How we write our guides

Who writes them

Matt Garnett, who runs Giddy Pets, writes and edits the guides, and every article carries his name and a link to who he is. He is a lifelong pet owner and a shop owner. He is not a vet, and neither is anyone else here.

That matters most on the health guides, so we say it plainly on every one of them rather than in the small print: this is general information, not veterinary advice, and it cannot replace an examination by the vet who knows your animal.

What we check against

Where a guide relies on veterinary or welfare guidance, we work from UK organisations that publish it — the PDSA, Blue Cross, the RSPCA, Cats Protection, the Royal Kennel Club, International Cat Care, the Royal Veterinary College — and we name the pages we used at the foot of the article so you can read them yourself.

Being straight about the gap: not every health guide carries its sources yet. Where a guide shows a Sources list, those are the pages behind it. Where it does not, treat it as general owner experience rather than as sourced guidance, and check anything that matters with your vet.

What we will not do

• Diagnose anything. Our guides describe what something commonly looks like and when to get it seen. They never tell you what your animal has.
• Give you a dosage. Medication amounts depend on weight, age, other medicines and the specific animal. That is a conversation with a vet, not a number on a shop’s website.
• Build you a diet. Our calculators give ranges with the method stated, and say to check them with a vet. None of them writes a feeding plan.
• Put the useful part behind an email address. If a page answers a question about whether something is safe, the answer is on the page. Any email form is an optional extra, after the answer.
• Claim a vet endorsed us. No veterinary practice recommends our products, and nothing on this site will suggest one does.

Dates, and what they mean

The date on a guide is the date it was published. We do not currently show a “last reviewed” date, because we do not yet track one — and showing a date that implies a review nobody performed would be worse than showing none. When a guide is materially revised we will say so on it.

Where money comes into it

We are a shop, so many guides link to products we sell. Two rules keep that honest: a product only appears where it is genuinely relevant to what the guide is about, and no guide changes its advice to suit something we stock. A page that tells you not to buy something is doing its job.

Our vet finder and services directory are free to list in and free to claim. No practice pays for placement, and none is ranked or promoted because of a commercial relationship — there are no commercial relationships.