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The doghouse

Pesky dog

6 replies

clam · 22/12/2011 17:08

He's 8.5 months and has just, in this last week or so, begun barking at night - for no apparent reason. Could be straight after we put him down, or after a few hours.
If we leave him to bark he just goes on and on. When we go to him, we're pretty horrid terse and he goes straight back to his bed and puts his head on his paws. But he'll often as not start up again a couple of times before going back to sleep. Last night, when DH stamped went down to him, he was lying down barking!
Any ideas as to, a) why and, b) what we can do about it. We have guests coming to stay most of Christmas and I don't want this palaver every night.

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feesh · 22/12/2011 20:58

Ok this isn't going to help massively, but ours started doing the exact same thing at the exact same age BUT we knew the cause - it was the morning (4am) call to prayer (we live in the Middle East and the stupid dog must have heard it hundreds of times during her life already!).

I presume she hit some sort of fear phase and started reacting to it.

What stopped it for us was COMPLETELY ignoring her and letting her get on with howling the house down. And then after a few nights of not being able to take any more, we downloaded a CD called 'Relax My Dog' from iTunes and left it playing on the laptop every night in the kitchen. It's done the trick - she's never barked in the night since and we don't even bother with the music any more.

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feesh · 22/12/2011 21:01

PS we would never have known what was setting her off (as we can't hear the call to prayer ourselves) had it not been for the timing of her barking coinciding with what we knew to be prayer time. Therefore it's quite possible that your dog could be reacting to some unidentifiable noise as well - you could try just leaving a normal CD on as I'm not convinced the 'Relax My Dog' one did anything special.

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scrappydoodah · 22/12/2011 22:02

A CD is a great idea. I've heard of rescue centres playing music to calm dogs. Mine like the radio.

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clam · 23/12/2011 00:24

Well, he's certainly not waking to pray!
He was unwell a week or so ago, so we put it down to that, plus a full moon and we wondered if he'd spotted a cat or something out of the window. But no excuse since.
Little bugger.

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feesh · 23/12/2011 08:07

It could become a habit now, unfortunately because it had the desired effect of getting his humans to come and see him.....unfortunately.

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clam · 23/12/2011 11:14

Bugger, that what I feared. Although he doesn't get happy humans at night. But he did sleep through last night.