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My 4 month old Aussie can sleep soundly through the night until about 6:30am when she needs to go out. She’s pretty well potty trained at home (outside the very rare times l’ve messed up her routine.) She also has a rough bedtime window that she seems to settle at pretty well (especially if she’s in the crate, she knows it’s bedtime).

However, she is starting to get a bit big for it. She has a bigger crate but it doesn’t fit in my bedroom, plus I’d really like to transition her into sleeping comfortably in a dog bed beside my bed.

My only concerns are – Without a crate, will she feel like she can go to the bathroom while I’m asleep?

• Will she settle down for the night like she does in the crate, or will she run around creating puppy chaos all night?

So my questions: 1. When did you make the transition? 2. How did you decide it was time? 3. What steps did you make to transition and how did it go?

My 7 month old pomeranian had a very difficult spay last week and per the vet's instructions needs to avoid almost all activity until she's healed up. This means no walks, minimal active play, and no running around the house. She also had some puppy teeth pulled that didn't come out normally (they were doubled up with her adult teeth) so she's not supposed to chew anything hard and has to eat wet food. Last week she mostly slept or stayed in the "Goldilocks zone" of alert but calm, up and walking around but not jumping or running. She had a lot of accidents, including in her crate which is a change from before her spay when we were down to about 1 accident a week and hadn't had any in her crate for months.

This week has been awful. She won't stop charging around the house when she's not crated, barks at every single noise, and hasn't been settling well in her crate. The vet's given her medication to help calm her, but it's not enough. I talked to the vet today and we increased her dosage, but she's still been wild. Between this and all the accidents she's having I'm more stressed out than I've ever been with my dog.

She's normally an extremely active puppy, but I'm home most of the day and am able to regularly walk, play with her, and take her out for "walk n sniffs" to keep her rambunctiousness in check. I've been feeling like I'm going to explode the last couple days and don't know what to do. I've been using lick mats with her wet food to keep her occupied and she has some soft toys to play with, but it's not enough to keep her occupied. Does anyone have some suggestions?

Is there anyone who's had experience maybe with teaching a dog how to tell when another dog is attempting to play with them? Cause as far as I can tell my pup knows how to play in ways dogs normally do but struggles to know when a dog is trying to play with him. He currently 2. Shih Tzu minature poodle mix if that makes any difference.

I struggled to socialize my dog as much as I like when I got him. It's not like he wasn't being socialized but he's a small dog (15lb full grown) and finding dogs he could interact with safely was tough. I did my best to try and teach him about how to play chase and doing "play bows". His favorite game is to just have be chase him with a ball or for me to take his and run. I introduced wrestling to him making sure I taught him how to respect others when they aren't wanting to play or if he plays too rough. And he has done well when play wrestling with our 15lb main coon mix cat. But any time a dog tries to entice him to play, either with play bows or by taking his ball he just looks at them like he doesn't understand what they are trying to do or will ask me to get his ball. Just today he attempted to get me to chase him around and it caught the interest of another dog his size who came over asking to play by play bowing and then running around past him to try and get him to and chase. all my dog did was look confused and dropped his ball for me to throw.

Edit. I thought it might be worth mentioning he is interested in other dogs pretty sure he had a crush on another shih Tzu but has never figured out play. Cause any dogs hes been interested interacting with didn't want to play.

Asking on behalf of a person that doesn't use Reddit. She's a petsitter of a dog with a harness and we haven't quite been able to figure out how it should be oriented on the dog.

Here is an image of the harness in question

Any help would be greatly appreciated! We want to keep this dog safe on his walks!

I like dogs, but I don’t know if I can handle raising a dog. What are the details that I wouldn’t have thought of if I didn’t raise a dog?

I’m completely at a loss as to what to do about my French bulldog pup’s barking 😞 sorry it’s long I’m desperate!!!! And sleep deprived.

He’s now nearly 9 months old, and I’ve probably made a rod for my own back but I am trying my best. We had got to the stage where he was mostly settling in his crate in the kitchen. Then when the hot weather arrived, we moved the crate from the kitchen into the lounge – it’s not a very big distance because our house is quite small. As it was a bit cooler in the lounge than the kitchen. It’s really impractical for the crate to be in the lounge, so as soon as the weather cooled down, we moved it back to the kitchen. And that’s when the night time issues started again.

He always has a wee and poo before bed, either in the garden or on a walk last thing. Then he’ll settle on the sofa next to us. We put him in the crate when he’s sleepy and then come straight upstairs. He can go through like a week or more with no issues, but then randomly starts barking again and there seems to be no pattern to it. Eg a few weeks ago we had heavy rain and wind one night so we thought it might’ve been that, but then last night was very bad with him barking, and there was no adverse weather. I’m at a loss! 😞.

We tried everything- ignoring it, eventually going downstairs and not making a fuss, but putting him straight in the garden to see if he actually needed the loo (he didn’t). it got to 4am ish and my husband ended up having to go and sleep downstairs on the sofa with the dog next to him. I know this is not the answer, but we were at our wits end.

We have been told that we are giving him mixed messages basically, it’s our fault, because in the mornings when I’m getting ready, he comes and sleeps on the bed with me while I’m doing my make up. So therefore at night, he doesn’t understand why he can’t come back upstairs.

We can’t have him upstairs overnight, there’s no room for the crate and we’re not happy to have him roaming around in case he tries to jump on / off the bed and hurts himself.

As I said, he’s nearly 9 months old and we have not even yet got to the stage where we can think about leaving him at home on his own for short periods, we don’t even know where to start with this considering the nighttime can still be so awful. I’m also worried about our neighbours, we are in a semi detached house and when we first had him I did speak to my neighbour and say I apologise if there was any noise while he is still little, she said it’s absolutely fine and she totally understands. Which is great, but we do need to get this sorted. We live on a new build estate so everyone is quite close together.. I’m scared that we are going to get a letter from environmental health and then end up having to give him up and I could not cope with that. And most importantly, I want him to feel happy and settled!!

Aaaaagh 😞