Female dog nesting? Help please!

UPDATE:
Thanks for everyones advice!

I have made an appointment for September 28th to have her fixed. She goes in the morning for some lab work to verify its a false pregnancy or pseudopregnancy and make sure there isn't anything else going on. If that's all it is, we'll need to wait about a month for her symptoms and hormones to become level again before having her fixed. Which is why the late date in September.

Thank you specifically schizo319 for helping me with finding out what she was doing and what it's called. Your awesome!




Original OP:

Since we’ve breed Basset Hounds, female dogs in heat is no surprise with us. However, this dog is nesting and that is something very new to us. She is taking all stuffed animals and keeping them on my sons bed. Being VERY fussy with them, her blankets and food. She will not let anyone near that bed. This morning she done something again completely unlike her. We let her out to go potty and she nosed away the door going to our crawlspace uh under the house and holed up under there. She would not come out for anything. She didn’t even have one of her babies (stuffed animals) with her. We got a few and put them at the door thinking she would come to get them, but no luck. She was so far under there we couldn’t even see her. We had to leave her there as we were already late for work. She has also become very whiney and seems agitated, very unlike her. The mood change has been about a week so far.

My son came home for lunch and she was sitting in her spot on the porch with her “babies” and as soon as he opened the door she took them all one by one back to bed. He put her on her leash to see if she’d go potty before being put back inside for the afternoon and she went right back to the crawlspace door wanting very badly to go back in there.

There is no possibility of pregnancy and she has not shown any signs of actual full blown heat. She usually bleeds pretty good during her heat and our fixed male dachshund always lets us know before then hehe. Has anyone dealt with anything like this with a female dog? I’m wondering if a trip to the vet is needed? She’s never been under the house before and I’m surprised she knew where the door was. There’s nothing of interest under there according to the dachshund, who is a barker of everything. He went in and sniffed around without even a whimper. If something was under there he would certainly tell us.

On a side note, DH is worried that if we fix her now, her personality will change. I don’t think it will as our Basset Hounds didn’t and we fixed the female after one litter. But she wasn’t particularly the smartest of dogs.

If anyone is interested, here’s the story of our sweet girl Aurburn:

2 summers ago, we were shopping at an outdoor flea market. Coincidentally, we had been talking about getting another dog on the way there. A bigger dog more to my DH’s liking as he really doesn’t like our dashound that we got from the pound a year earlier. We are not at the flea market 10 minutes when the boys come running up to us with this beautiful fluffy dog with his teenaged owner. He was begging someone to please take her and give her a good home. They were moving and he could not take her with him. It was so very sad. The boy very obviously had some mental and developmental delays. It felt like fate that we were to take her home. The boy has texted me several times asking about her and I’ve sent many pictures to show him what a great life she was having. His mother even brought him to meet us at a park a year later so he could see her. He’d gotten her from their neighbor when the litter was born, so we know her age is 3 now. The boy had been unable to give her anything but the minimum of care with tons of love.

We had taken her a few days later to the vet to have her spayed and to get her up to date with all shots. The vet commented that she was such a beautiful and extremely intelligent dog that we may want to consider breeding. We’ve breed Basset Hounds before and the vet knows us well from that. Although she is a mutt she has such wonderful markings and incredible intelligence, she and likely offspring would make an incredible service type dog. So we decided to wait on spaying her and see if the vet came across what she should be breed with. She trains so easily it’s fascinating and she can tell us when my mother’s sugar is high (diabetic). She whines and does circles around my mother until she sees her test. She’s been right every time and each time my mother’s sugar was in the 300-400 danger zone.