We begin by teaching the basic obedience commands for the following actions: wait, sit, stay, down, jump, bark, heel, go out, stand, come, retrieve, seek, leave it, take it.

We tend to rotate the dogs in the house, kennel or free in the yard. With females there are some combinations we can't house together so having everyone free to roam around in the house at once isn't an option. We teach the basic obedience commands and continue to "proof" them in a variety of way. Here is an excellent website that goes through 15 steps to proofing your dog. We often think our dog should just generalize a command we have taught them to any other situation they find themselves in - it doesn't happen without proofing:

http://www.inch.com/~dogs/proofing.html

We have hosted a couple of dog training seminars
focusing on obedience and tracking. We hope to do more of this each year.

Cey Working Shepherds is a kennel that strives to produce German Shepherd Dog puppies that are intelligent and easy to train, structurally sound with deep pigmentation. The German Shepherd Dog is a working breed - these dogs are not happy lying around with nothing to do. Our girls love to train in obedience, agility, and tracking. They also love to be in the house participating in the activities of the family. We take many opportunities to practice their obedience while going about our every day tasks. This "proofing" is what helps to make them so easy to be around. They are all three housebroken and crate trained as well.

Crate Training

All of our dogs are crate trained. It is gives us great peace of mind to have a safe way to transport our dog, or a safe place to house them at times that we can't have them out and about. Most of them do fight it somewhat initially, but they end up enjoying their "den" and often prefer to be in it. We place a crate in their whelping shed about the 3rd or 4th week. The puppies get used to going in and out of it and sleeping in it. The door is left off. We encourage all of our families/individuals that adopt a puppy to take advantage of this wonderful training/security tool.

Sometimes it helps to send the puppies off with a familiar article in the crate, which has the smells of the litter on it.

Here are some very good reads about this issue:

http://www.cuhumane.org/topics/crate.html
http://www.canismajor.com/dog/crate2.html
http://www.siriusweb.com/AAD/crate.html