. They start purring before 6:30 a.m., they get trampolined right off the comforter. They start kneading my butt as if it’s bread dough, they get flung across the room.

After years of this kind of behavioral training, the cats are unfazed and they jump right back on the bed and commit more nuisances.

Frankly, I have become resigned to animals in the bedroom. In fact with the wisdom of age I now see that this is part of nature’s way. As mammals, all of us - dogs, cats, husbands, wives - crave the comfort that we can only feel when crowded into a cozy little den with our fellow creatures, warm and happy, listening contentedly to the cold winter rain beating on the roof and the wind moaning through the branches.

Or is that the dog being flatulent? It’s so hard to tell.