Is a Dogs Mouth Cleaner than a Humans Mouth
If this were the case, I’m pretty sure a dog’s mouth would be some sort of medical
miracle, considering: they rarely if ever have their teeth brushed or mouths cleaned;
they literally put their mouth on everything; and they use their tongue as toilet paper
for not only themselves, but also any other dogs they encounter.
Mouths are a great environment for bacteria to thrive; so barring some innate very strong
anti-bacterial agent in their saliva, this myth just wasn’t going to be true.
There are also numerous types of diseases associated with dog bites, including pasteurella,
tetanus, rabies, klebsiella, proteus, E. coli, eikenella, etc, which point to the fact that
a dog’s mouth couldn’t be sterile, as people often claim.
Don’t just take my word for it though.
According to a study on the relative amount of microbes in a human’s mouth vs. a dog’s
mouth, dog’s mouths had significantly more bacterial colonies than a human’s mouth.
In this study, they measured the number of bacterial colonies per square centimeter in
a dog’s mouth vs. a human’s mouth.
The samples were taken after both had eaten and without the humans being allowed to brush
their teeth before the sampling.
The results were scaled down to a 1-4 scale where 1 is the cleanest, with relatively few
bacterial colonies (“relative” being the operative word as both human and dog’s mouths
are teaming with microbes), and 4 being the grossest, meaning relatively high amounts
of different bacterial colonies.
According to the study, 10% of the dogs scored a 1 (relatively clean); 30% scored a 3; and
the remaining 60% scored a 4 (grossest).
With the humans, 70% scored a 1; 20% scored a 2; and 10% scored a 3.
This small study backs up the intuitive notion that if you are someone who goes around eating
garbage, poop, and pretty much putting anything and everything you find in your mouth, all
the while typically never having your mouth cleaned in any way, then your mouth is going
to have quite a lot more types of bacteria in it than someone who brushes their teeth
regularly and doesn’t go around eating poop and other such microbial gold mines.
So where did this myth come from?
It’s likely that it started from people observing that dogs clean their wounds with
their mouths and it is scientifically proven to have less chance of getting infected than
if they didn’t lick it.
The problem with this is that any wound that is cleaned regularly, by licking or simply
running water over it frequently, will give you much less chance of infection than otherwise.
There is no strong anti-bacterial agent working here, it is simply a case of cleaning off
dead tissue and the like.
Another theory of this myth’s origin is the medical myth that if you are bitten by
a human, you’ll have a much greater chance of having that bite become infected than if
you are bitten by a dog.
This “fact” has been spread around in antiquated medical journals for ages, but
has recently been shown to be incorrect.
As stated in the 1988 Annals of Emergency Medicine:
Recent study of human bites has shown that the early literature depicting all human bites
as having an extraordinarily high infection and complication rate was biased by its emphasis
on human bites of the hand that presented late with infection already present.
These bites, the so-called closed-fist injuries (CFI), do indeed have a poor prognosis, but
it may be as much due to their location and initial neglect as to the source of the injury.
Human bites elsewhere do not seem to have any higher risk than animal bites, which have
an infection rate of about 10%.
A more recent 1995 study done by the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, observed
the same thing:
Human bite wounds have long had a bad reputation for severe infection and frequent complication.
However, recent data demonstrate that human bites occurring anywhere other than the hand
present no more of a risk for infection than any other type of mammalian bite.