About Hay & Hutch

Hay & Hutch publishes one thing: the figure a small-pet enclosure has to clear, the name of the body that issued that figure, and then the products that clear it. Everything else on the site is in service of that.

Why it exists

Small pets are routinely sold housing that is too small, and the reason is structural rather than anyone's fault. Cages designed to sit on a pet-shop shelf cluster well below the floor-area minimums that veterinary charities publish. An owner who buys the largest cage in the shop, adds the wheel that came with it and fills it with the bedding on the next shelf has done everything the retail environment asked of them, and still landed under every published figure.

What made this worth building was a second discovery. When we went looking for the number those cages were failing, most of the buying guides in this category did not state one. You can read several thousand words about the best hamster cage and finish with no way to assess the next cage you find yourself looking at. Where a figure did appear it was often unattributed, and in several cases attributed to an organization that does not publish it — the RSPCA, most commonly, which publishes no numeric hamster floor-area minimum at all.

So the site is organized around figures with issuers attached. Every threshold we use is listed on the standards section with the body that published it and a link to the page we read it from, and every one of our own stricter thresholds is labeled as ours with the reasoning given.

Who writes it

Every page on this site is written by Ryder M., the owner behind Magoo Media Group. He reads manufacturer specification sheets, checks products against the published welfare minimums for their species, does the floor-area arithmetic, and excludes anything that falls below the threshold regardless of what else it does well.

That is the whole of the claim being made about who wrote this, and the omissions are deliberate. There is no veterinary qualification behind this site. There is no license, no certification and no professional membership. No page here has been reviewed by a vet, and none says otherwise — which distinguishes us from several competitors who display a vet-review badge without naming the vet.

Where we genuinely cannot compete is clinical authority, and we do not pretend to. What we can do better than the sites currently ranking is cite the primary source for every figure, table the specifications nobody else tables, and keep the pages current with a visible date you can check.

What we do not do

• We do not test products. Our assessments are based on manufacturer specification sheets, published welfare standards and each product's listed dimensions, with the arithmetic shown on the page so you can redo it. There is no testing lab behind this site and no product library, and we will not write a sentence implying otherwise. How we assess products sets this out in full.
• We do not publish prices. A price we published last month is a price we cannot stand behind today, so every buy link goes to the live listing instead. It reads less satisfyingly and it is more honest.
• We do not publish star ratings, review counts or testimonials. We hold no first-party rating data and have no reviews that are real, so there are none on the site. A clean page beats an invented one.
• We do not present stock photography as our own setup. No photograph on this site shows an enclosure we own, and every illustrative image is labeled as illustrative.
• We do not accept payment for a placement. Our editorial policy covers this and the corrections process.

Who publishes it

Hay & Hutch is published by Magoo Media Group (magoomediagroup.com). The site is monetized through the Amazon Associates program, which is set out in full on our affiliate disclosure page, and commission does not decide which products clear a welfare threshold.

The mechanism protecting that is structural rather than a promise. The floor-area filter is arithmetic against a figure someone else published, it is applied before anything else is considered, and both the figure and the arithmetic are printed on the page. If commission were moving a product up a list, you would be able to see it in the numbers.

Corrections

If a figure on this site is wrong, we want to know, and telling us is the most useful thing a reader can do. Email contact@hayandhutch.com with the page and the figure. Where you are right we correct the page and re-date it, rather than quietly editing it to look as though the error was never there. The full standard is in our editorial policy.