Question for those with rescued doodles

[jenn D]

Is it common for rescues to continue to work through behavior issues that were a result of their previous situations 6+ months after you have them? Jake has come a long way in his 6 months with us. No more hoarding food or drinking water until he throws up. He is starting basic obedience classes with my husband which is great. I think Jake has a true working dog's personality. He really likes to be doing things. He follows me or hubs around when we do things around the house.
However, he does love to play the "you can't catch me game" when we need to get the dogs to come in from the outside. At times he still seems to be testing us, like grabbing one of our things and wanting us to chase him. But the thing that concerns me is that sometimes when we go to pet him he cowers,like he has been hurt by this. Other times, he seems to seek out body contact and will squeeze right next to you and put his paws in our lap and lean into us pretty intently. Also, brisby and pickles seem to understand when I say enough and tell them to settle. I spend equal amounts of time doing individual training but it seems Jake just is taking ALOT longer to train than the other boys (even though pickles is only 5 months old). On the other hand, Jake is always watching a persons face and body when walking on leash where the others don't seem to be that in tune. Just wondering if it's his upbringing before us or his genetics.
Pickles and brisby are relatively easy to trsin and while Jake is tougher, I see soooo much potential in him.

[Adina P]

It's such a tricky thing because you usually will never know for sure the source of the cowering/hand shy appearing behavior.  I would take comfort in the fact that dogs probably don't have major flashbacks as much as automatic responses shaped by either temperament or past experience.  So even if he was not treated kindly by fast hands...he's probably not replaying memories in his mind as much as reacting in a knee-jerk fashion.  Thinking about Jackdoodle and his response to long cylindrical objects...I wonder if there is a way to counter-condition that by turning long cylindrical objects into predictors of really good things?  Just a random thought.

I would just look at his 'issues' as goals for training rather than 'issues.'  Because all dogs have things that are harder to train than in other dogs and may take A LOT of work to change.  Keep up the good work!