I felt oblivious

Your mistake was you trusted the cat. Never trust the cat, he was probably in on it.

Scary scenario, get a loud siren and install it high on your roof and the next time that happens let'er blow for a few, that ought to make him move quick.

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Originally Posted by txron

I find myself doig the same thing, but I have re trained myself. We get rabbits in our back yard and my dog hates rabbits. He sleeps in the house with us and when there is any critters in our back yard, he barks and basically goes nuts. At first, I would just roll over, tell him to be quite and go back to sleep. After thinking about it, I realized that 99.9% of the time, it was a critter, but what if it was that 0.1%. Now, I have trained myself to get up, arm myself and let the dog into the back yard to chase away whatever is back there.

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My dogs are the same way and I too got lazy about checking since they barked at everything, every night. That ended when one day we caught somebody on our property going through woods (next to our shed) looking for scrap metal in the middle of the afternoon. Ever since then, I get up, armed, and let the dogs out to run anything off.

Middle of the night and my dog got agitated and woke me up with a couple of barks. She then got behind me, put me between herself and the "danger". I heard noises coming from the living room. I lived alone and had no other dogs or cats,,, something was moving around in the living room.
I got up "buck-assed" naked and went out with the Charter Arms Bulldog to see who/what needed to be shot.


Found that a bluegill from the aquarium had jumped out and landed in the basket of dog toys.

I figured if the fish wanted it's freedom that bad,,, then I should help. Picked up fish, opened front door and threw fish out on to the front lawn. Problem solved and repeat occurances avoided.

I also eventually got a different/better dog!!!!

My Lab will bark if a grasshopper farts. I don't get too excited about him barking. He also highly dislikes other dogs comming around, but he has a more specific bark for that I usually recognize it.
My Chow mix doesn't bark unless she actually hears something, and she can usually assess a threat/situation as good as I can. If she barks at night I get chills, coz I know she heard something. If she makes a sigh kind of noise and settles down, then I try to relax and go back to sleep. If someone is there who shouldn't be, she won't stop barking until the threat is gone. You could say that I put too much stock into her intuition, but she's never been wrong - even alerting to people in the yard who didn't even get on the porch or knock or make excessive noise. The only "false alarm" is that she HATES the mailman lol

It is definitely a case of "know thy dog" and it sounds like your dog is much like my Lab - kinda sucky for a burgalar alarm coz he barks at everything. Wish you could tell before you reaised them lol my Lab is so annoying some days I want to dict tape his mouth shut, but he's my buddy and here to stay.

Paranoia is nice this time of year. You should visit!