Breed Priorities – Miniature American Shepherd

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386 – November/December, 2022

By Nikki Riggsbee

The Miniature American Shepherd was developed in California in the late 1960s from smaller dogs thought to be Australian Shepherds. The Australian Shepherd standard calls for dogs to be 20– 23inches tall, bitches 18–21 inches. The Miniature American Shepherd dogs are to be 14–18 inches and bitches 13 –17 inches.

The MAS was originally called Miniature Australian Shepherd. Its name was changed when it entered AKC’s Foundation Stock Service in 2011. They progressed quickly and joined the herding group in 2015. It has been popular from the beginning, ranking in the mid-thirties early in AKC registrations and was 30th in the 2021 statistics.

We found three breeder-judges and eleven breed mentors plus nineteen other experienced breeders to invite to take a survey on their breed’s priorities. Sixteen agreed to do so. Seven completed surveys were received. The respondents have been in the breed nearly twenty-one years on average. The judges have been approved to judge MAS for an average of nearly seven years, approximately the length of time they have been fully recognized.

Miniature American Shepherd Virtues

The survey included a list of sixteen virtues taken from the MAS AKC standard for the experts to rank on how important they were when evaluating the breed. The list below is in order by the average of the rankings, with one being the most important.

Click here to read the complete article
386 – November/December, 2022

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Posted by AnthonyA on Nov 29 2022. Filed under Current Articles, Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.