I have a dog of about one year and a few months. She's housetrained and we've had no problems with her night time habits, until about two weeks ago.

She's become so hyper focused at night on surrounding sounds and noises from the trees (falling leaves and such) in one corner of our garden that she doesn't pee no matter how long we leave her out there. As a result, she wakes up up to do business anything from three - five hours after we've gone to bed.

The last two nights she's woken me up solely to go and run up to those trees and look into them - no toilet business at all. Needless to say I was fuming and chased her back in immediately. I don't want to ignore her calls to go outside but I don't want to keep encouraging this behaviour either.

I have tried locking the doors for hours until right before we go to bed, thinking that our keeping the doors open means she's just been doing her business earlier - that hasn't helped.

I have tried blocking that corner, all she does the is look up at the trees from a distance.

I have tried taking her to not one, but two different parts of the garden. All she does then is bark at the dog next door, and in the other part she is hyper focused on a different corner where the other neighbor dog has been spotted once or twice.

I've tried mentally stimulating her with brain games such as snuffles towels in the evening to get her brain tired, but as soon as it's time for bed she's wide awake and obsessed with the trees.

The constant disturbances to my sleep is driving me up the wall, because she will wake me up anything from 01:00 - 03:00am, and then my other dogs will want to go out at their usual time of anything between 04:00 - 05:00am so at best, I get five hours sleep before I'm disturbed (and considering I have chronic fatigue and anemia, that's not enough).

What can I do to break this cycle? I've tried Googling but this is such a specific issue I'm battling to find results.