My wife and I have a 21 week old German Wirehaired Pointer, in the daytime she is mostly well behaved, toilet trained, good recall – a great dog.
However we are having more and more problems at night, and it feels like we are spiralling.
She has been crate trained since we got her at 10 weeks. She hasn’t gone through the night as of yet, but previously we would get her up somewhere between 2 and 3am and take her out to the toilet. She would then sleep till 6am.
The last 2 weeks or so she has just decided she will not settle at night. She will willingly go in her crate around 11pm when we go to bed, settle for 5 minutes or so and then bark and whine for between 45 minutes and an hour before setting. We have tried comforting her by my wife sitting down with her just outside the crate, but as soon as she’ll go to bed, queue barking.
We have 3 young children, and if one of them gets up in the night, she will hear and we will get another half hour of barking.
We have tried white noise, extended crate training in the day, long walks later in the day, treating, but she just seems to be getting worse.
We thought maybe she felt too confined, so we put a stair gate across the doorway of the utility room her crate is in and left the crate door open, but this made things worse as she would just jump against the gate until it broke.
During the day we have tried feeding her in the utility with the gate shut, give her a licking mat with the gate shut, and she will drop everything to sit and cry at the gate instead.
If we go out, she will whine and bark constantly on and off till we are back.
Is this the beginning of separation anxiety? Is there anything we can do to try and settle her?
submitted by /u/KeanieT
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