Affiliate disclosure

Hay & Hutch is a participant in the Amazon Associates program. When you buy something through a link on this site we may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you. Some products we recommend are not sold on Amazon at all, and where we link a brand's own store and earn nothing, the button says so.

What that means in practice

Every product link on this site goes through our own redirect at /go, which then sends you to the retailer with our Amazon Associates tag attached. That is how the commission is attributed. Those links carry `rel="sponsored nofollow"`, which is how we tell search engines that they are commercial rather than editorial links, and every one of them is marked `#ad` on the page.

You pay exactly the same price as you would going to the retailer directly. The commission comes out of the retailer's margin, not out of your purchase.

Which links earn us something

• Amazon links earn us a commission. Amazon is the default retailer on this site and the only affiliate program we are part of.
• Brand-direct links earn us nothing. Some products — the Omlet enclosures, an IKEA cabinet, a manufacturer's own store — either are not on Amazon or are better bought direct. We link them anyway when they are the right answer, and those buttons say plainly that we earn no commission there.
• Citation links earn us nothing. Every link to PDSA, the RSPCA, RWAF, Humane World for Animals, VCA or the House Rabbit Society is a source citation. There is no commercial relationship with any of them.

Why commission cannot move a product up a list

Every site in this category promises this, so a promise is not worth much. What we can point at is the structure, which is checkable.

The first filter applied to any product is its continuous floor area against the figure published by a named welfare or veterinary body for that species. That filter is arithmetic, not judgment. Both the published figure and our arithmetic are printed on the page — in the specification table, in the assessment, and in the pass or fail marker beside each product. A product moved up a list for commercial reasons would therefore be visible in the numbers, because the numbers are on the page next to it.

That is also why several products on this site are listed with a clear statement that they fall below the threshold, and why the cheapest route to a compliant hamster enclosure we recommend is a storage tub you convert yourself, which earns us almost nothing. The full method is in how we assess products.

Why there are no prices on this site

You will not find a price anywhere here. Every buy button reads "Check price on Amazon" and takes you to the live listing. This is deliberate: prices on small-pet housing move constantly, and a page updated in September carrying an August price is misleading by the time anyone reads it. Sending you to the live listing is less satisfying and more honest.

One consequence worth stating: because we are not tracking prices, we cannot and do not rank products by value for money. Our scores are about specification against a published threshold. If two enclosures both clear the floor and one costs half as much, that is your tiebreaker to apply.

Editorial independence

• We do not accept payment for a placement in any list, at any position.
• We do not accept payment to review a product, or to change an assessment.
• No manufacturer sees a page before it is published, and none has approval over anything on this site.
• We do not run sponsored posts and there are no paid guest contributions.

The required Amazon statement

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Amazon and the Amazon logo are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. Product availability, specifications and prices on Amazon change frequently and are outside our control; the specification figures on this site are recorded from each manufacturer's own listing on the date stated, and are the figures we assessed against.

Questions

If anything here is unclear, or if you think a recommendation on this site looks commercially rather than editorially motivated, say so: contact@hayandhutch.com. That is a genuinely useful message to receive, because the structure described above only works if someone occasionally checks it. Our editorial policy covers corrections and update cadence.