Editorial Policy

This page exists so you can judge how much to trust what you read here. It describes how our pages are actually made, what we will not do, and where our limits are.

What We Are, and What We Are Not

PetPawCalc is not a veterinary practice and we are not veterinarians. Nobody on this site can examine your animal, and we do not diagnose. What we do is take published veterinary work — screening instruments, association guidelines, peer-reviewed studies — and turn it into something you can use at home before or instead of a search-engine guess.

That framing shapes every tool. Our screening tools tell you whether something is worth raising with a vet and give you specific questions to ask. They do not tell you what is wrong with your pet, and several of them are deliberately built so that the only answers available point you toward veterinary care.

How Pages Are Researched and Written

Content on this site is researched and drafted with AI assistance, under human direction, and every claim is checked against a named source before publication. We say this plainly because you deserve to know, and because the alternative — implying a veterinarian wrote it — would be dishonest.

What that process involves in practice:

• Sourcing first. A page starts from published veterinary material, not from what other websites say. Our Sources & References page lists the studies, instruments and association guidance behind each tool.
• Named citations for figures. Where a page gives a number that came from research, the research is named on that page. If we cannot trace a figure to a source we can name, we leave it out.
• Internal arithmetic checks. Composite figures — a diagnostic workup total, a feeding volume, a cost range — are checked against the underlying tables on the same page so the page does not contradict itself.
• Every calculator is tested before release. Tools with branching logic are run against every possible combination of inputs to confirm no combination produces a broken, contradictory or missing result.

What We Refuse to Do

• No dosing. We will not calculate a medication dose for any animal. Doses are weight-based prescription decisions and belong to your veterinarian. Several of our cost calculators cover medications; none of them will tell you how much to give.
• No diagnosis. Screening indicates whether a veterinary conversation is warranted. It does not name a condition.
• No product or brand recommendations. We name drug classes and diet types where it is clinically relevant. We do not tell you which brand to buy, and pages about prescription products say that the choice belongs to your vet.
• No invented statistics. Covered above and on the sources page. Where a widely repeated figure turns out to be untraceable, we say so rather than repeating it.
• No overstating evidence. If a study's finding was weaker than it is usually presented — a result short of statistical significance, or guidance that is genuinely contested — the page says so. This costs us authority-sounding sentences and we consider it the right trade.

Safety Comes Before Completeness

Several pages are deliberately built to err toward caution, because the cost of being wrong is not symmetrical:

• Our cat urinary checker has no "stay home and monitor" outcome. A straining cat producing no urine can die within a day or two, and no version of that tool should ever suggest waiting.
• Our neonatal feeding calculator refuses to output feeding amounts until you confirm the animal is warm, because feeding a hypothermic newborn can kill it.
• Our separation anxiety screener will not produce a training plan if the screening suggests the problem is something else, because a months-long protocol aimed at the wrong condition wastes the animal's welfare as well as your time.

Corrections

If you find an error — a figure that is wrong, a source we have misrepresented, guidance that has since changed — tell us. We would rather hear it from you than leave it up. Corrections to substantive claims are made directly on the page, and where a correction changes the meaning of a recommendation we note it on the page rather than quietly editing.

Veterinary guidance does change. One example already reflected on this site: the long-standing advice to withhold food from a pet with diarrhoea has largely been reversed, and our page on it presents the current position, the remaining disagreement, and the groups for whom fasting was never appropriate.

How We Make Money

PetPawCalc is free to use, with no signup, no email capture and no paywall. We do not sell anything, and no page on this site is written to sell a product. If we introduce advertising or affiliate links in future, they will be disclosed on the page where they appear and they will not change what our tools tell you.

See also: Sources & References · Disclaimer · About