We have a 20 week old miniature American Eskimo Dog who has recently developed some incredibly annoying habits.
We have had him since he was 8 weeks old and have crate trained him from the begining. He is totally housebroken, which is wonderful. However, in the last week or so he has started crying/barking/going bonkers in his crate around 4:30 - 5am. Every morning. He goes in his crate around 12 am (I take him out for a walk before he goes in) and he used to sleep until 6am with no problem. Lately, though, he's started up with this nonsense, which wakes everyone up. My SO is an internal medicine resident (his first year of training after graduating from medical school) and he only gets to sleep a few hours a night. The dog doing this is making him especially nuts. The dog also tends to bark a lot at him and bite at his pants more than he does to me (it really annoys the hell out my SO when he does it, too). I don't know why he's doing this, but the usual "No!"/spray bottle/dropping the can of pennies doesn't seem to be working.
Any ideas???
Thanks.
PS: And this morning I took him out, thinking all this business was because he needed to pee, but while he did pee, it wasn't a lot. And it took him awhile to do it (if he has to go bad he does it immediately).
We have had him since he was 8 weeks old and have crate trained him from the begining. He is totally housebroken, which is wonderful. However, in the last week or so he has started crying/barking/going bonkers in his crate around 4:30 - 5am. Every morning. He goes in his crate around 12 am (I take him out for a walk before he goes in) and he used to sleep until 6am with no problem. Lately, though, he's started up with this nonsense, which wakes everyone up. My SO is an internal medicine resident (his first year of training after graduating from medical school) and he only gets to sleep a few hours a night. The dog doing this is making him especially nuts. The dog also tends to bark a lot at him and bite at his pants more than he does to me (it really annoys the hell out my SO when he does it, too). I don't know why he's doing this, but the usual "No!"/spray bottle/dropping the can of pennies doesn't seem to be working.
Any ideas???
Thanks.
PS: And this morning I took him out, thinking all this business was because he needed to pee, but while he did pee, it wasn't a lot. And it took him awhile to do it (if he has to go bad he does it immediately).