Trust
The Health Guarantee
What falls inside it, what falls outside it, the single condition that brings it to life, and why it is tighter than the guarantees some kennels advertise.
Before any puppy leaves, Bell Rock Veterinary Clinic examines it and finds it healthy. Take it to your own vet for a first visit within a week of arrival, and if that vet uncovers a serious congenital or hereditary defect, you choose between a replacement puppy and the full price back, and the dog stays with you. Set out plainly, that is the entire guarantee.
The one condition
A licensed vet of your own has to examine the puppy within one week of collection. Line that appointment up before the puppy even reaches you.
This is not box-ticking. It fixes the puppy’s condition on arrival in the judgement of an independent professional, and without it there is no telling a problem the dog carried to you from one that began once it was in your hands. It also gets a local vet onto the record from the very first day, so if anything shows up at four months you already have someone who saw the dog healthy.
Let that window pass and the guarantee falls away. I will not dress it up, because a guarantee with no point of verification is not a guarantee at all, it is a slogan.
What it covers
- A serious congenital defect, meaning one the puppy was born carrying.
- A serious hereditary defect, meaning one passed down from the parents.
- Either way, one that genuinely affects the dog’s quality of life.
The remedy is yours to choose: a replacement puppy from a litter down the line, or the full $700 back. The dog stays with you whichever you pick. There are kennels that make you return the animal to claim, and asking a family to do that four months in strikes me as an appalling thing to demand.
What it does not cover
- Vet bills. The guarantee answers for the purchase price, not for treatment. That is pet insurance territory, and it pays to price it up before the dog lands.
- Parasites. Coccidia, giardia and worms turn up often in puppies, clear up with treatment, and tend to follow the stress of a move.
- Minor or self-clearing conditions. Umbilical hernias, retained testicles, cherry eye, demodex.
- Anything picked up after arrival: injury, infection, parvo caught in your own surroundings.
- The results of care: obesity, joints damaged by over-exercise while the growth plates are still open, heat stroke.
- Allergies, which generally surface somewhere between six months and three years and are the breed’s most common health trouble. Nothing tests for them in advance and no breeder can promise against them. What they involve.
Why it is narrower than some you will see
Because a broader one would be a lie, and the lie would land on you at the worst conceivable moment.
You will come across kennels touting ten-year genetic guarantees. Ask them what really happens when you try to claim in year six. More often than not the answer means returning the dog, or waiting on a list for a replacement, or a clause tying you to a particular food bought from the seller for the whole of the dog’s life. A guarantee is worth exactly what it actually pays out, and no more.
And here is the claim I refuse to make: I do not screen the parents and I do not certify them. No hip scoring, no genetic panel, no certification. What happens here is a general veterinary examination and close watching from the day they are born, and that is the limit of what this site will ever claim. A ten-year hereditary guarantee out of a kennel that never tests the parents is advertising, not protection. Mine is brief for the simple reason that it is real.
How to claim
- Take the puppy to your vet within a week of it arriving.
- If they find something both serious and congenital or hereditary, get in touch within 48 hours.
- Send over the vet’s written findings, and let me speak to them directly.
- I will talk to your vet, and bring mine in if that helps.
- Pick a replacement or a refund. The dog does not leave your side.
Call me first, ahead of anything else. Every trouble this kennel has ever met was fixable, and the ones that went unfixed were the ones nobody raised until it was too late.
My vet is Bell Rock Veterinary Clinic in Sedona. Every puppy is examined there before it travels, and the dates are written onto the health record.
The full contract · Sales policy summary · The veterinary protocol
And the guarantee that has no conditions
I’ll take back any dog I’ve bred, at any point in its life, with no time limit and no questions asked. No clock on it, no questions, and nothing on this page touches it.