All the dirt (ewww!!) on my weekend in bed

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/05/2018 (3019 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I don’t know how you guys spent the holiday weekend, but I made a sincere and humanitarian effort to spend all three days sleeping.

Out of journalistic fairness, I will confess that, thanks to our ungodly deadlines, I wrote this column early Friday, which means I don’t have a clue what I actually did on the weekend, but I’m pretty sure snoring in complete oblivion is a pretty safe bet.

Normally, I don’t like to brag, but when it comes to sleeping, I am one of the best there is.

Seriously, if Canada had an Olympic Sleeping Team, I would be the odds-on favourite to bring home the gold medal, unless, of course, I overslept and missed the competition.

Often, when I sleepwalk through the local mall, parents will point at me and proudly tell their children: “That’s Doug Speirs, kids. He is one of the best sleepers in the entire country.”

At least, that’s what I think they are saying. The drowsy point I am trying to make is that, if I love anything, I love to sleep. I don’t just like to sleep; I adore sleeping. I attack sleep the same way some guys my size attack a juicy steak, which explains all the yummy noises — “Mmmmmmm!” — coming from my bedroom.

This means I spend a fair bit more time lying in bed than most Canadians, which explains why I was deeply traumatized last week by a major scientific discovery that made headlines around the world.

For those of you just waking up from a power nap, I am referring to breathless news reports stating that chimpanzees have far cleaner beds than human beings.

Or, as Men’s Health magazine put it: “Guys, here’s some news that will make you want to give the bachelor pad a scrub: a chimp’s bed contains less feces than yours.”

On behalf of germ-phobic readers who are finding it difficult to finish breakfast now, I would like to issue the following statement: “Ewwwwwwww!!!”

What happened was scientists from North Carolina State University, for the first time, compared human sleeping quarters to those of other mammals to find out who is cleaner.

The study, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, compared the microbes and creepy-crawly organisms found in chimpanzee beds in Tanzania with samples collected from human beds.

Not surprisingly to anyone who has ever lived with teenagers, it turned out that people are far more likely to sleep in their own filth than chimps in the sense that human beds are teeming with more yucky body microbes than those of our furry little buddies.

From what I read and partially understood, 35 per cent of the microbes found in human beds come from our own bodies — fecal, oral and skin bacteria — compared to only 3.5 per cent of the microbes found in the chimp nests. Parasites, such as ticks and fleas, also were scarce in chimp beds.

“We found almost none of those microbes in the chimpanzee nests, which was a little surprising,” study co-author Megan Thoemmes, a PhD student at North Carolina State University, said in a statement.

That’s surprising to a scientist, perhaps, but not surprising to someone as worldly as myself, an overweight, middle-aged newspaper columnist widely considered to be the greatest sleep practitioner in the free world, especially during those long work meetings when no one bothered to bring coffee and doughnuts.

For starters, chimpanzees are far more diligent housekeepers than the typical guy of my gender in the sense they build new nests every (bad word) night, whereas I have never met a human being (and I never want to) who changes their sheets every day, unless they are forced to at gunpoint.

As an expert on not being awake, I can tell you there is a simple reason that chimps beds are not as filthy as human beds — apes do not let their pet dogs sleep in the bed with them.

In contrast, in a recent study of the humans in my house, all slept with a minimum of three dogs curled up on the sheets. Sadly, I am not exaggerating about our sleeping arrangements.

Typically, after I brush my teeth and prepare to hop in the proverbial sack, the first thing I have to do is rearrange the dogs, because they seem to feel legally entitled to sleep on my side of the bed and directly on top of my pillow.

During the night, the dogs will work in concert and use their pointy little noses to roll me over to the edge of the bed to ensure they have about 80 per cent of the mattress to themselves.

If, in the middle of the night, I am foolish enough to attempt to roll over, the dogs will loudly grumble like angry little old men who have just had their checkerboards knocked over in an ugly spat at the seniors’ home.

Worst of all, however, is the fact my beloved spouse, She Who Must Not Be Named, gets up around 5 a.m. to let the dogs into the backyard to perform their daily ablutions, then feeds them and pops them back in the bed with me.

What with being dogs, when they are in the backyard, our pets will go out of their way to find disgusting things to roll on, such as mud, crunchy leaves, anthills, fast-food wrappers tossed over our fence and the fragrant corpses of dead squirrels.

“That smells disgusting!” one of the dogs will bark on encountering a deceased rodent on the lawn.

“Sure does!” another of the dogs will snort in reply. “Watch this. Roll. Roll. Roll. Roll. Roll. Whee!”

Despite the fact it means our bed is now teeming with dog-related microbes, I tolerate this sleeping situation, because I am a well-known dog fanatic. I am such a noted dog lover that last week I opened my mail and found a kind-hearted reader had sent me a copy of Life magazine’s special issue on dogs.

I have been reading it every night before nodding off. Sadly, I have no idea what chimps read in bed.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca