Help…dog waking in the night!

[MonkeyTennis34]

Our 4yo chocolate Lab has been waking, usually twice a night..around 2/3am and then 5am.
He’s only been doing this for about the last couple of months and we don’t know why..
He has a morning walk involving boisterous play with another dog of about 1.5 hours then an evening walk of 1 hour.
When he’s had more or less than these amounts, it hasn’t made any difference.
When I come down to him when he barks he’s either heard something in the garden or is just sitting on the sofa.
Other than hearing foxes in the garden (which we obviously can’t do anything about) it’s almost as if he just wakes up and wants to see a human.
Our bedroom is too small for him to sleep in.
It’s like having a newborn baby in the house again but a big brown furry one.
We’re exhausted.

Has he always done this? Is he crate trained? Have you tried ignoring?

Our dog does it every now and then and we shout down to her if she barks in the night and 99% of the time that settles her, but she knows it doesn’t get her any valuable attention.

Crate training our dog and putting a blanket over the crate that she can get in and out of was also game changing for sleeping though the night as she can take herself off to her small confined space and forget about needing to guard the kitchen/garden.

No, he’s never done this before.
As a puppy, he didn’t use a crate.
We do sometimes ignore him but he’ll carry on barking for quite some time and then I worry about the neighbours!
I like your idea of shouting down the stairs so he doesn’t get any actual attention… I will try that tonight.
I’ve just been googling “sleeping tablets for dogs”….

Can he sleep on the landing?

Block of his view to outside so he can’t get disturbed by wildlife or cars, and try a white noise machine to block out any noises. Also I’d make sure he has blankets etc. as it’s getting colder.

Thanks everyone.
Amazingly, he slept through last night, despite the heavy rain…or maybe because of it!
We will try some of the suggestions.

Try having some music on a speaker - you can get rain music, waves, white noise or just classic fm.

I’ll bet the rain worked as white noise to drown out anything else.

@thisishowloween
You might be right…I’ll try putting “heavy rain” on the Alexa 🤞🏻