Great Dane puppy crate crying at night

A 5-month-old Great Dane crying alone in his crate at night — that's genuinely hard to hear, and hard to ignore given the volume a giant breed puppy can produce. Separation anxiety is one of the most distressing things for both dog and owner, and I want to be upfront: products can genuinely help, but they work best alongside a behavioural approach, not instead of one. Before I point you toward anything, can you tell me a bit more? Is he okay during the day when you're around, or is the distress specifically at night in the crate? And is the crate in a separate room, or near where you sleep?

That's a really useful distinction — what you're describing sounds less like true separation anxiety and more like normal puppy distress at isolation, especially at night. At 5 months, and only six weeks in, he's still hardwired to expect proximity to his pack after dark. The kitchen-away-from-you setup is the classic setup people use, and honestly it's the setup that causes the most crying. A couple of quick questions: has he ever settled quietly in the crate during the day with you nearby, and has he been sleeping through the night at all, or is it every single night?

Right — so the crate itself isn't the problem, and he can self-settle eventually, which is genuinely positive. What this tells me is that he needs two things: a sense that he's not completely alone, and something that mimics the calming scent signals he'd get from his mother. For giant breed puppies in this exact situation, the product I'd point you to is the Adaptil Junior Collar. It's a puppy-specific pheromone collar he wears all the time — it releases a synthetic version of the appeasing pheromone a mother dog produces, and it works passively around the clock without you having to remember to plug anything in or refill a diffuser. It won't sedate him, it won't make him dopey — it just takes the edge off that underlying anxiety. The reason I prefer this over the plug-in diffuser for your situation is that the scent travels with him, including in the crate at night, rather than dispersing from a fixed point in a large room. Pair it with moving the crate closer to your bedroom — even just outside your door — and most people see a meaningful improvement within the first few nights.

Good question. The Adaptil Junior collar comes in one size and is designed to fit puppies up to around 40–45cm neck circumference, so if he's already pushing past that you'd need to move to the standard Adaptil Calm collar instead — same pheromone technology, just sized for adult dogs. Measure his neck before you order. Either way, the mechanism is identical and the effect should be the same. One other thing worth doing alongside the collar: put an old worn t-shirt of yours in the crate with him. It sounds simple, but your scent is genuinely reassuring for a dog this age, and it costs nothing.

Most people notice some improvement within three to five days, and the full effect tends to build over two to three weeks as the pheromone level stabilises. If you've moved the crate closer, added the t-shirt, and used the collar for a full month and he's still crying for an hour every night, that's worth a conversation with your vet — occasionally there's an underlying anxiety that needs a bit more support. But for a healthy, otherwise-settled puppy like yours, I'd be genuinely surprised if you weren't seeing significantly shorter crying spells within a week.