Their first self bred sheltie of the type they aimed for was Ch. Tiakina Tia Maria. She was still winning Best in Shows at 11 years of age. She was what a Tiakina sheltie should look like: with sweetness of expression, with very good temperament and movement. Abundance of coat may not have been as good as it could have in the early days. At that moment Carol and Les could never suspect that 6 generations later a GGG grandson of this bitch (‘Jordan’, Tiakina Tri B’fore Ya Buy, now living in France with Veronique Hubert) would become multi-champion and would produce champion progeny all over the world. CLICK HERE to see one of the Tiakina lines, to begin with Tiakina Tia Maria and to end up with Ch. Tiakina Touchd By An Angel. 

Carol, looking back, in what way shelties have changed in those 30 years?

Carol: “Compared to then shelties now have a lot more bone and coat and temperaments are much better. Movement has not improved as there are no longer breeders who have a reasonable number of dogs to carry on a breeding programme.”  
  

Tiakina today

After her husband Les died (in 2000) Carol concentrated on tri colours and blues. Keeping all colours on her own meant keeping more dogs than she could look after. Having met the challenge of breeding many sable and white champions, she decided to continue to do this with the much harder challenge of the blues. She’s the only breeder in West Australia breeding blues.

Many years ago blue merles in West Australia had big heavy ears and were not of a good type. Carol and Les decided that to improve the general type of the blues it was necessary to introduce sable lines, especially those which had the better ears and ear carriage. As there were no tricolours available to them, they used tri-factored sables. 

Carol: “Also thanks to those matings my lines carry clear silver blue. With the clear silver colour you do mostly get a lighter shade of tan, especially on the face. It gives the very soft expression that I love so much. Of course those matings can result into sable merles too. I think it’s silly to prevent them. I never kept or bred with the sable merles but in all the years I’ve been breeding I never got one sable merle having health problems.

Many of the old time breeders maintained that to keep good colour you needed to put in a sable every fifth generation. Sable merles are not allowed to be shown here, but I do know of several Rough Collie champions who are sable merles. They have brown eyes, and once they have their adult coats they just look like sables. They can be very useful for breeding as there are times that they are the pick of the litter. Then you can put them to a tricolour dog and get blue merles – excellent coloured blue merles - once again. I have always selected the blue merles if they had the other qualities I was looking for. When I mate tricolours with blue merles I prefer to use tricolours from sable lines and not from blue lines.“

a very succesful son of the blue merle/sable mating between Ch. Tiakina Turquoise Tuxedo (blue merle) and Ch. Tiakina Tip'Th Taxi Driver (sable).
 

Considering a mating the first thing Carol does is to decide what she wants to improve. Then she makes a list of all the males she knows that have that improvement, and hopefully his parents are good in that aspect and his progeny produced it as well. Carol is looking for an overall quality dog. So her priority is to produce a puppy as good as the parents. Carol: “To expect improvement in each generation I have found is not possible. You gain one thing but you lose another.”