How to Help a Rescue Dog Settle at Night With a Donut Bed

The first thing I learned about a rescue dog is that you do not get to decide where he sleeps. He decides. Pip came home the second week of December, a four-year-old terrier-Chihuahua mix, thirteen pounds, tan with one white paw, and for his first eight nights he slept on an old fleece blanket under my kitchen table with his nose pointed at the back door. I had a flat foam bed sitting four feet away the whole time. He never once used it. It is in the hall closet now.

I did what I think a lot of people do in week one. I bought things. The thing that ended up mattering was the Best Friends by Sheri Original Calming Donut Dog Bed, Small, 23 inches across. I ordered it on his third day home, after I measured him with the tape from the kitchen drawer, chest 17 inches and neck 11. It arrived on his tenth day, the day after he backed out of his collar at the back steps and ran two houses down, which is a story for another page. I am not a trainer and I am not a vet. I spent thirty years in a school office in Plymouth, Massachusetts, retired now, and I had only ever had family dogs before this one. Eleven months later, that bed is still on my bedroom floor, and this is the order I would do it in if I had to start over.

Before You Set the Bed Down

Two things I did before the box was even open, and both mattered more than I expected. The first was measuring. Chest 17 inches, neck 11 inches, on a kitchen tape measure with Pip standing on the floor and me kneeling next to him. That is how I landed on Small. The bed has a 17-inch sleeping surface inside a 23-inch round, and the listing says it suits pets up to 25 pounds, which left him about twelve pounds of room. The second thing was deciding in advance that I was not going to make him use it.

The thing I got wrong was the first bed. I bought that flat foam bed the same week he came home because it looked sensible and it fit in the corner of the living room where I figured a dog bed ought to live. He ignored it for a month. When the donut bed finally came, I put it down in the bedroom next to my side of the bed, because by then I had stopped being sensible about any of this.

Step 1: Put the bed where you sleep, not where a dog bed is supposed to go

A rescue dog who is scared of being alone does not need a bed in a nice corner of a nice room. He needs to be able to hear you. My bedroom is small and there is about three feet between my side of the bed and the wall, and that is where the bed went, flat on the floor, no blanket underneath, nothing between him and the rug.

The first night it was there, he came in, sniffed the bolster, and went back to the kitchen table. Fine. He did that for eight nights. But the bed was in the room with me by then, and that is the whole argument for the bedroom: he had to be able to check on me before he was willing to lie down.

Even after he took to it, he was awake at 5:40 most mornings. I want to be honest about that, because I have read things that make it sound like the right bed fixes everything on night one. It did not fix everything. It got him off the kitchen floor and into the room with me, and everything else came afterward.

If your house is laid out like mine, one story, no stairs, moving a bed at night is easy. If you have stairs, put it at the top of them where you sleep rather than downstairs where the dog is by himself. The point is company, not upholstery.

Step 2: Put something of yours in it before you put the dog in it

I took a T-shirt I had worn all day, not a fresh one from the drawer, and laid it flat in the middle of the bed. Nothing else, no blanket, no toy. Just a shirt that smelled like the person who was now in charge of his life. That shirt is still in the bed eleven months later. I have never washed it, because the smell is the whole point.

I know how that sounds. I am not a person who talks about energy. But a dog who has just been moved out of a shelter kennel and into a stranger's house is working with his nose, and the nose was telling him this round thing on the floor belonged to the woman who fed him.

I have since wondered whether the shirt did anything at all, or whether I just needed a job on day three. I cannot prove it either way. What I can tell you is that when I have lifted it out to shake the bed, he has stood there and looked at me until it came back.

Step 3: Give it eight nights and keep your hands off it

The bed arrived on his tenth day home. He sniffed it, walked a circle around it, and went under the table. He did that for eight nights. I did not pick him up and put him in it. I wanted to. What stopped me was that I had already tried picking him up for other things, and it only ever set us back a day.

