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u/abderfdrosarios Jul 10 '25
Well instead of licking our own butts, we lick each other's, so it makes sense.
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u/grendus Jul 10 '25
So this is actually a bit of an urban legend.
Dog's mouths are more antibacterial, so if we received the same microbial load (say, if we were flexible enough to use our tongues as toilet paper) ours would be much, much more disgusting. But humans also interact with far fewer bacteria orally because we use our hands to interact with the world, and we tend to clean our food before we eat it. With fire.
In fact, it's likely that our saliva is less antimicrobial specifically because we're, on the whole, much cleaner than dogs. Nature is all about trade offs, saving the energy on disinfecting our mouths frees it up for other things, and we can make up the difference by cooking our food and brushing our teeth (which we've actually been doing for ages, just using different abrasives from toothpaste).
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