Episode 32 - Puppies Who Can't Settle Down in the Evening: The Arsenic Hour

10/13/2025

This episode answers a question about puppies who just can’t settle down in the evening:

"What are your best tips for “witching hour”? We have an 11.5 week Spinone Italiano that we brought home just over two weeks ago.

He settles down for naps during the day after some play and training, but after his early evening nap, some play, dinner, potty, he gets over aroused and overtired and we cannot for the life of us redirect his mouthing to a toy or chew and he cries in his X-pen and jumps at the sides.

We are trying to establish a routine with a licky mat, Kong or other soothing activity to transition him and bring down his arousal. But it is a nightly struggle!"

In this episode I talk about:

Why it’s natural for puppies to be restless and difficult in the early evening
Tips for dealing with a puppy who can’t control himself
Management and bedtime routine suggestions

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To read the transcript for this episode, click the link below.

Transcript - Episode 32

I'm Jane Messineo Lindquist. And this is a Puppy Culture Potluck podcast. You bring the topics, we bring the conversation.

Today's question comes from our puppy owner, a discussion group from our puppy owner course. And it's about what we call the arsenic hour. And here's the question.

What are your best tips for, quote, witching hour, unquote. We have an 11.5 weeks Spinone Italiano that we brought home just over two weeks ago.

He settles down for naps during the day after some play and training. But after his early evening nap, some play, dinner, potty, he gets over aroused and overtired. And we cannot, for the life of us, redirect his mouthing to a toy or chew and he cries in his X pen and jumps at the sides. We are trying to establish a routine with a licking mat, Kong, or other soothing activity to transit him and bring down his arousal, but it is a nightly struggle.

Wow. Yeah, I feel you. It's what we call the arsenic hour. You don't know whether to give it or to take it, but somebody is going to die. And I just want to say this is true. Not just of puppies. Although it's worse with puppies, of course, because they're worse. But it's true of adult dogs as well. Frequently my adult dogs will become just restless and annoying and just unable to settle. Right around that 7 p.m. hour.

It is often tied to that time just on the cusp of day and night. Okay, so it's just maybe just past dusk. I think that part of the vigilance and the hyperactivity that we see around that time is a natural response to the changing of the guard, so to speak, because what you have is your daytime animals are all going to sleep and your crepuscular animals are coming out.

Those animals that come out right around dusk, things like deer, rabbits, skunks, coyotes, bears, bobcats, foxes, and even bats. These are a lot of the natural predators of wild canids, so it's not surprising that this sort of transition from day into night, when these animals all become active, can be a time of sort of hyper arousal for dogs in general.

It doesn't make it any more pleasant for us, but maybe it makes it a little bit easier to bear just knowing that there is possibly an evolutionary basis for this. Okay, so what can what can we do about her, how can we help this woman with the 11.5 week old Spinone?

First of all, your puppy needs to learn cues for when their opportunity for interaction is open or closed.

For me, 7:30pm at night I've already played with my puppy. I've fed my puppy. I pottyed my puppy. I'm going to start getting that puppy into a routine where at that time they're going into bed because she is correct that they do become over aroused at that hour, but they're kind of building on all their insanity of the day, and by the end they just they got nothing left.

And again, we talk about this in the course with self-regulation that they got a tiny little prefrontal cortex just dangling out there not connected to the back of their brain, and they don't really have a lot of self-control. And they probably use it up in the first 15 minutes of their day. By the time you get to the end of the day, they've got zero self-control.

They're not going to be able to self-regulate. They are going to bite you. So at best, you're in a management situation. For me, I want to start getting my puppy into a routine at night. By this time where you're going to get a bone, you're going to go to bed. No matter what you do. I am not taking you out. You're done. Your day is over.

Now again, I can't really do this topic justice here because I it's what the course is about. You do have to make sure that you've been fair to your dog that you've met all their needs, that they've had enough time out, etc., etc. but assuming that the puppy legitimately has had a good day and it's time to go to bed, it's time to go to bed.

The end of story. Okay, so we're going to start teaching the puppy that we're going to ignore them if they really mug to get out, when you've given them a chew toy and they've had enough time out and it's time to go to bed.

It's difficult for me to answer this in a vacuum also, but I'm assuming that they didn't just get home at 7:30pm and then the puppy's out of control.

I'm assuming they've been home either all day or for a while, and this is the end of, again, a good day for this puppy. So that's my first piece of advice, is that you do have to develop a non-negotiable bedtime routine for your puppy. Now, some people wrote in with great advice about managing this behavior because honestly, sometimes you are going to be sort of working in that hot zone with your puppy.

Sometimes it's really not time for your puppy to go to bed, and it is the arsenic hour or close to it, or the puppy is just over aroused. So, one woman wrote in, which was a great observation that she sits on the floor and plays with long toys. So not toys where you're holding it in your hand, where the puppy could potentially grab your hand.

