Delivery
Getting Your Puppy Home
Meet us, ground transport, or a flight nanny. Never a cargo hold.
Three ways: you collect, we drive it, or a nanny flies with it in the cabin. We don’t put puppies in cargo holds at any distance, for any price.
Collect in person
Free, and what we’d choose. We meet buyers up to two hours out of Riverside, which covers most of southern California.
It takes about half an hour, at our pickup spot, which is a space kept for handovers rather than our living room. We go through the health record, answer whatever you’ve thought of since you wrote, and you spend as long with the puppy as you want.
You do come to us in person. What we do not do is bring families through our own home, and it is worth saying why: a litter that has only had its first shots is not protected yet, and the surest way to carry something in to it is a stream of visitors walking through the room the puppies sleep in.
Most people come to us rather than the other way round, and these two were both taken here at the kennel on the day the puppy went home.
Ground transport
Driven the whole way in a climate-controlled vehicle, with stops to walk, feed and check the puppy.
No depot, no holding facility, no handover between carriers. You’re told when it leaves and roughly when it will arrive, and the puppy is handed to you in person.
Cost depends on distance and we quote it separately rather than building it into the price.
Flight nanny
A courier flies with the puppy in the aircraft cabin, holds it the whole way, and hands it to you at arrivals. Door to door it’s one day rather than three or four.
For anywhere past about 1,500 miles this is usually the better option, and most of our east coast buyers choose it.
This is what the end of it looks like. The handover happens landside at the gate, and the puppy has been held by a person for the whole flight rather than travelling alone.
Photographs of two Dallas Fort Worth handovers are on the Texas page.
Why never cargo
A cargo hold is a loud, unpressurised-feeling, temperature-variable place to put an eight-week-old dog, and the animal is unattended for the duration.
Some airlines allow it. We don’t use it. If the only way to get a puppy somewhere is cargo, we’ll tell you that rather than do it.
Summer
Heat decides more of our dates than distance does. A Corso puppy travelling through Arizona in July is a bad idea regardless of the vehicle, so from May to September the southern legs run overnight and we’ll move a date rather than push one.
Choosing between the three
Roughly, distance decides it for you.
Inside two hours of Riverside, come and get the dog. It costs nothing, it is the least stressful option for the puppy, and you get to see it with its littermates before you commit, which no photograph replaces.
Between two hours and about 1,500 miles, ground transport usually wins. The puppy stays in one vehicle with one person, and there is no airport in the story at all.
Past 1,500 miles, a flight nanny is almost always better despite sounding like the more dramatic option. The journey is a day instead of three, and a puppy held by a person for five hours is having an easier time than a puppy in a van for seventy.
Tell us where you are and we will tell you which of the three we would pick, including when the answer is that you should wait a fortnight for cooler weather.
The day itself
Whichever route, the pattern is the same.
The puppy is fed roughly four hours before it travels rather than immediately before, which cuts travel sickness considerably. It goes with a piece of bedding that smells of the litter, and that scrap of blanket does more for the first two nights in your house than anything you can buy.
You get a photograph when it leaves and updates on the way. At the handover you get the health record in your hand, the food, and about twenty minutes of us or the driver going through where the puppy is up to.
Then let it sleep. The most common mistake on day one is inviting everybody round to meet the new dog. What to have ready before it arrives.
What it costs
Collection in person is free.
Ground transport is priced by distance by the driver, and a west coast run is naturally cheaper than a run to the eastern seaboard. A flight nanny is the courier’s fee plus the cabin ticket, and cabin fees differ airline to airline.
We quote it separately and we pass it through at what it costs us. It is not built into the puppy price and there is no handling fee on top of it, which is why we cannot put a single figure on this page: it genuinely depends where you are.
Ask, and you will get the actual number for your address rather than a range.
Where our puppies have gone
Most go within California and the rest are spread across the country. Texas, Florida, New York, Ohio and Arizona are the ones we are asked about most.
We deliver to all fifty states. The section below sets out how a puppy reaches each part of the country, and if your own corner of it is not obvious from that, ask and we will tell you the route.
How a puppy reaches your part of the country
We are in Riverside, an hour east of Los Angeles, on the I-10 and the I-15. Where you are decides which of the three options above makes sense, and roughly it breaks into five bands.
Southern California, and out to about two hours
Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego, the desert cities. You come to us, it costs nothing, and you collect from our pickup spot rather than our living room. Most of our puppies go this way.
The southwest: Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico
Four to ten hours by road and we often drive these ourselves. Phoenix and Las Vegas are the two we schedule around rather than through, because both stay hot deep into the night in high summer and a hot night is harder on a big dog than a hot afternoon.
The mountain west and the plains
Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas. Ground transport up the I-15 or out on the I-70 and the I-80, typically two to three days. Denver is the usual flight alternative, and for Wyoming it is normally simpler to land at Denver and drive north than to fly into the state itself.
Altitude is worth one sentence: a dog arriving from sea level wants a fortnight of shorter walks before it is working normally at five thousand feet.
Texas, the south and the midwest
Two to three days on the I-10, the I-20 or the I-40, or a nanny into Dallas Fort Worth, Houston, Atlanta, Nashville, Chicago, Columbus or Indianapolis depending on where you sit.
The Gulf coast is the one we plan hardest around. Humidity stops a panting dog cooling itself, so ninety-five degrees in Houston or New Orleans asks more of this breed than a hundred and ten in the Arizona desert. From May to September those legs run overnight or the date moves.
The east coast and the northeast
Past about 1,500 miles the drive is three to four days, which is a long time in a vehicle for an eight-week-old, so almost everyone here takes a flight nanny instead. One day door to door, landing at JFK, Newark, Boston Logan, Philadelphia, Baltimore Washington, Dulles or Charlotte.
Alaska and Hawaii are flight only. Hawaii has its own quarantine rules and we work through those with you before anything is booked.
Tell us your town and you will get the specific answer: which option, which arrival point, what it costs and when it could go.
Weather decides more of our dates than distance does
Cold is the easy end for this breed. A Cane Corso is heavy, short-coated and built for winter far more than for summer, so a January run to Minnesota or Maine is a straightforward job. Snow moves a date rather than a route.
Heat is the constraint, and the southern corridor out of Riverside runs through the Mojave and the Sonoran. From May through September the southern legs leave at night and arrive early, and if a week looks bad we will move a date rather than push a puppy through it.
If you are somewhere hot, the thing worth knowing before the dog arrives is what your own summer will ask of it: shade, water, walks at the two ends of the day, and the back of your hand on the pavement before the dog stands on it. The rest of the health picture, and what to feed a dog this size, which shows up in coat and skin faster in a warm climate than anywhere else.
Tell us where you are
We’ll give you the option, the timing and the cost in one reply.