we can't think of anything else to try.
06:30 every morning is the time that Jenni starts going ballistic in her crate downstairs - scratching at the crate door, howling and crying.
We have tried moving her crate and shutting all the doors between us and her - we can't get it further away (relatively) from where we sleep, and she still sounds like some kind of coal train rattling and howling.
We have tried putting her to bed later after a good play - it doesn't matter, put her to bed at 2am and she's still up at 06:30.
We have tried covering her crate so that it she doesn't get as much light as early, hopefully tricking her into thinking it's still dark - this has worked for 2 nights so far - I think she got wise to it this morning as even covered she was howling and rattling.
When we go to to let them out (in the morning or otherwise), we always make sure that they are silent before entering the room, and are trying to enforce them to 'quietly' sit before actually opening the doors.
Don't get me wrong, this isn't something that has 'just' started happened, she's been doing it pretty much since we got her, but in the early days we kinda expected it because she was a real baby, needing to pee every 2 hours or so etc
However now we know she can hold through the night, especially if she definately has a pee before bedtime and no water after 10:30pm
Millie did start doing this, although she wasn't howling, she was pacing up and down the bedroom and scratching at our arms /bed to wake us - to stop this we put her in a crate, then she started to whine when we moved at around 5:30am and wouldn't stop crying so she started to sleep downstairs - problem solved - silence.
However Jenni is already downstairs, and already in a crate - we thought perhaps leaving her out of the crate would reduce the noise, but we know that a) she wouldn't hold her piddles/poops through the night, as she hasn't quite gotten the hang of toilet training completely yet and
that she and Millie would just start fighting as soon as the sun was up, which would be just as noisy - potentially noisier!
Someone has suggested frightening her when she's doing it by banging on the top of the cage / or a pot/pan to get her to stop - obviously this sounds a bit mean to me, and would succeed in scaring Millie also anyway. It may also cause some kind of negative image of the crate, and she's very good at going into it whenever we say "boxes Jenni" she just goes and sits inside it, and will sleep in it if the door is open - unlike Millie, who, although she will go in it if told she won't voluntarily sleep in it.
Does anyone here have any other suggestions?
