Staffordshire
Bull Terrier
breeder

One litter, occasionally two, sometimes none. If you write to us at a time when there are none, the answer is that there are none: we do not offer you an acquaintance's puppy and we do not rush you towards a future litter.

None of our puppies travels by courier: no aircraft holds, no handovers halfway in a car park. Whoever takes a puppy comes to Ostellato. That way they see the mother, the house and the place where it grew up.

There is no such thing as a puppy “with” or “without”: the ENCI certificate goes with every dog and is not charged separately.

On the contrary, they are what tell us who we are dealing with. Whoever asks about the tests, the parents, or what happens if in two years' time they can no longer keep the dog, is the person we would gladly entrust a puppy to.

All breeding dogs are tested for L2-HGA and HC (HSF4), or clear by parentage with their parents' reports. Our dogs are also clear of DM-SOD1. The reports, with the microchip number, are published on the dogs' pages.

All three are recessive diseases. They are found with a DNA test that is done once and lasts a lifetime. Two clear parents cannot have affected puppies. How to read the reports is explained in the genetic testing guide.

The pedigrees. The Del Piccolo Diavolo dogs are registered on SBTPedigree, the breed's international database, with all the dogs and the litters. From there you trace the grandparents, the great-grandparents and the littermates. You see who the dogs behind a name are, and also what is missing.

The pedigree certificates. Every puppy leaves with the ENCI pedigree certificate, which is checked by its studbook number.

The show results. The titles are not self-certified: the show catalogues are public, and the judges who assessed our dogs have a first name and a surname. They are collected in the palmarès.

The dates. Every litter has its date of birth: the most recent in the diary, those of earlier years in the breeding programme. None disappears once the puppies are in their new homes, and that is deliberate: this way anyone can count how many litters we have in a year.

Our females, one by one. Microchip, genetic tests and pedigree: from there you verify ancestry and litters.

We do not mate two Staffordshire Bull Terriers because they are beautiful. Every mating comes from a reason we can explain: what we are trying to fix and what we are trying to correct. If the answer were "they are two nice dogs", there would be no programme behind it.

We do not place puppies before 60 days, which is a legal requirement and not a choice of ours. For families abroad the timing is longer still, because the rabies vaccination and the official health certificate are needed.

It also works the other way round. When a puppy is clear by parentage for one disease but not for another, we say so. When for an outside stud we have the report for two conditions and not for four, we say so.

It is the part nobody likes to tell, and it is also the reason the rest stands up: a kennel that only declares the good things is not giving information, it is advertising.

If you are assessing us, or another kennel, the guide on how to recognise a breeder who does things properly lists the eight criteria and how to check them, on us as on anyone else.

How a litter comes about is told in the breeding programme: the choice of the two parents, the weeks in the house, the matching with the family. The history of the litters is there too.