Hi, we have had our puppy just 1 week and he is now 9 weeks old. He is doing very well but we have noticed the witching hour on the last 2 evenings, we try and offer lots of distractions with toys, Kongs and even some training but sometimes he is in a focused mood of biting, scratching etc and tend to focus more on my wife! Do we just keep going or is there something we are missing. By the way he is adorable 99% 9f the time
Hi Leecaz, welcome to the forum! Congratulations on your puppy Puppies are generally hopeless at regulating their behavior or controlling their worst impulses when they're tired. The witching hour is real! I'm afraid you can't avoid it altogether, but this article on our main site has lots of advice for coping until he grows out of it. Keep hanging in there!
Our puppy is now 5 months old and used to go crazy at "lounge time" as we call it, that time in the evening when we open the kitchen stairgate and we all move into the lounge for the evening. He used to hare about jumping on sofas, biting everyone and everything he could. Well I can now safely say that is a phase which they grow out of if you are consistent with your response. We now have a puppy who calmly enters the lounge, lies on the rug or in his lounge bed and is totally relaxed. Those crazy witching hour evenings seem a distant memory and I'm sure will soon be the same for you so take heart!
We always took a ball in and also some low key toys in with us. We've got a dogwood stick which I totally recommend (Google it) and just some old socks knotted together. Then each evening we'd start off playing a steady/slow game of roll the ball to each other with Nero chasing and then try to calm his play down using the dogwood stick (woody) and sock and eventually calm play has become the norm. We didn't use treats for this but do for an daytime activities.
