my boyfriend has an almost one year old black lab mix puppy and he drives us nuts at night. when my boyfriend first brought him home in the summer, he was an exclusively outside dog. before people start freaking out, this dog has always been kept outside since before we got him and the reason we continued to keep him outside was becuase my boyfriend has allergies. however, now that i've been giving him a hard time and his allergies are getting better and it's starting to get colder outside we're starting to bring him in more especially at night. we've always kept him in a kennel at night even when he was outside just to get him used to the idea and to ease our minds that he's not getting into trouble while we're sleeping. when he's outside in his kennel he's pretty quiet, except in the morning he'll wake up and start barking really early if he doesn't have his bark collar on. (i know, i know; lots of people think bark collars are cruel, but it's helped control his barking to the point where if we put it on he won't even bark at all so don't leave any mean comments regarding this). anyway, now that we've moved his kennel inside, he whines after we go to bed. we tried keeping him in the garage and he whined and barked, so we tried keeping him in the house and with the help of the bark collar, he doesn't bark, but he does whine like crazy. leaving a light on doesn't seem to help. because my boyfriend has allergies, we can't keep him in our room and even if we could there's no room in there anyway because it's a small room. we can't leave him loose in the house by himself because he'll tear everything up and we don't want to have to deal with that catastrophe in the morning. i understand that we should just let him whine until he goes to sleep which the two of us don't have a problem with. the problem lies in that my boyfriend has two roommates, and neither one really understands that we need to just let him cry until he stops. one of them has let him out when he was whining because she felt bad for him, and the other one starts to get mad if the dog is whining for more than 3 minutes even though his dog sits in the garage and barks for hours in the morning and during the day. we don't want to have to keep him outside at night, but it's the only place he's quiet and i'm not so sure it's because he's more comfortable out there because when he's out there during the day, he'll act like he'd rather be inside with us. we'll be moving in about 8 or 9 months but kind of need a solution until then so if anyone knows of anything that might help let me know!
My boyfriend does have allergy medication but his allergies aren’t going to get better over night, so we’re balancing keeping him out during part of the day and keeping him in the other part of the day and at night. We’ve already taken the dog through one course of obedience training and he’s a lot better in a lot of ways than when we first got him. We asked the trainers about it and all they told us was to not keep him in an area that he isn’t used to so he’s been in the house a lot more in the last few months.

I understand labs need a lot of attention. I was not the one that brought this dog home and I warned my boyfriend about it when he first told me about the dog. I told him that it would be a lot of work and that granted, labs are great dogs, but they can be crazy and require lots of attention. That being said, I don’t believe we give this dog any less attention than any other would. He’s outside by himself while my boyfriends at work during the day and then when he comes home he lets him in. We take him on hour long walks everyday to a field where we can let him loose and he can just run off some energy. And we play fetch with him in the backyard and we play with him when he’s inside.