About
Our Toy Aussies are, first and foremost, our pets and companions. They sleep in our bed (how can such little dogs take up so much space?!) and go on hikes, adventures, and car rides. They play with our kids and our cat, and trample the flowers in our garden.
I’m Ashley, and I’ve been breeding Toy Australian Shepherds in Massachusetts for the past three years under the Tater Tails name.
I came to breeding through living with the dogs first. Truffle, our teeny tiny blue merle, came home as a pet and promptly turned our lives upside down in the best possible way. Watching her learn — the speed of it, the intensity of it — made me want to understand the breed more deeply. That curiosity is what eventually led to a breeding program.
What I’m trying to produce is a specific kind of dog: intelligent and athletic, with the structure to stay sound for a long, active life, and the temperament to be genuinely fun to live with. Toy Aussies at their best are funny, engaged, and responsive. They’re dogs that make you look like a better trainer than you are, and make your life so much richer with their clever and quirky personalities. That’s the dog I’m working toward with every litter.
My dogs are registered through both the American Stock Dog Registry (ASDR) and the American Kennel Club (AKC). I’m an AKC Bred with Heart breeder and a member of the Miniature American Shepherd Club of the USA.
All of my breeding dogs go through full health testing — DNA panels plus OFA evaluations for hips, elbows, patellas, and eyes — before they’re ever bred. I take the health side seriously because I don’t want to cut corners.
Our dogs compete in agility, Fast CAT, rally obedience, scent work, and trick training, and have participated therapy work. They’re not just pretty, they’re doing things. That matters to me, because these are dogs who were designed to work alongside their humans, and I believe they need to work to be fulfilled.
If you want to talk dogs, breeding, or whether your family is a good fit for a Toy Aussie, I genuinely enjoy those conversations. Get in touch.
What makes us different?
Our breeding program prioritizes health, temperament, and continuous learning. We conduct rigorous DNA and health testing on our breeding dogs and study ideal Toy Australian Shepherd biomechanics so we can produce puppies with sound bodies and structure. Equally important is soundness of mind. In their first eight weeks with us, our puppies receive nearly round-the-clock supervision and care, and are provided with structured science-based socialization opportunities to give them a developmental head start on life. This means that when your puppy comes home with you for the first time, it has already experienced a number of sights, smells, and sensations, learned valuable manners and social skills, and been desensitized to loud noises and other potentially frightening situations. It has been said that puppies learn best what they learn first, so we seize every opportunity to help our puppies become resilient, well-rounded, go-anywhere family pets.
Why “Tater Tails?”
When Russet, our little man of the house, was a puppy, he looked like a tiny round potato with a tail! “Tater Tails” is a nod to him and all the fluffy little potato puppies we raise.