Before you buy
What Comes With Your Puppy
Everything that goes home on the day, and what you should have ready before it does.
Vaccination record, worming dates, and enough of the food it’s already eating to change over gradually. Written down, in your hand, with the actual dates on it.
What goes home
- Health record. 6 to 8 weeks: first dose of DHPP, covering distemper, parvovirus, adenovirus and parainfluenza. 10 to 12 weeks: second DHPP booster, plus optional lifestyle shots such as Bordetella or leptospirosis. Every date written down.
- Worming schedule. Wormed on schedule from two weeks old, with the dates.
- Food. Enough of what it’s eating now to change over across a week rather than all at once.
- ICCF registration paperwork. The International Cane Corso Federation is the parent club registry for the breed in the United States.
- Microchip number, recorded on your paperwork. Register it in your own name once the puppy is home.
- Date of birth and parentage.
- Our number. Ring it. People do, for years, and we’d rather that than not.
- A signed copy of the contract itself. You read and sign it before collection day rather than on it.
Bordetella and leptospirosis are optional and depend on where the puppy is going and what it will be doing, so we talk that through rather than giving them by default.
What to have ready
- A crate sized for an adult, with a divider. Buying a puppy-sized crate means buying two.
- A vet appointment in the first week. Get the dog on the books before you need them urgently.
- Large breed puppy food, if you’re switching from what we send. Why that formula specifically.
- Somewhere it can’t reach cables. Everything goes in the mouth from about four months.
The first night
It will cry. That’s a puppy that has never been alone before, not a puppy that’s unwell.
Crate beside your bed for the first week, then move it gradually if you want it elsewhere. Ours are already crate trained, which makes this much shorter than it would otherwise be.
The first week
Keep it small. One room, the crate, the garden, and the people who actually live in the house.
A puppy that has just changed continents as far as it is concerned does not need six visitors. Give it three or four days of quiet and it will come out of its shell on its own, and the dog you meet in week two is the real one.
House training runs on the clock rather than on hope: outside on waking, after every meal, after play, and last thing. Ours have started this before they leave, so most buyers are through the worst of it inside a fortnight. Accidents indoors get cleaned with an enzyme cleaner rather than anything with ammonia in it, because ammonia smells like urine to a dog and marks the spot as a toilet.
Book the vet appointment for the first week even if nothing is wrong. Being on the books before you need somebody urgently is worth doing.
Food, and changing it
We send enough of what the puppy is already eating to get you through a changeover, and the changeover is the point. Swapping a puppy’s food overnight causes several days of loose stools, which then gets mistaken for illness.
Do it across a week. Three quarters ours and a quarter yours for two days, then half and half, then the reverse, then all yours. If the stools loosen, hold at the current ratio for two extra days rather than pressing on.
If you are choosing a new food, it needs to be a large or giant breed puppy formula specifically, and the reason is calcium rather than protein. Why that matters on a dog that will reach a hundred pounds.
The crate, properly
Buy the adult size now, with a divider panel. A Corso finishes at 25 to 27.5 inches at the shoulder, so a crate that fits an eight-week-old is money spent twice. Move the divider back as the dog grows.
Ours are crate trained before they leave, which means the crate is already a good place rather than a punishment. Do not undo that. Feed in it, leave the door open through the day, and never use it as a consequence for anything.
Night one goes better with the crate beside your bed. A puppy that can hear you settles in twenty minutes; a puppy shut in a kitchen on its own cries for hours and learns that crying is what happens at night.
What is not in the box, and why
No branded starter kit, no collar with our name on it, no bag of toys. Those things exist to make a handover look generous and you would replace all of it inside a month anyway.
What you get instead is the paperwork with real dates on it, the food, and people at the end of a phone. Who we are.
Two things worth reading before the puppy arrives rather than after: the first year, and what the twelve months ahead will actually cost. Neither is a sales page.
Ask what a particular puppy is on
Food, routine, and how it behaves with the others in the litter.