Hi all, long time lurker, first time poster. I don't even know if Behaviour is the place for this or if it should be in Health or Food...
Wondering if anyone has had any experiences similar to ours because we're at a point where we're beginning to struggle with sleep.
We've had our ex-racer girl for 3 months now and she's the absolute light of our lives. About a month in, however, she stopped sleeping through the night (I knew 11pm-7am was too good to be true but I'd hoped it would last!) She would have us up three or four times a night, and the behaviour was always the same - she'd jump on our bed to wake us, then back down onto the floor, run through to the living room to lead us to her food bowl, and then roll over on her back with (what we assumed was) the expectation of being scratched but now I worry it's actually a submissive roll over because this is where she often realises the game is up and she's not getting fed.
I'm trying to think of everything that we've tried, because there's been so much (!):
At first we thought maybe she was hungry, so we changed her feeding schedule to include a snack before bed. Then we thought she was cold, so we bought warmer pajamas (in June?!) and then, maybe warm, but it's worse when she doesn't wear the pajamas. We got a crate for her, she likes it but she won't sleep the full night in it and still has this bizarre hungry/wanting to play/not really sure what she wants behaviour through the night. She gets plenty of exercise through the day, so we're confused. We've tried NutraCalm from the vets, but it gives her loose stools, so don't want to do that again, and a few weeks after this started she was treated for a stomach bug with antibiotics, which she seemed to recover from pretty quickly.
Because she's running to her bowl in such a frantic manner, I'm worried that she's hungry, but I'm unsure how to tell the difference between genuinely hungry and food motivated? She gets fed the correct amount according to her weight, which we've confirmed with the vet, and we've also tried bulking her food up with some steamed veggies, but she still seems to be constantly hungry.
Through this whole time, we haven't been rewarding the nighttime behaviour, and doing that, we've managed to get her down to one zoomie per night - and while that's great, we're trying to stay in the good books with our neighbour, who is complaining that he can hear her getting up at 5am. Of course, we chose to bring her into our lives so we don't mind once per night, but it's selfish of us to believe that the neighbour will be happy to see the progress she's made.
Has anyone else had anything similar to this or has any suggestions?!