So like a flirt pole or a long octopus toy or something like that, just to have the puppies mouth away from you as you're playing with him.

The other thing that people mentioned about the crying in the X-pen in the area P, as we call it, is that sometimes distance can be an issue. In other words, if you have your puppy with you, you're probably should be with you, close to you.

And if you have your puppy in their X-pen, it can be difficult. If they're in their X-pen and they can see you and they want to get to you, and it's not so much see you with their eyes as see you like you're within ten feet of them. And they're like, hey, you know, I really I have a shot at this.

This is something I wrote an article on this called Attention Monsters that we hope that breeders have worked on, because it is one of the three kinds of alone that we want to teach our puppies. We want to teach our puppies to be alone. Alone, like in another room. We want to teach our puppies to be alone with you just sitting there and them in an X pen right near to them.

And then we want to teach the puppies to be alone, like with you doing stuff in the room and the puppy in the X pen. But it sounds like this puppy might not know those three kinds of alone. So yes, you you should teach those three kinds of alone. But right now, for expediency, you might try just moving the X pen to a place where the puppy can't see you, because this woman said that she did have it set up so the puppy could see her.

Probably not seeing you would help. I also just want to draw up here that I'm not throwing the breeder under the bus and saying that the breeder didn't teach the three kinds of alone, because it is possible that the breeder taught those three kinds of alone, because puppies are very opportunistic creatures and even if they've learned, basic separation conditioning when they get to their new homes, it does not take them long to figure out that their owners are a soft touch.

Okay. So they'll get in there, they'll whimper, they'll cry once they're going to get the attention, and they're like, hey, you know, I'm off to the races. I know how to work this game.

I just want to clarify that I'm not giving you a blanket edict to let your puppy cry it out. I think you have to do a balancing act. You have to talk to your breeder about how much crate and confinement conditioning the puppy has had. So you know what your baseline is. Again, this is stuff we all talk about in the course. But for this woman, right now, what she's telling me, I think maybe just moving that enclosure further away from where she is so the puppy can't see her, and letting the puppy work it out with the with the chew bone or something over there where the puppy does not feel like they have an immediate opportunity to be let out by the owner, I think that's going to be the best course of action here.

So Rebecca, one of our moderators, said, you're on the right track. The witching hour is due to fatigue. I put mine away a bit before the time they start witching and give them high value chew projects or food puzzles to do and self-soothe. But there's likely to be protesting early on.

Yeah, this is a great point, which is what is your antecedent? It's predictable. If you start tracking it, it's very predictable. When your puppy's going to start getting out of control. So you want to just get ahead of that. And if you know, it's always, you know, right after it gets dark, you know, maybe they just eat dinner a little bit earlier and maybe they go in just 15 minutes before it gets dark.

Then one of the other puppy owners in the group wrote this in, and I thought it was really sweet. She said:

Hi Lisa, we're in a similar spot. When Willy gets that way, usually at about the exact time we're trying to wind down for the day. We put him in his area, which happens to also be my home office and is adjacent to the living room.

At first he really didn't like being separated, but we always made it a good thing and gave him a Kong, bully stick or something similar to distract him from the stress of being separated. Now we just say something like “time for a timeout”, and he usually goes running for the office for his special treat. I just put him in there a couple minutes ago and he was asleep in less than five minutes. I struggled with it at first because I'm a huge softy, but it's worked out best for all of us now that I've accepted that he just can't settle sometimes without the separation.

Wow. You know, that's just that really warms my heart to hear that kind of personal growth in a puppy owner that, you know, that realization that it's a knife in your heart. You feel bad when they cry, but sometimes they just need a nap.

So I liked this assortment of suggestions because again, we got some management suggestions about how to play with a puppy that maybe is in a little bit of over arousal because you really you're not going to manage or train out the puppy. They're going to be puppies to some extent, and there is going to be some over arousal, especially as the day goes on and you're going to have to work a little bit in that hot zone, right?

I mean, I think a lot of puppy owners think that with the right training methods, they're never going to have to experience a puppy. So those management things for when the puppy is being a real full on puppy are great. A bigger toy, a longer toy, avoiding getting getting bitten by the way that you play with the puppy.

These are all great suggestions. If your puppy is food motivated enough, what I will do is give them a very high value bone so that they'll they'll be in the room with me. But self-soothing by chewing. So if I feel like I still really want to have that puppy out with me longer and also be shaping calm behaviors, be sort of conditioning the puppy to have a feeling of calmness in the house when they're with me.

I will then sometimes give them that high value chew that I might have otherwise given them in the pen. I'll give that to them in the room with me.

So I hope that those are some good selections that will help you listeners when you're dealing with a puppy at the arsenic hour.

If you liked this podcast, you'll love our puppy owner bundles. We have bundles with courses, books, and films. Check them all out at puppyculture.com. Well, that's it for this time. Thanks for listening. Bye bye.