 Barking - at nothing
So, Winston has picked up an interesting little habit lately... barking at thin air. First I thought he was reacting to noise outside of the apt (since it can be loud here sometimes) or to our chinchilla. Unfortunately, he's not.
He is in fact barking at nothing. The hardest and most puzzling thing of all is - he is very scared. We just got finished with a nice extended session of it, and he was being incredibly protective of me and was clearly very shook up and shaken. I've resorted to putting him in his crate early for the moment since we're going to bed in a few anyway.
I am at a loss of what to do here. I tried scolding him, which doesn't help much on the protective instinct he is going with (and I worry about doing it too much and having him think I am encouraging him.) I don't want to get in the habit of picking him up and coddling him since I don't want him to think barking = affection (which didn't help much anyway.) If it was actually noise I would try to desensitize him, but there isn't anything to do it with.
Does anyone have any suggestions? Beyond chalking this up to him being a ghost or something I'm at a loss here. |