Miss Shelby has given us a real hard time about sleeping downstairs on her own. We don't want this to go on forever - we'd love to have her sleep in our room - but we feel that she really needs to get comfortable in her crate because she's there during the work day, at least for the foreseeable future. I'm super pro-crate training, but Shelby presents an interesting case. She KNOWS how to live in a kennel. She was a race dog, for crying out loud. She knows that she's really not supposed to relieve herself in her crate, and we're happy to say that anytime she has, it's been our fault (like last night). She either holds it, or cries and lets us know that she definitely has to go. It's just hard...
...to distinguish the pee cries from the howling and screaming that goes on every night. I don't have a sound clip of Shelby (I'll try to remember to take one), but she sounds exactly like this (mostly the black dog mixed in with some of the fawn dog).
It's a special little noise that apparently all greyhounds do, and it's much harder to sleep through than a simple bark might be.
We know that part most of her issue is that she misses us. It's why she was so good the first few nights before she got used to us. I think that she genuinely is lonely and scared that we might not come back to see her. Any puppy goes through this, and even though she's 2, she's never had people before, so this is a whole new experience for her. Another issue, though, is that I don't think she's incredibly comfortable - greyhounds are very bony even when they put weight on after racing - but we haven't found anything that she won't destroy. Towels, blankets, crate mats, anything that goes into her crate gets shredded during her panic over being in there at all. We're going to try a Primo Pad and hope that does the trick, but in the mean time we're running out of things to put in there for her. She's ruined 3 fleece blankets, too many towels to count, a crate mat, and a down comforter. (She won't, however, shred up the old sweatshirt I put in there for JUST THAT PURPOSE). The less comfortable she is, the less likely she is to lay down and cuddle until morning. It's a vicious cycle. As soon as she gets comfortable enough in there to stop ripping things up during the day when we're gone, she can sleep with us at night. Until then, we're all looking like this:
Bah Wilderness, MGM Productions, 1943
The kicker is that Shelbs gets to sleep it off during the day - Pat and I are stuck dragging through work, just dreading the next night. Something's gotta give.
