Reply to Dog witching hour agony

Forum Index » Pets

Reply to "Dog witching hour agony"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]We’ve had a 18-month old rescue dog for 3 months, and have a pretty good handle on his exercise, training and socialization needs. He’s getting a good amount of physical and mental exercise during the day, balanced with rest and naps because we found that he sometimes got overstimulated. He’s a mutt with strong herding/hunting traits and genetics. We are experienced dog owners and rescuers and have had some really tough dogs along the way.

Even with that experience, our evenings right now are a nightmare. From 6-10 pm we can’t walk him because he’ll come home, have to pee in the backyard, and then do psychotic zoomies. If we go in the backyard during that time, he’ll flip out and has grabbed at shifts or cuffs until they ripped. If he’s inside and starts playing after dinner and we engage in a ball game or try to do a sniffing training game, he’ll get worked up and race around the house or he’ll start stealing stuff that isn’t his (especially shoes!) and trying to chew them like toys. If we try go to bed before he decides it’s bedtime, he’ll race around the house trying to grabbed whatever object we last touched.

We’re getting around it by reducing evening exercise and games and by giving him a really defined area to play with new and interesting toys in the evening. And if he doesn’t calm down, we’ll crate him.

But what are we missing? When the school year rolls around, some of his daytime exercise will have to be pushed to the evening, so I worry the witching hour will only expand.

My sense is that he’s young, energetic, doesn’t like when people go to different spaces at night and hates when the fun stops. We also think that the 6 months this dog spent in the shelter affected him in ways we’ll never fully understand but possibly were especially bad at nighttime. Is there something in our routine we’re missing that could fix his behavior or is this normal?![/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics