I adopted a 5 month old yesterday, and am having the devil's own time running the energy out of her. We've done probably five or six walks a day, either wandering our property until she gets bored and wants to go back inside the a/c, or walking the neighborhood; she'll settle down a bit for twenty or thirty minutes, and then she's right back to being hyper. I've had several GSDs before, but the only rescue that wasn't a senior was a medical case that was in bad shape for almost a year and kind of missed the whole puppy phase. Or, with her, I'd take her for a mile or so walk twice a day and yard wanderings in between, and she was perfectly happy to just chill out between them.

We're also having to crate her at night, because our cats aren't entirely on board with her yet. She does just fine during the day, but will cry and bark at night for a half hour or so before she goes to sleep. Again, with my seniors the cats never cared, so we didn't bother with the crates, just some orthopedic dog beds. (With the little grandmas, the cats actually usually slept with them. It's a puppy energy thing, I guess.) Aside from her keeping me up for a while, I'm worried she has some kind of anxiety thing that I don't want to make worse. For the most part, she does just fine during the day (until its time for a walk) as long as she can hang out around my roommate and/or I, and she'll sleep just fine out of her crate. (She's snoring next to my desk chair right now, actually.)

She also seems to be getting by on like...five hours of sleep a day total. Activity ramps up once the sun is down, which is good and bad: it's really too hot to expect her to want to be outside during midday right now, but we have a large predator population (critter predators) around where we are, so "out after dark" is a calculated risk here.

I would love and appreciate anyone's thoughts on this.

Edit: my worry isn't that there's something wrong with doggo, it's that I'm accidentally doing something powerfully stupid that I'm just not realizing. Senior dogs are easy, lol: feed them, walk them, give them love, ignore the snoring, and take them on car rides. (Give them all their pills, weekly IV antibiotics, convert the porch stairs into a ramp...) Just worried that the puppy needs something I don't know to give her.