[Nighttime Zoomies - Hungry?]

Hi all, 

Months later, but I just wanted to update in case anyone else finds themselves in a similar situation. Discussions with another vet brought up the possibility that Millie thought we were sleeping in her bed, which turned out to be correct. She and her crate were shifted out of the bedroom for two months while she readjusted to sleeping in there with the door closed, and she wasn't allowed on our bed any other times. After those two months we moved the crate back into our bedroom and she's getting on absolutely fine - she sleeps right through the night and doesn't stir too much. Fingers crossed it continues! 

[Nighttime Zoomies - Hungry?]

9 minutes ago, Time4ANap said:

I am going to throw another wrench into the mix, but only out of concern for your hound.  Have your vet run some fecal tests over the next few weeks until you have at least 3 negative rresults.  If you get a positive result, you can start treatment and discontinue the tests until you need to see if treatment was effective. 

Now - here''s the reason.  Hookworms.  Hookworms are cyclical and there literally has not been a hound adopted in the past few years that didn't have them. There is lots of info in the hookworm threads in the health and medical section of the site.  The hunger is the clue here.  If she has hookworms or some other parasite, the middle of the night hunger is very normal.  Our last 2 adoptions took almost a year each to eradicate the hookworms using Dr. Ng's modified hookworm protocol. The current strain of hookworms is resistant to the standard treatments, so you may need to do the intensive protocol if you keep getting positive fecals. Even though your group likely gave her a dewormer and you may be giving her a monthly heartworm / deworming pill, it may not be adequate. Do the fecals to be sure that you aren;t dealing with parasites. 

There will often be stomach upset and some bloody stools during treatment.  This is normal and your vet can prescribe meds for those issues as needed. Also, one negative fecal only means that this test was negative.  You can get a positive result a few weeks later when the eggs hatch.  I don't consider the dog to be negative until I've seen 3 negative tests in a row.  I hope you aren't dealing with hooks, but if you are, starting treatment ASAP is the key. 

Thank you! We handed in a fecal sample earlier in the week and it's been sent to the local vetinary school to run some tests on so when they call I will definitely make sure to ask about hookworm. 

[Nighttime Zoomies - Hungry?]

On 8/4/2021 at 4:52 AM, Embie said:

Our hound was a bit like you describe. She would wake up at odd hours pacing and barking. We tried the alarm clock trick and that helped a little, but what finally solved the problem was completely overhauling her feeding schedule. Even though she was receiving the correct amount of food during the day, she would wake us up at night and she was very loud about it (we happened to get a hound who likes to bark a lot, which made the sleep disruptions even worse). She just always seemed hungry! Our adoption group would tell us to stay firm and she would get used to the feeding routine, and not to worry as long as she was getting the correct amount of food. We tried that for awhile but ultimately had to make a change. 

We finally bought an automatic feeder that dispenses food at pre-programmed times, including late at night and early in the morning. She gets 1 cup of food roughly every 6-7 hours for a total of 4 cups per day. This helped us tremendously. Her last meal of the day dispenses at 11:00 pm and the first will dispense in the morning at 5:30. We are usually up by 6:30 to take her out. At this point, she has learned the routine of when the food dispenses and now sleeps through the night. I think it helps that she realizes the food will appear without us, and therefore she leaves us alone.

Maybe that is worth a try? 

You have no idea how happy I am to hear someone else has been through this, though I'm sorry to hear she was vocal too - that's the one silver lining with Millie, she doesn't bark or howl, just breathes on our faces until we wake up! 

What you described about overhauling the feeding is EXACTLY what our vet suggested on Monday, and exactly what we've done. She's now being fed most of her dinner at 10pm, with a small snack at 5 to see her through til then. By making this change, for the past few days she's sleeping most of the night, and although she still wakes at 4, she seems aware that she doesn't get any attention or food and has just been changing where she sleeps (moving from crate to rug or couch) or circling for five minutes before going back to sleep.

I've been looking at automatic feeders and I think it's definitely something to invest in! 

[Nighttime Zoomies - Hungry?]

2 minutes ago, macoduck said:

Try the alarm clock trick. If you can guess when she will get up, set the alarm for several minutes before that time. Do that many days in a row, gradually pushing the alarm time back to the wake up time you want for her.   Let your neighbors know you are continuing to work on this problem as you hand them a gift card to a restaurant.

Hi, thank you so much for your reply! Unfortunately we can't guess when she'll wake - it seems to be random between 2 and 5am, sometimes earlier but usually between those hours. We used the alarm clock trick initially in pushing her breakfast time back from 5am to 7am and it worked well but this time we've no idea of when she'll stir, so we can't really pre-empt it with an alarm 😭

[Nighttime Zoomies - Hungry?]

8 minutes ago, Toffeesdad said:

I’m sure you’ll get some good insight from more experienced folks, but our hound sleeps well til around 4am. If one of us gets up to the bathroom etc around that magic time he thinks it’s time to get up and is hard to get back to sleep.   It appears that the racing kennels usually let the hounds out at 430.  The hounds are very schedule oriented.  
Does she need to go out?  Is there a scheduled noise like a garbage truck happening at the time she gets up?  You mention neighbors, is it elevator noise?  Sometimes it’s like a mystery novel trying to figure things out.

Thank you so much for your response! The thing about the neighbours specifically mentioning 5am is that she's actually up anywhere between 2 and 5, so while it's probably annoying for them to wake up a few hours earlier than normal, for us we just don't get sleep if she wakes up as early as 2!

 

She doesn't need to go out, she'll happily go outside but won't do anything while she's there, and given the timings are so random I don't think there's any noise that would be waking her - even if there was, I'd be concerned about her behaviour thinking it's time to eat/play at 2am. 

 

Another forum said to try brain games with her and I think that's probably the one thing we haven't done yet so will give that a go today. It definitely feels like a mystery novel for sure, like a big game of Cluedo except we're exhausted while playing 😅

[Nighttime Zoomies - Hungry?]

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?!