Things that Groan in the Night

One of our dogs – a mid-size female Shepard cross – has taken to sleeping on the runner beside my bed at night. I have tried; unsuccessfully to discourage the habit but every evening there she is, stretched out on the piece of carpeting beside the bed.

It’s not like she has no other place of her own. The house is littered with a variety of animal cushions. There is the faux leather-covered one underneath my office desk, the soft, fluffy velour-covered pillow in the hallway, and a red blanket decorated with black paw prints that we picked up for her last Christmas.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not the kind of person that restricts her movement to any specific places in the house, both her and her brother are free to wander throughout the place at will.  During the day and early evening she frequently sleeps on the kitchen rug, in the tiled hallway and on the carpeting upstairs but at night, there she is, stretched out beside me. Sometimes she beats me there and I get the ‘where were you?’ look as she settles herself back on the mat.

This habit of hers has now become a problem. In her old age, she’s taken to groaning in her sleep. Every time she lifts her head or changes position on the mat, she resettles herself with a long satisfying groan of comfort and she may do this as many as six to ten times per night.

I wake up! The groan doesn’t just rouse me out of a sound sleep but awakens everybody in the house including the cat that is generally burrowed in her basket behind the wood stove. To make matters worse, the dog has now added snoring to her repertoire.

Now this is not funny. In the wee hours of a dark winter morning not long past, the dog started her rhythmic gurbling and I, slightly dozy with sleep assumed it was the other person in the bed. Before I realized that it was the dog that was doing the heavy breathing, I had delivered several well-aimed thumps on the other body in the bed with some disastrous results.

Her brother – a mid-size golden lab cross - has been content with the same spot in the house for 12 years and gets distressed if he has to sleep somewhere else. He too, has become a snorer but being in another room of the house he can snorkel to his hearts content without disturbing us too much.

I am almost at the point of investigating one of the anti-snoring devices. There is one available called the Air Machine, a rubbery device that one inserts into the nostrils. It allegedly expands the nasal passages to increase the size of the air intake thereby taming the noise of the airflow.   I wonder if it works on dogs?