Juliano Barrotti crosses his kitchen on this damp, early spring morning in Stamford, Conn., twists two handles of coffee grind into an espresso machine, hits a switch and slides two demitasse cups beneath the dark dripping water.

The espressos go on a tray where he’s already placed a slice of poppy seed cake for himself, and a bowl of oatmeal and muffin with honey for his wife of 26 years. He fills out the tray with two porcelain bowls – one full of chopped mozzarella sticks, and another full of crushed, multicolored biscuits that he’s taken from a jar on the counter.

Gripping the tray, Barrotti, a professional photographer and artist, starts his daily trip back up to the bedroom, first passing the couple’s dining area, finished in Venetian palazzo style. Gilded Italian mirrors overlook a walnut sideboard and crystal chandelier. Passing through, he climbs a staircase flanked by a painting of Louis XVI and a statue of a nude woman.

At first, the parade of civilization appears to continue into the bedroom.

But there, on a mahogany sleigh bed with Barrotti’s wife, Paula Waldman, lie Beauregard, Sadie, Tallulah Belle and Lupie the Poopie – a Keeshond, a miniature Schnauzer and two pugs.

“I get about 16 inches of sleeping space,” Waldman says in her native Arkansas accent. “But as a kid I always wanted to have dogs in my bed. My mother never let me do it, so you know how you act out when you’re old enough?”

“We love it,” adds Waldman, a grandmother who works as a realtor. “So do the pugs. They spoon. But Beau, he jumps on and off. We have an orthopedic bed, so sometimes he gets a little toasty.”

Scientists who study dogs say the animals have lived inside people’s homes since at least the 1400s. But no one is really sure when or why dogs began sleeping in people’s beds. In most places on Earth, the practice is considered filthy to this day.

Yet it is a common, if unreported, phenomenon for many dog owners in the United States.

And it’s affecting the sleeping patterns and sex lives of many of those who do it.

Questions of how long dogs have been sleeping in people’s beds, and why the practice remains taboo in certain regions, may be tied to public health, according to one expert.

“Having a pet was for many years a condition of the rich,” says Dr. Raymond Coppinger, a professor of biology and animal behavior at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., who has been studying dogs for nearly 50 years.

“Rich kids had pet dogs or rich women had dogs in the house,” he says. “Paintings from the 15th century have dogs in the house, or castle. But poor people who had trouble keeping clean, in our modern sense, would not have dogs in the house. Most places, the dog is an unclean animal and not to be touched. So the idea of letting a dog in the house is repulsive, let alone one’s bed.”

In many areas, dogs remain a major carrier of lethal diseases, Coppinger says, such as rabies and echinococcosis, or hydatid cysts, a parasitic illness that brings on a tapeworm infection.

Though hydatid cysts are not endemic in the United States, changing immigration patterns and the ability to cross continents easily have raised the profile of the disease.

Coppinger, author of a widely discussed theory on dog domestication, recently studied dogs and lectured throughout South Africa, a country with a 75 percent poverty rate. Many poor people own dogs there, he says, but not because the animals are seen as clean.

“Dog ownership is high among the poor because they are seen as alarms in areas of high crime rates, but never in the house,” he says.

“Some of us who like and study dogs don’t think they should be in our houses and finding them in bed is somewhat disgusting.”

To understand how domesticated dogs ended up in bed, it’s helpful to look at how they developed from their ancestor: the rangy, powerful wild wolf. The past decade has seen significant progress in the study of domestication.

For years, many academics believed that the modern, domesticated dogs originated in the Middle East.

But genetic code research has shown otherwise, according to Dr. Peter Savolainen, a molecular biologist at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.

“Dogs around the world have the same genetic types, but the full spectrum is found only in East Asia,” Savolainen says.

By reconstructing the relationships of individual dogs through mitochondrial DNA, a non-nuclear form of DNA that usually does not change when passed from parent to offspring, Savolainen led an effort to show approximately when domesticated dogs branched off from their ancestor.

Based on genetics and archaeology, Savolainen places the event approximately 10,000 to 15,000 years ago.

“With the spread of dogs to other places, some of the genetic types got lost on the way,” he says.

Very little is known about those lost dogs. Even among the more than 400 breeds recognized worldwide today, it isn’t clear just how domestication happened.

For decades, the widely held theory went something like this: Humans purposely took in wolf puppies, and then nourished, trained and tamed them for purposes such as hunting, companionship and protection.

Coppinger’s theory turns that thinking on its head. He believes that wolves domesticated themselves at the period when bands of humans began to settle into one place instead of moving around. By settling, people created what the professor believes was a key to domestication: waste. Leftovers became a ready meal for scavenging wolves, he says, and, together with human sewage, drew cockroaches, rats and pigeons that also served as food.

Eventually, new generations of wolves inherited a new behavioral trait – feeling comfortable eating near humans – and, over time, the domesticated dog began to take shape.

Fast forward 10,000 to 15,000 years.

