benefits of obedience training?

[Eryn]

Hi Doodle lovers! 

As some of you may know from my other post, I am a new doodle owner and although I have grown up with dogs my whole childhood, this is my first time owning my own in my adult years.... I just brought Sully home with us about 5 months ago and I keep going back and forth between deciding whether I should bother with obedience training or just do private training..

To give you a bit of a background- Sully is 13 months, but was re-homed twice in that time.... which is very sad, but happy we have him because he fits in wonderfully in our family and he has most definitely found his forever home with us!

I do know quite a bit about behavior modification and have already trained Sully to do the following: Sit, Down, shake a paw, touch (he comes and touches my palm with his nose), stay and drop it. He is fairly consistent with these, but he is still a puppy and will get distracted and not listen at times. With the gentle leader head collar, he walks really well and he seems to be very well behaved around other dogs. He has met about 8 other dogs within the time we've had him and he was quite social with them.

He came to us already crate trained, and has no issues with this at all. He loves his crate!

However, here are the issues we have with him: He likes to swipe food off the counter and he gets into the garbage. He also is terrible at greeting people that come to visit. He jumps up on  them- Although I don't let him do this. He is a big dog and he could really hurt someone, so I keep him on his leash when I have visitors and only let him go when I know he has calmed down and won't jump. He also has issues with our cat... but some of you know this from my previous post and we are working on that problem as well.

So what are your thoughts on obedience training??Is this something that will help us with any of our issues? Or private training?? Or should I keep doing what I'm doing, because I am aware that some of these issues will just take time because he is still young...I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Thank you :)

[Eryn]

Thank you all for your responses. I do work with him everyday and plan on continuing to do so. He was a bit of a crazy puppy when we first got him, but it's amazing how quickly he has changed now that he has regular physical and mental exercise throughout the day. I think I will go ahead and register him for a group training. He is not a great listener when there are other distractions around, so I think that will definitely help with that! And it will give us something fun to do together, he is so social I think he will really enjoy it!

I will continue to work on the home issues and hopefully with time, they will come. 

[Rosemary (Ro) and Enzo]

Sounds like an excellent plan!