Hands up who empathises with this article on the Mail Online which says that one in two pet owners say they regularly lose up to 90 minutes’ sleep because of their pets mewing, barking, scratching or nuzzling them awake – with many saying their pets ’caused them lots of stress’.
A survey of 1,000 cat and dog owners from around the UK found that 54 per cent often lost up to an hour-and-a-half’s sleep from being woken up early by their pets.
The most common interruption to a good night’s sleep was ‘incessant’ barking or mewing in the early hours, with 47 per cent saying it was a ‘common problem’.
We are pretty lucky. Our cats and dogs all sleep pretty much throughout the night. Cats tend to start moving around 6am, but if we open up the roof they run up and happily play, and the dogs don’t really surface until 8am (earlier in the summer). We rarely sleep right through as usual a couple of cats on the bed so legs get a tad hot at times, and they do tend to give us a nudge from time to time for a bit of a fuss.
Stressed? Not at all!