According to Coppinger, dogs getting into houses in the developed world, and in the United States, in particular, coincided with the rise of the middle class after World War II.

It also coincided with the so-called “eugenic” breeding of dogs, Coppinger says. The term refers to the way humans, starting in the late 18th century, selectively bred dogs for certain traits – still a common practice. So-called “purebred” dogs are celebrated today at dog shows, agility trials and in breeding circles, yet that selection also has led to vast medical problems for a species that hasn’t been allowed to develop naturally.

Coppinger is critical of the purposeful breeding, and sees a link in the human attitude that controls dogs’ genetics and invites the beasts into bed.

“Some of us think it was a mistake to close the gene pool on breeds of dogs and that it has led to the genetic deterioration of modern breeds,” Coppinger says. “Some of us who like and study dogs don’t think they should be in our houses and finding them in bed is somewhat disgusting.”

Peter DiLeo is no molecular biologist.

And until that rainy afternoon eight years ago, the 54-year-old never really had a problem with dogs.

Prior to his divorce eight years ago, in fact, DiLeo was the proud owner of two Labrador retrievers.

But six months after the divorce, a strange thing happened. DiLeo, an Old Greenwich, Conn., resident, began dating a New Jersey woman who owned a small terrier, and he found it difficult to stay aroused with the dog there in the woman’s bedroom – on the bed, in fact, where the beast always slept.

DiLeo soon asked his new girlfriend to keep the dog out of the bedroom during sex, please, and also requested some music to drown out its yapping and soften the mood.

But the terrier remained. And all the woman did for music was to turn on the TV, which was showing “Sixteen Candles” that fateful day.

“I did try to proceed, but the dog was jumping all over my chest during oral sex,” DiLeo, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Connecticut, recalled with a smile.

“I said, ‘Please get rid of the dog.’ But she didn’t want to put him out of the room, said it would hurt his feelings. At this point I’ve lost excitement. You got Molly Ringwald on TV. You got this dog with its head and two paws right across the side of my face, jumping across every five seconds. And meanwhile she’s trying desperately to get me aroused. I got in the car and went home. That was it.”

“I did try to proceed, but the dog was jumping all over my chest during oral sex.”

Experts say that having a dog in bed could indicate more than a simple pet-owner relationship.

Though not pathological in itself, the practice can become worrying in situations such as the one DiLeo encountered, according to Carole Goldberg, a New Haven- based marriage and sex therapist and licensed clinical psychologist.

“I would caution someone who is beginning a relationship with someone who is inflexible about the role or place of their pet – especially in bed,” says Goldberg, who is certified by the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists.

“I would be concerned about this person’s ability to make and maintain meaningful relationships with another person. If they are unable to give up past bonds or make room for new ones, they may be adhering to the fantasy model of a relationship, which pets can certainly exemplify. The pet relationship is one of compliance, submission, obedience, devotion, never complaining, totally accepting of our moods, looks, habits and actions and don’t hold grudges or retaliate – most of the time. Pets are happy if their owners are happy and that is not the basis of a good reciprocal relationship.”

For Goldberg, there’s a difference between having a dog as a sleeping companion and having a dog in bed during sex.

From a psychological standpoint, pets in bed are only a problem when the practice causes conflict, Goldberg says. People probably invite pets to sleep with them for the same reasons they want a pet in the first place, she says: companionship, bonding, protection, narcissism and self esteem.

“If someone having their pet in the bed is a conflict, we might look at it in the same way we would as having any third party in the room – as a distraction, voyeurism, competition, fetish or even the replaying of a primal scene,” she says.

Yet for many dog owners, a pet’s transition from crate to bed is unplanned.

Archie, a yellow Labrador, began life with the Morris family in a crate in their kitchen.

Stuart and Robin Morris adopted Archie from an Armonk, N.Y.-based rescue group about six months after they lost Eiffel, a yellow Lab who didn’t sleep in their bed.

At first, Archie slept in a crate on the Morris’ kitchen floor. But Robin, 50, couldn’t stand to hear him cry.

She heard him crying through a baby monitor system she purchased specifically for the dog, and used to lay pillows on the kitchen floor, put her hand into the crate and fall asleep.

“Like a nut,” Robin recalls.

Then, when he was about six months old, Archie found he could jump from the floor up onto the couple’s king-size bed.

“It was so cute that we looked at each other, like ‘OK,’ ” Robin recalls. “Stuart was not a big believer. He just said, ‘No bed.’ But then after one night it was like he was done.”

Now, Archie sleeps every night on the bed – usually on his back with his legs spread, Robin says.

“Sometimes I wake up sore. I’m on a space like this big,” she says, holding her hands impossibly close together, “so that he (Archie) can be comfortable. Anything to make him happy.”

For Robin, Archie’s presence is felt in the bed when she and her husband want to become intimate.

“I have teenage sons with a house full of kids, so it’s not really easy,” Robin says. “We have to pick and choose our times, if you know what I mean.”

