Behavior changes after sitting

Hi Rhonda -

I watched my friends' husky puppy, James, a while back while they were gone for 3 days. He was 11 months old at the time, and they had never left him before. James is in LOVE with my older dog, Carys, and he knew me pretty well since we'd been getting together for a couple months prior for dog play time, and I'd even taken him out while his owners were at work, so he'd spent time with me without his owners already, too. James was comfortable in my house, although the first night he did not want to stop playing at all--I had to kennel my own dogs, put all the toys away and sleep in the living room to encourage him to go to bed. He spent nearly all of his waking time playing. We also took long walks and had outdoor playtime. He had a BLAST.

After he went home, both of my dogs, as well as James, retired to their respective kennels (all three are dogs that love their little dog caves) and barely came out except to eat and potty for about three days. All three were exhausted. Normally when I get up in the morning, mine come to greet me at the bedroom door, stretching and wagging. After James went home, they didn't do that for the first three mornings. They just looked at me from their kennel, came out calmly when I grabbed the leashes to take them outside, then went right back to bed. James did pretty much the same thing. He is normally about as excitable as you would imagine a teenage husky is, but he went home and crashed, for the most part ignoring his parents and sleeping for days. He had a great time, but he had a very exhausting great time. Like people after a crazy party weekend, all the dogs needed some recovery time.

If I were to guess, this is what's going on with Baxter, too. The combination of a totally different environment and the lack of nearly everything that had been normal over the past couple years, paired with having a genuinely good, exciting time, probably left him in need of a good long recharge. Even if he had a great time, that kind of change is stressful to the system. It's pretty common with our clients, though not necessarily to such an extent. Dogs who never sleep in the car will crash on their way home, and pretty much everyone will go right to sleep as soon as they're back home.