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. A few products we recommend are not sold on Amazon at all. Those carry no buy link of any kind, and their cards say 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.
• Some things we recommend have no buy link at all. The Omlet enclosures, the IKEA cabinet, the Kavee cages and the Savic Royal Suite are not sold on Amazon and we are on no programme that covers them. Rather than hand you an untracked link dressed up as a recommendation, we leave the assessment in place and leave the button out. The card tells you that is what has happened, and the specification source is printed as plain text so you can find the product yourself.
• 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.

Where the prices on this site come from

Every price here is read from the retailer by machine once a day and shown inside the buy button with the date it was read. No price is written into a sentence, because prices on small-pet housing move constantly and a page updated in September carrying an August price in its body copy is misleading by the time anyone reads it. If the daily refresh stops, the figures expire by themselves and the buttons fall back to "Check price on Amazon".

One consequence worth stating: a price never moves a product up a list. Our scores are set from specification against a published threshold before any price is read, and we do not rank by value for money. 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.