Mary Allen
It’s not about toothbrushing – but of course, it is common to say: “It does not matter if the dog licks you all over your face with its wet long tongue. In any case, the dog is cleaner than you in the mouth? ”
How many times have you not said that too cute little children or adults when your own dog kisses them violently in the face? But how is it really? Is this true? No, not really, writes AKC, the American kennel club on its website in the article “Is a dog’s mouth cleaner than a human mouth?”.
Comparing the dog and the human mouth is like comparing apples and oranges. That’s what Colin Harvey, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Veterinary Medicine, says in the article.
That the dog and the human mouth are not identical is due to the fact that our mouths are filled with microbes. These organisms, such as algae, bacteria, molds, yeasts, and viruses, go by the collective name microorganisms or microbes and are found everywhere.
Different Microbes
There are some similarities in the type of bacteria between different species. But there are also a lot of bacteria in your dog’s mouth that you will not find in your own. In fact, dogs have more than 600 different types of bacteria in their mouths. Not at all different from the number we find in humans, as researchers at Harvard counted to 615.
Some are the same in humans and dogs, but many are not. These bacteria can also be combined with other bacteria that we (humans and dogs) pick up from different places. For example, food, toothbrush, chewing bone, or whatever we now chew and hold in our mouths. Perhaps part of the reason that the idea that “a dog’s mouth is cleaner than the human mouth” came from the fact that dogs and humans do not exchange diseases with each other via saliva.
Less Risk of Kissing the Dog
You will not get the flu from a kiss from a dog, but you can get it from kissing another human. However, there are other things that can be transmitted between humans and dogs, such as worms and salmonella.
But the answer is that the dog’s mouth is not cleaner – it only has other microbes than the human. In other words, kissing your dog is less risky than kissing another human, but that does not mean that your dog’s mouth is necessarily cleaner than a human’s – it just has a different set of bacteria.