What Is CHIC Certification for a Cane Corso?

Buyers researching a breeder eventually run into the term CHIC — usually attached to a specific dog, as in "this sire is CHIC certified." It sounds like a health seal of approval, something a dog either has or doesn't based on being sound enough to earn it. That's a reasonable guess, and it's wrong in an important way. Understanding what CHIC actually measures, and what it deliberately does not measure, makes it a far more useful piece of information when you're evaluating a litter — and it complements, rather than replaces, understanding the individual test results underneath it.

This confusion isn't unique to Cane Corso buyers. It shows up across every breed with a CHIC program, and it's worth untangling once so you can apply the same reasoning no matter what breed you're researching.

CHIC stands for the Canine Health Information Center, a database jointly maintained by the Orthopedic Foundation for Animals (OFA) and the AKC Canine Health Foundation. It isn't a test in itself — it's a centralized, breed-by-breed registry that aggregates the results of whichever specific health evaluations a breed's national parent club has designated as significant for that breed. For breeds prone to hip dysplasia, that typically means a hip evaluation is on the list. For breeds with known cardiac concerns, a cardiac exam is on the list. The exact panel of required and recommended tests differs from breed to breed, set by people within that breed's community who track what actually shows up in it.

A dog earns a CHIC number when its owner has submitted results for every test on that breed's required list to the OFA database, and the results are made public. That's the entire bar. It has nothing to do with how the dog scored.

This is the single most important thing to understand about CHIC, and it's the part marketing copy tends to blur. A CHIC number does not mean a dog passed its screenings. It means the required screenings were performed and the results — good, mediocre, or poor — were disclosed publicly rather than quietly withheld. A dog with a "fair" hip rating or even a diagnosed condition can still receive a CHIC number, as long as every required test was completed and the result is on the public record.

That design is deliberate, and it's arguably the most valuable part of the whole system. CHIC isn't built to reward good genetics. It's built to reward transparency. A breeder who tests a dog, gets a disappointing result, and still submits it for the record is giving you more useful information than a breeder who only ever mentions the dogs that scored well. If CHIC required passing to earn a number, breeders would have an incentive to simply not test the dogs they suspected might fail — which is exactly the outcome the registry is designed to prevent.

If you've read up on hip and elbow evaluation already, CHIC will make immediate sense as the next layer up. OFA hip and elbow scoring — the seven-point hip scale and the pass/fail-style elbow grading — produces individual results for a single joint category. CHIC doesn't replace that; it's the framework that says, for this particular breed, hip and elbow screening (along with whatever else the parent club requires) are the tests that matter enough to be tracked centrally and required for a CHIC number. A dog can have a perfectly good individual OFA hip rating without ever being entered into CHIC, simply because its owner never submitted it for aggregation, or because a required companion test — cardiac, for instance — was never completed.

For Cane Corsos specifically, the exact list of required and recommended tests is set by the breed's national parent club in coordination with OFA, and it can be revised over time as more is understood about which conditions show up meaningfully in the breed. Rather than relying on a secondhand summary of what's currently required, the reliable way to confirm the current list is to look it up directly on OFA's own CHIC pages for the breed — the requirements are public and specific.

It's also worth knowing that a CHIC profile can include tests beyond hips and elbows depending on what a breed's parent club has flagged as significant — cardiac evaluations, eye examinations, and DNA-based genetic tests are common additions across large and giant breeds. The specific mix varies by breed, which is exactly why checking a breed's current CHIC requirements directly, rather than assuming they match another breed you've researched, matters.

Like individual OFA hip and elbow numbers, a CHIC number resolves to a real, public record. OFA's database lets you search by a dog's registered name or number and pull up every test result submitted under its CHIC profile, including the date of each evaluation and the specific outcome — not just a summary badge. This is worth doing yourself rather than taking a breeder's word for it. A legitimate CHIC number will show you exactly which tests were run, when, and what came back. If a breeder mentions a CHIC number but the dog isn't findable in the database under that name, or the profile shows required tests missing, that's a discrepancy worth asking about directly.

It would be simpler, in a way, if CHIC were a pass/fail health stamp. But a breed-wide health picture built only from dogs that scored well would be a distorted one — it would hide exactly the information breeders and buyers most need to make good decisions over time. Because CHIC requires disclosure rather than a passing result, the aggregate data it produces is more honest about what actually shows up in a breed, and it puts pressure on breeders to test consistently rather than selectively. For an individual buyer, the practical upshot is the same principle that applies to any health credential: don't stop at "is this dog CHIC certified." Ask which specific tests are behind that number, what the results actually were, and go verify it in the database yourself.

A CHIC number is a starting point for a conversation, not the end of one. Worth asking directly:

• Can I have the CHIC number for the sire and dam of this specific litter, so I can look it up myself?
• What were the actual results behind each required test — not just whether the dog is CHIC listed?
• Were there any required tests that weren't completed, and if so, why?
• Beyond the CHIC-required minimum, were any additional health evaluations performed on this pairing?

A breeder who can answer these plainly, and who's comfortable with you checking the database yourself, is treating health testing as something to be verified rather than taken on faith.

CHIC certification tells you a dog's owner submitted every breed-required health test to a public database — nothing more, and nothing less. It's not a claim that the dog is healthy, and it's not a substitute for reading the individual results underneath it. What it does well is make selective disclosure harder: a program that only publicizes its best results while quietly skipping the rest isn't participating in CHIC the way it's designed to work. As a buyer, use a CHIC number as your cue to go look at the actual record, not as a reason to stop asking questions.