You or Fido – Who Has the Cleaner Mouth

Posted 12-30-2009 10:39 pm by
It’s pretty certain that you have all heard this rumor at least once in your life – that dogs have cleaner mouths than humans.  Could this really be true?

People claim that a dog's mouth contains "special" substances that ward off infection.  Truth is ALL mammals have these "special" substances.  Basically all saliva contains enzymes that help to protect the body from infections.  Dogs do not have any spectacular advantage over people in this regard, and therefore do not have cleaner mouths.

So, how did the myth originate? It likely came from the medical literature.  Early studies showed that wounds caused by human bites were more likely to become infected than dog bites.  These studies thus made people assume that the dog mouths had less bacteria than human mouths.  Later, research showed that this belief was wrong for two reasons. 

First, mouths of people contain human bacteria for the most part, and mouths of dogs contain dog bacteria.  If you were to count the actual amount of bacteria, it is not that a human mouth contains more bacteria than a dog mouth – they just have a different type of bacteria.

The second problem is the manner in which people are bitten by others.  Most bites sustained by people, from other people, heal without incident.  Most human bites do not cause any more problems than dog bites. 
Bites on the hand, sustained through a "clenched fist" interaction, are significantly worse, and account for many of the human bite infections.  This is likely due to the mechanism and depth of wound sustained by this activity, not because of the dirtiness of a human's mouth.

So the next time you go to give your pooch a kiss on the mouth after he's been cleaning himself, just remember that dog's mouths are in no way cleaner than human's mouths.  (But if you like to kiss your dog, by all means, continue to do so! You just may want to brush their teeth a little more than you have been.)

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