Our dog will be 11 next month. He recently began a new behavior that we're at a loss about.
The morning routine is, H always gets up hours before I do. He dresses in the bathroom, and when he walks out of the bedroom, pooch follows him, and hangs with him while H is making his lunch for the day. H feeds pooch and lets him out to potty. Right before H leaves for work, he comes back to our bedroom and opens the door, so pooch can come back in, jump up on the bed and he has always gone back to sleep until I'm ready to get up.
About a month or so ago, after H let pooch back into our bedroom, pooch would jump up on the bed, but when he'd see H leave, he'd follow him out to the living room. He wouldn't stay in our bedroom, even if I would give him some nice scratches and rubs. He'd go to the dining room French doors, sit there, and just bark at the outside. Sometimes, if I use my sternest voice and yell at him, he will go back to our bedroom with me, but by the time I've done this, I'm so frustrated that when I get back in bed, I have a hard time going back to sleep. So my sleep has been poor the last month.
I decided a couple of mornings to let him bark it out, and see how long he'd do that. Yep, a full hour before he'd give up and come join me in the bedroom. Then he'd crawl up on my legs and go back to sleep; I would, too, if I'd been barking that long.
Then it occurred to me that pooch is barking... because it's dark outside! Once the sun comes up and it starts to get bright outside, that's when he's returning to the bedroom (which, BTW, has blackout curtains). So there's something anxiety-provoking to him about looking out the French doors, into the darkness. This is the first winter he's done this.
I know he's not responding to anything he's hearing outside because his hearing is terrible. He has long, furry ears and he really doesn't respond to noises (doorbell, door knock, phone ringing, etc.). We can return home from errands, he can be asleep 20' from the door on the couch, and we can walk in, start putting groceries away, etc., and he doesn't budge from his nap. He only really wakes up when his smell kicks in that we're home. Then he jumps down off of the couch and greets us.
We have a bark collar - the kind that vibrates, not shocks. Our daughter recommended it to us a couple of years ago when we were having issues with him barking at other pets walking in front of our house. But I never liked putting it on him, so it's been sitting in a drawer. That's an option we might try on Monday.
So this morning, H got up after it was light outside, fed pooch and let him out to potty. Then he left for the grocery store before I was awake, not letting pooch back into our bedroom. He found pooch on the couch, asleep when he returned from the grocery store, and he never barked once while H was gone, which is leading me to the 'barking at the dark' theory I've developed.
There's not much we can do about dark mornings right now, and I'm not going to start getting up in the mornings when it's still dark out. Any suggestions/insight? I've probably left out something, but this is the best summary I can think of right now.