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| Grandchild Sophie congratulates Gizmo: no night whimpers!! |
For several nights, Gizmo has been waking me at 3 or 4 am with whimpering and barking. After going to his container near the kitchen (usually I am barefoot on the cold tile floor) and saying, “NO,” quite loudly, he is silent until I am warm in bed and nearly asleep before he begins the short, extremely high-pitched whimper sure to awaken any dogs and me. Then I repeat the process with the same results.
Grace wanted to take him to a vet and get a tranquilizer or a sleeping potion for him, but I did not want to start our dog on the drug-addiction route. I could just see him begging for tranqus from us in a few weeks.
A consultation with our daughter, Russell, who has two adorable dogs who awaken her with their needs at 6 am (and who can be sent outside with little effort), resulted in the following observation: Gizmo just wants to be with you. Why not bring his cage into the bedroom and let him sleep with you. It might work to keep him quiet.
This immediately had several advantages: No drugs. Gizmo has been trained not to get on our bed without our permission and probably would not leap on us in the middle of the night.
We added a slight improvement: Leave the cage door open so he can get out if he wants to. Put flashlights on each side of the bed so we can avoid stepping on him if we want to get up and he is out of the cage.
The happy results: he slept through the night, so did we, no accidents, a peace treaty was signed and apparently ratified by human and animal.
"In order to really enjoy a dog, one doesn't merely try to train him to be semihuman. The point of it is to open oneself to the possibility of becoming partly a dog."
-- Edward Hoagland
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