The shape is the part people do not expect. The Best Friends by Sheri bed is round with raised bolsters all the way around and a dip in the middle, and Pip uses those bolsters the way I use the arm of a couch. He gets in, turns twice, and puts his chin over the edge facing the door. The fill is soft enough that he sinks a little. He works at the faux fur with his front feet before he drops, which is the closest thing to a puppy habit he has.

On the ninth night after it arrived, about eighteen days after I brought him home, he got in on his own and stayed there until 5:40 the next morning. I know the time because I was awake for a good part of it, lying there listening to him breathe and trying not to move.

Eight nights feels like a long time when you are in the middle of it. It is not. A dog who has been in a kennel does not trust a new object in one evening. If you are on night three and he is still under the table, you are not doing it wrong. You are on night three.

A word on the nights he does get up, because there are still some. Mostly when the wind is up, or when Marge's trash truck comes down the street early. He stands beside the bed and puts his chin on the mattress and I put one hand flat on his side and he goes back down. I do not turn on a light and I do not talk to him. Two minutes, and we are both asleep again. The bed he goes back to is the same bed in the same place, which I think is most of why it works.

Eight nights he sniffed it and went back under the table. On the ninth night he slept until 5:40, and I lay there wide awake, listening to him breathe.

Step 4: Keep the bed with him when a night goes sideways

The Fourth of July was the test. Pip had been with me seven months by then and he was a different dog on most days, but fireworks are fireworks. The first one went off around eight and he was off the bedroom floor and pressed against the back of the couch before I had my shoes on.

I carried the bed into the bathroom, which is the smallest room in this house and has no window on the street side. I set it on the tile, put the radio on the counter on the local station, and sat down on the floor next to it. He shook. He also stayed in the bed, all evening, with his chin on the bolster and his eyes open. That is not the same as calm, and I am not going to pretend it is. It was the first loud night that did not end with him under the table, and I will take it.

What I would tell you: pick the spot before you need it. A small inside room, a radio, and the bed he already trusts. You will not be thinking clearly at eight o'clock on the Fourth.

Step 5: Carry the bed room to room instead of buying a second one

I have one bed. At night it is on the bedroom floor. In the morning I pick it up by two of the bolsters and carry it to the living room, where it sits near the front window in the afternoon sun. Two trips a day, maybe fifteen seconds each. It weighs a little over two pounds, so this is not a chore.

I thought about buying a second Best Friends by Sheri bed in January and I did not, for a reason that turned out to be right. The smell is the point. Two beds means two things that both sort of smell like the house and neither one smells like his person. One bed that travels has one smell and one meaning.

What Else Helps

A last trip out the back door before bed, on the leash, even though the yard is fenced. Pip gets two walks around the block a day and one short trip out the back steps at night, and that short trip is what tells him the day is over. Dogs read order better than they read clocks.

Low light and a closed door. I turn the overhead off and leave the small lamp on my nightstand. The bedroom door stays open so he can get to the water bowl in the hall, but the house is dark past that doorway, and dark means nothing is expected of him for the next eight hours.

A tired dog sleeps. The evening walk happens after supper and before the lamp goes on. Pip wears a harness for both walks, with the leash clipped to the harness and never to the collar. I am not going to tell you a walk fixes a scared dog, because it does not. But a dog who has been out and sniffed the whole neighborhood has less left over at bedtime.

Something to do in the morning, so the morning is not the hard part. When I went back to my Tuesday and Thursday shifts at the library, Pip got his breakfast kibble in a snuffle mat, and it takes him about ten minutes to work through it. That is a daytime thing, not a night thing. But a dog who has had a good morning is easier to settle at night, and I did not expect those two to be connected.

And the one I cannot answer for you. If your dog is not sleeping at all, night after night, or is pacing and panting and cannot be reached, that is a conversation for your vet, not for a stranger's article about a bed. Dr. Amaral is four miles from this house and I have asked her plenty of questions that no product could answer. A bed is a place to sleep. It is not medicine, and I would not want you to read this and think otherwise.