“Sometimes I don’t want to look at (Archie),” she continues. “It’s weird. We block him with pillows because it does dampen the mood, having Archie like this, staring at you. But we laugh about it. It’s like it’s funny. We’ve been married for 25 years, OK? That we still enjoy it together is pretty damn good. If you can’t laugh about it and have fun, forget it.”

No one knows how many people sleep in bed with their dogs.

Data on the phenomenon is spotty at best. In its 2007 “Sleep in America” poll, the National Sleep Foundation reports that 14 percent of women sleep with a pet, and that women who sleep with a significant other only are far less likely to experience insomnia than those who sleep with a pet.

But the study didn’t include information on men. Nor did it break down “pets” into subcategories or say whether it’s more damaging to sleep with a large breed of dog or a small one.

That doesn’t stop Bruce Shirky of San Antonio, Texas, from having a strong opinion.

“I think the bigger dogs tend to be bed hogs,” says Shirky, president of the Chihuahua Club of America, an American Kennel Club-recognized organization.

Shirky has bred and owned the world’s smallest dogs for 30 years, and his Chihuahuas sleep in the bed now.

“You get very used to them and comfortable sleeping together,” he says. “I think there’s an awful lot of Chihuahua owners who do it but don’t say they do. The only thing you’ve got to watch out for is if you roll over. That’s the biggest fear.”

Linda McDonald of Hesperia, Calif., has a different problem. There’s always at least one, if not two, of her seven Brittanys or three bullmastiffs in the bed beside her. The bullmastiffs – Morrie, Zoe and Zula – weigh about 100 pounds each.

“It’s only a problem when one of the bullmastiffs decides it wants to take over my side of the bed and I’m on about two inches of bed,” says McDonald, who serves as a director of the American Bullmastiff Association.

For McDonald, who is divorced, it’s comforting to have a living, breathing animal like the dog to snuggle with in bed. Bullmastiffs, though highly trainable, are extremely territorial guard dogs by nature.

“Especially in case something goes bump in the night,” says McDonald. “It’s like a security blanket, and I don’t think it’s any more strange then when little kids have a teddy bear with them.”

Yet some obedience trainers and animal behaviorists tell dog owners not to allow their pets in bed.

Kristen White, president of the Society of Veterinary Behavior Technicians, says she had a trainer who told her that inviting a dog to sleep in bed would confuse the animal by defining the owner as a litter mate.

“The rationale there is that it puts the dog on the same status level as the person, where they want the person to be more of the leader,” says White, who owns a German shepherd and works as a veterinary technician at the Animal and Bird Hospital in Clearwater, Fla. “But I think if the animal doesn’t have behavioral issues and cause problems, then it’s not a problem.”

White says that she only saw bed access as an issue with one dog. The animal would bare its teeth at men who slept with the dog’s owner, she says.

“That was about resource-guarding, where the dog would lash out at the man if he reached over the woman in bed,” White says.

For Eileen Wilson, an Asheville, N.C., resident who teaches classes at the Obedience Club of Asheville, the question of whether to allow a dog in bed depends entirely on the dog.

Wilson has a Cavalier King Charles spaniel, Tinker, who sleeps between the pillows on the bed, and a puli, or Hungarian sheepdog, Nigel, who isn’t allowed to because he’s shown signs of wanting to dominate the household.

“If you have a dog who is properly trained and who knows his place in the house, which means he’s not alpha, then as far as I’m concerned he can do whatever I permit him to do,” Wilson says.

Still, there have been times when what Wilson permits will clash with beliefs held by people around her.

Wilson says her mother-in-law grew up on a Nebraska farm and never had an “indoor” dog. Once, when Wilson and her husband traveled from Pennsylvania to Louisiana to visit her, they arrived with two of the Hungarian sheepdogs.

“Of course, they slept in the bed with us or got in the bed and it really freaked her out,” Wilson recalls. “She saw paw prints on the sheets. It’s just something she wasn’t used to. It’s something she just can’t quite get over, but she’s 92 and she’s not going to change now. People grow up a certain way and it’s hard to change.”

Back in Stamford, Paula Waldman and her dogs are finishing breakfast in bed.

Beauregard, Sadie, Tallulah and Lupo, or “Lupie the Poopie,” are munching on cheese and dog biscuits, and eating a bit of Waldman and Barrotti’s breakfast, too.

Waldman admits that it can be difficult to be intimate when the dogs are all around.

“It does rain on your parade somewhat,” she says.

Yet Beauregard has a tendency to jump off the bed when he gets too hot, and the pugs, with their tiny legs, require a small stepladder to ascend from the bedroom floor to the mattress.

Waldman says she simply pulls the miniature staircase away when necessary.

Sadie, the miniature Schnauzer, doesn’t spend much time on the mattress as a rule – but not because she gets in the way.

“Sadie doesn’t sleep in the bed because she has halitosis,” Waldman says.

Copyright 2008 Last Exit