Is it ok for my pug puppy to sleep in my bed with me?

QUESTION: Is it ok for my pug puppy to sleep in my bed with me? I have a 16 wk old pug. I’ve read in two books about pugs that they need to sleep in a kennel but everyone i have known with dogs lets the dog sleep with them…is there a good reason why he cant? he is potty trained.

ANSWER: This is a matter of personal choice.  While there is a documented slight risk that you could catch an infection from your dog – and I DO mean slight – the chances of this are slim and this mostly happens in severely immuno-compromised people.  And quite honestly the infection could just has easily been transmitted by cuddling or kissing the dog – it can’t be definitively related to co-sleeping.More than half the half the people in the country have dogs and more than half of them allow their dogs to sleep with them. And while the incidence of infection or disease being spread from dog to human is rare the health benefit of having a dog is enormous. There are 30 years worth of studies documenting the health benefits of owning a pet.  And by the way more people own dogs than cats and in the vast majority of cases cats are allowed to come and go at will and sleep on the bed at some point during the course of the night in the majority of homes.There are risks to virtually everything you do in this life. Do you wash your banans and oranges before you peel them?  Do you leave your tooth brush sitting in the tooth brush holder by the sink?  Id so you are probably more risk for a problem than you are by letting your puppy sleep with you.If your dog is well-behaved on your bed and he doesn’t have fleas or ticks in my view there is no reason not to let him be there with you unless you have a serious medical problem that would put you at extreme risk. And when I WAS that sick quite frankly my dogs gave me more comfort than I can convey – comfort I needed to be able to get through many years of chemotherapy.We let our little Cavaliers sleep on our bed.  They are well-behaved flea and tick free get bathed and groomed regularly and they cuddle together at the end of the bed.  If they are with us they are not getting into mischief around the house.  The only time we restrict them is at the height of tick season.  If we are seeing a tick here and there hitchhiking in on their long fur we restrict them as we don’t want ticks to get a free ride into our bed.  Quite often when we wake up in the AM to find the two cats snuggled with the dogs.  Fortunately we are short in sgtature and the bed is king sized so we all fit. ;