Welcome to
Pleasant Acre Collies
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Mary Lee Shingle
West Alexander, PA
724-484-9265
dmshingl@verizon.net
    Updated    4/15/24
Pleasant Acre Collies is a small hobby kennel located in southwestern Pennsylvania. We have been breeding and showing AKC registered rough and smooth collies (sable/white, blue merle, and tri color) for close to 40 years. We have been fortunate to have bred/owned a Best In Show winner, Several CCA National winners, multiple Group placing winners, multiple champions, and several near champion collies throughout the years.

​My next chapter of being involved with collies is judging. I have recently been notified by the American Kennel Club that I have been approved to judge collies. It’s been a life long dream of mine! 

I grew up on a farm (Pleasant Hill Farm) in central Pennsylvania. When I was in elementary school I found a copy of Albert Payson Terhune’s Lad of Sunnybank in my school library. I was mesmerized with every word in the book, just couldn’t put it down until I was done reading it! I knew from that moment I had to have a purebred collie. Living on a farm, we never bought dogs; they were either drop offs or were given to us. And there were no purebred collies in our area. When I was in the eighth grade my oldest brother had just moved to the Pittsburgh area and told me there were “purebred” collies advertised in the newspaper down there (males $40, females $50). I wanted a female and had a friend who also wanted a collie. The only problem, neither of us had any money to buy a dog and we couldn’t ask our parents for the money. My friend found an ad in a magazine where you could order a holiday greeting card kit and go door-to-door selling Christmas cards. Well, it was July but my friend and I went door-to-door in our small town and got enough Christmas card orders that we each earned enough money to buy a collie. Lassie was my first purebred collie. As I look back now, she wasn’t much to look at, but she was everything to this starry-eyed twelve year old girl who absolutely had to have a collie!

When I moved to my current residence, I decided to start breeding and showing collies. I wanted to use our farm name Pleasant Hill as my kennel name. I did register my first couple collies using this prefix only to find out later that there was a well known, successful collie kennel named Pleasant Hill. Therefore, my kennel name “Pleasant Acre” was born. I haven’t been without a collie since and hope to always be blessed with such wonderful, beautiful, and loyal companions in my life.




Member of: 
Collie Club of America
Panhandle Collie Club of West Virginia
Cleveland Collie Club
Collie Health Foundation
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