Basically the title. My poodle is 10 months old, so he's not a tiny baby any more. He's definitely capable of sleeping through the night—he would sleep from about 11pm to 7am starting when he was around 5 months old. I was basically like "Great! This is it!" No such luck, though. Starting at like 8 months—what I'm thinking of as his adolescent phase—he's a very light sleeper and will wake up around 3 or 4am most nights.
He'll be woken up by some noise outside, or just nothing in particular, and then whine and cry until I get up with him. I'm pretty resistant to taking him out, because I feel like it's teaching him that he gets what he wants when he whines, but usually for sake of my sleep I do take him out. He'll pee a tiny bit and then is willing to go back to bed.
So, what is this behavior? I don't know if he really "needs" to pee, since he is capable of holding it through the night, and there are certainly nights where I just soothe him back to sleep and he doesn't pee until morning. At the same time, though, it's not like he wakes up needing exercise or fun—when I take him out, he pees and goes back to sleep. So I'm at a loss. What can I do?
submitted by /u/taurusmoonology
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