The latest is his excited revelation that having a dog in the house is good for his health. Of course it is.
He has frequently pointed out that, if I was a proper farm dog, I would be chained to a kennel most of the time, thrown kitchen scraps to eat and let off now and then for some energetic work.
To counter his discomfort at having a dog in the house, he thinks he has to justify what is obvious to dogs everywhere with some fancy scientific explanation.
This time, it is based on a forensic examination of the way a hound in the house alters the household dust in a beneficial fashion. I could have told him that if he’d asked.
He tells me the study started back in 2018 with 55 houses, half of which introduced a dog — the other half clearly saying ‘No’ to joy.
They measured the dust particles in each house at the beginning, and then a year later, discovering a long list of bacteria that the dogs had generously introduced to their owners’ homes.
The Boss felt bound to list a number of the lovely microbiota that we dogs inject into a house within the first week of residence — Porphyromonas, Fusobacterium, Capnocytophaga, Moraxella among them — and they found a lot more over time.
There were plenty of other bugs, he said, but the conclusions were that children growing up with a dog in the house mostly have fewer allergies and asthma. We dogs know that already.
He rattles on, boring me with the convoluted theory behind it, that dust from homes with dogs may influence the development and response of the human immune system by changing the composition of the gut microbiome in ways that reduce the risk for allergies and asthma.
And that people with chronic pain reported that their pets improved their mood, sense of hope, activity levels, comfort and functionality.
And that multiple studies have found the owners’ heart rates, blood pressure and stress levels tend to be lower when there’s a dog around.
At this point he paused, frowning.
“There are exceptions, of course — like when you vomited bile on the new carpet and we couldn’t get it out... or when you bit that big brown in two and tossed it in the air. Those things didn’t help my blood pressure.”
I nodded at him to move on and focus on the next point. Which was that, while we dogs don’t claim to stop people having heart attacks, other researchers have discovered that people who have dogs survive longer after having heart attacks or strokes.
What he hasn’t realised is that every dog is interested in keeping his or her owner alive as long as possible, so the owner doesn’t fall off the perch before the dog does.
We’re mainly in it for the love of our owners, of course — but there’s a little self-interest, to be sure. Woof!
