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nocturnal barking

Skye is pretty laid-back. Her typical day is a long nap either in the house or in the yard that is occasionally interrupted by play and squirrel chasing.

However she wakes up at dusk and turns into a barking beast. She goes into the yard (yeah! we can't close our backdoor yet) and is on the lookout for any movement, any sound. As soon as she sees or hears critters, she chases them full speed and barks in frustration when they go out of reach. And Skye's barking is always full volume, she doesn't have any loudness control!

It's really not great, because she does that at any time during the night. When we go outside to check what's going on, she immediately stops barking. I have actually the impression she relaxes (maybe she has done her alerting job and her humans are now taking control over the situation). She relaxes so much that she tries to engage us in tag and tug games. "Hey human! Now that you are up, let's play!" We try to not do that because that would reinforce her barking behavior, but yesterday night we did hoping we will burn some of her energy.

Useless to say, it didn't help. She still had lots of energy left to patrol the yard afterwards. LOL


We've talked to our VB about this. There aren't many ways to manage the situation. We can't close the backdoor (which is really the ultimate solution) and we can't remove the critters. We tried without success giving her melatonin to improve her sleep cycle. We are now trying Zylkene to help her relax and stay calm. We are 4 days in it and so far, we don't see any effects. :(


I think we are going to need to be able to close that backdoor, and work through all the issued linked with it. Maybe now is the time to start using the big meds (ie. fluoxetine). To be continued...


PS: I think Jindos are cats, barking cats. LOL

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