# Barking ALL night long



## lisylou (Dec 13, 2011)

Hi there,
Can someone help us PLEASE?
We recently adopted a dog from the local home. We were told that she was a lab cross, but did not know what she was crossed with. She was bred in Ireland for hunting and apparently not very good at it so her owners were going to shoot her! She was rescued to a pound in Ireland and then over to a rescue centre in the UK where we found her, severely underweight and full of infection.
After doing a lot of research and looking at her traits (especially the Velcro trait) have come to the conclusion she is a lab/Vizla cross.She is approx 12 months old. We have 2 young children and a Lab/Collie cross and she is AMAZING with all of them so loving and docile.
Now for the bad bit..........she sleeps downstairs with our other dog, she is in a crate (we did leave her out of the crate but kept turning the gas on the cooker!). When we go to bed she is fine for about 1-2 hours and then she starts barking, and barking, and barking, She will bark all night long, unless she is upstairs with us in our bedroom. We do not want to get her into bad habits by sleeping in our room but are really at the end of our tether due to the lack of sleep!
We can't even begin to imagine what she has been through before we got her but the lack of sleep on our part is beginning to take it's toll.
Any advice would be VERY gratefully received. Thank you and sorry to waffle on at the beginning but just wanted to let you know her background and that she is not a purebred.
Thanks


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## tracker (Jun 27, 2011)

Hi Lisyllou

Is your other dog crated at night as well, and it it also in a crate?

how long has this been going on for? My experience has proved that letting them bark it out will eventually pay off. 


Good luck


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## polkan (Dec 29, 2011)

Usually, a dog that is barking for attention (take me to your bed, pleeeeeeaaaase mommy!!!) would take breaks in between the barking to see if it's working. If it isn't, she would start again. I assume your dog barks all night because she wants to be close to you to feel safe and cared for, especially considering how she was treated in the past. 

I think there has to be a way to teach the dog that some distance between it and your bed is OK without depriving yourself of sleep. 

Two potential ideas to consider, off the top of my head:

1) Teach the dog to spend some "alone" time during the day, especially in a different room and in the crate. Usually, people would have a "special" Kong for this that's _only_ available in the crate during the alone time. 

If the dog doesn't leave your side during the day even for a minute, then it's asking too much of it to spend the entire night without you, so I would observe how the day goes to see if the nighttime barking is really a form of separation anxiety. If that's the case, then start with short day periods and gradually increase them.


2) Or, you could move the crate to your bedroom temporarily, but position it in such a way that you could gradually, over days or a few weeks, slowly move it away from the bed and towards the door, possibly along some wall. So before getting ready for the night's sleep, you move the crate a little further away from the bed. Or you could put it near the door right away and begin there, slowly moving towards the stairs. It depends on what your dog can handle at this point.

Obviously, dealing with stairs will be a bit of a problem at some point. If the flight of stairs isn't too long then once I read the landing from the bedroom, I'd just move the crate to the bottom of the stairs and keep it their just a bit longer.

Maybe others have more ideas and you could always build on these. Maybe there's a way to combine (1) and (2) but you'd have to figure out the logistics in a way that makes sense.

Net: I agree that you cannot reward your dog with attention for barking. But I also think simply ignoring the barking will result in the issue that's driving it to find some other outlet. Barking may go away but the problem that's causing it could stay.


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## Ozkar (Jul 4, 2011)

Great suggestions Polkan.


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## jld640 (Sep 29, 2010)

If it is taking an hour or two for her to start barking, beyond the good suggestions already offered for attention seeking behavior, you might also check her environment an hour or two after bedtime.

Does her area get cold? Does she need another blanket in her crate?
Do things go bump in the night? Can you play a radio softly to cover background noises?
Do car headlights flash through your windows? Does her crate need a blanket to cover it to block out the light?

I hope you resolve the problem soon!


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## Jenn06 (Jan 2, 2012)

Our dog loved the RADIO. The first few nights he was home he kept us up all night but after that I out a radio in his room and it stopped almost overnight.!


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