Italian Puppies

October 24, 2018

Italian Puppies

My son had his heart set on a blood hound. A massive 90 to 110 pounds of dog. “He can do search and rescue,” he argued. “I’ll train him. I’ll keep him in my bedroom.” It wasn’t enough to convince me . . . not with our small to average size house and the fact that we already had two dogs. However, since my son had recently graduated from high school and was sincerely interested training a dog for search and rescue, I began looking at other breeds. There had to be a smaller breed, I reasoned, that was good for search and rescue. I searched the internet for any kind of dog that was a good tracker and small. That’s when I first learned about the Lagotto Romagnolo, an Italian dog bred for hunting truffles. While the male blood hound can be as much as 110 pounds, the Lagotto Romagnolo tops out at just 35 pounds. My son wasn’t sold on the compact Lagotto and life went on without adding another dog to the family.

It was years later that my husband and I began to think about what kind of dog we wanted to get. It was the first time that we would choose a dog for the two of us instead of for our children.

One morning before he left for work my husband nudged me and showed me a picture of a Lagotto on his tablet. “What do you think of that?” he asked. He was on his way out the door and that was the extent of our conversation. I remembered the cute curly dogs and the fact that it originated in Italy interested me. I began learning as much as I could about the breed.

To my mind there were at least 3 big reasons that this breed was for us. We wanted a medium sized dog. We wanted a dog that didn’t shed much. We wanted a dog with a loving personality.

Birth

A litter of ten Laggoti Romagnoli are born, seven girls and 3 boys. The father is registered with AKC and the mother is registered with ENCI (a certifying agency in Italy). Both parents were imported from Italy. Later we would learn that our female puppy was the largest in the litter and our male puppy was next to the smallest.

One Week

We decided to adopt two puppies. I mailed a check to our breeder for the deposit. We requested a male and a female. We don’t know which two puppies are ours yet, but our breeder says she will begin matching puppies to families in late August. She does not ship her puppies. We were happy with this because we didn’t like the idea of shipping either. We made plans to fly to Oregon to pick them up.

Two Weeks

Five Weeks

Exciting news! We just got a text with the pictures of our puppies. Right now, their names are Mario and Matilda.

My puppy prep reading:

The Art of Raising a Puppy by the Monks of New Skete This was recommended by our breeder.

The Thinking Dog: Crossover to Clicker Training by Gail Tamases Fisher. I read her first dog training book when I got my first dog. Her ideas and methods worked well for me and I wanted to see what she was thinking now. This is a great book. I highly recommend it!

Eight Weeks

At their 8 week check up our male puppy weighed 4.2 pounds and our female puppy weighed 5.8 pounds.

We finally met our puppies. Our breeder had told us we could pick them up as early as

September 13, but we had plans to attend a family wedding on the fourteenth. We flew into Portland on Saturday, September 15. Early on Sunday morning we drove through the Oregon countryside to meet our breeder in person, talk, pay the balance due on our puppies and take them home.

We decided to give our puppies Italian names. We chose Biscotto for our little white male and Fiore for our roan female.

Nine Weeks

We rented a car and drove from Portland, Oregon to our home in Illinois. The entire trip was just over 2000 miles. We stayed at three AirBnbs and one hotel along the way. We used a 27 inch The Other Door crate for the puppies for both sleeping and traveling. Both puppies easily fit in this size crate, and it fit nicely in the back seat of our rental car. We secured the crate in the backseat with a long nylon strap.

We stopped every two to three hours, took the puppies out on their leashes for a bit of exercise, fed them a small amount and let them drink as much water as they wanted. They played and slept while we drove. Sometimes the car was quiet, sometimes the puppy barks, cries, and yowls were deafening. They never seemed to mind being in the crate and amazingly enough, we didn’t have a single puddle in the crate while we traveled.

Any time we had the puppies out on a leash we were amazed at how much they loved deeply sniffing the ground and how much they loved digging. We had already decided to dedicate an area of our yard to a sand pit for digging, but realized that we wanted to make it bigger than we had originally thought.

We left Portland early Monday morning and arrived home Saturday afternoon.

In these pictures the puppies are enjoying a bit of freedom outside a gas station convenience store.

We took the puppies to our vet for a well puppy check up shortly after we arrived home. They are the first Lagotti Romagnoli in our veterinarian's practice, so they were quite the celebrities. Bisco weighed 5.9 pounds and Fiore weighed 7.7 pounds.

Ten Weeks

Lagotti Romagnoli are all about sniffing and digging. That’s what makes them such great truffle dogs. Trying to train away something that is so built into their natures would be crazy. We decided the best thing to do was to channel that drive to dig into something acceptable; we would let them dig in a sand pit to their hearts' content.

Our first project when we got home was to dig out an area of our garden and fill it with play sand. The play sand does cling to their fur when it is damp, but it’s much better than the black clay soil in our backyard.

The puppies have fun in the sand pit and exploring the family room.