Sinco
ATCH MACH Fourwinds in Sync With Me XF CL4-R CL4-H CL4-S CL4-F O-EAC O-EJC ECC TG-O TN-E WV-E HP-O XCC-N XGT-N XHP-N MPD
Sinco is an awesome Aussie who picked me for her family when she was just 6 weeks old. Her litter was being raised at my home because I had two other puppies at the time. I thought it would be "safe" and I wouldn't be tempted by any of the puppies. Well this little red merle girl would scream at the top of her lungs any time I walked away from their puppy pen. She figure out how to escape out of the pen and would find me through a crowd of people when I was teaching agility classes at the house. She stole my heart. She was spunky and everything I like in a puppy. Well her screaming when I'd leave her continued during her crate training process. I thought she would never be quiet in a crate. After spending a few nights in a crate in the car in the garage she started to be quiet at night in her crate.
She was a different puppy to train than I had been used to training. I love to use clicker training/shaping with my puppies. I found that she was so soft that the absence of click shut her down. I had to use a lot of emotional and positive verbal encouragement with her. I finally stopped using shaping with her and went to more luring. She was much happier at being shown what I wanted. She learned very quickly that way and she would get faster and faster at doing whatever I wanted her to do. I could tell there was drive in there after all, I just needed to bring it out in a different way. As a result she doesn't offer a lot of behaviors to get attention, she has a great natural off switch and she would get a bit silly if I even thought a mistake had happened. Early in our training I had to work through her tendency to wiggle around the crowd when she thought a mistake had happened. We worked through it and now she is the most serious, driven and hard working agility dog I could ask for! She is also so self-confident she has been trained as a service dog, obedience dog and herding dog. She is extremely versatile. At six months old she showed a lot of talent and interest in herding which was very exciting to me. I had always wanted an Aussie with herding instinct. She was also biddable on stock which would be easier for me to train in herding.
She embodies everything I would want in an Aussie in terms of drive and talent. She has a great structure with nice angulation in front and rear. Her only faults is that she is small even for a female and she doesn't have as much of a sense of humor as many Aussies have but she communicates with humans incredibly well. So I talked to her breeder about breeding her. I had never wanted to breed a dog before in my life but I just couldn't bare the thought of taking her out of the gene pool. So her breeder and I spent a year researching who to breed her too. It was complicated by the fact that Sinco only comes into heat about once a year. I like that for performance sports though!
In April 2010 we finally bred her to MRE Jus Taggin Along (Tag) and on June 17 (her own birthday) she had 9 beautiful and healthy puppies! They are all in their homes doing wonderfully and I have kept a red and white girl "Carmine" who is the puppy of my dreams!
Sinco was back winning at agility at the end of August 2010 and she has since earned her ASCA ATCH title on April 17 2011, she competed in the AKC Nationals in April 2011, in the CPE Nationals in June 2011 and in the NADAC Championships October 2011. She won the Extreme Games Overall 16" Novice award and she earned 2nd Place Overall 16" Regular at the NADAC Championships. She has qualified for the 2012 AKC Nationals and for the 2012 AKC World Team Tryouts. She earned her MACH on Dec. 2 2011 and went 6 for 6 that weekend too! She is an awesome girl!
