Editorial policy

This page sets out what we will and will not publish, how we handle being wrong, and how often pages are reviewed. It is deliberately specific, because a policy written in generalities cannot be used to hold anyone to anything.

Who writes and who publishes

Every page on this site is written by Ryder M., the owner behind Magoo Media Group, and published by Magoo Media Group. There is no editorial team, no rotating byline and no ghost author. Full detail on the about page.

What we will not do

• Publish a price we cannot verify. There are no prices anywhere on this site. Every buy link goes to the live listing instead, for the reasons set out in the affiliate disclosure.
• Invent test results. We do not run a testing lab, we do not own most of the products we assess, and we will not write a sentence implying otherwise. Our assessments are based on published specifications, published welfare standards and arithmetic shown on the page.
• Claim veterinary review we do not have. No page here has been reviewed by a vet. Several competitors display a vet-review badge without naming a vet; we would rather have no badge.
• Invent a credential. The author is the owner of Magoo Media Group. There is no license, qualification, professional membership, years-kept figure or count of animals or products claimed anywhere, because none was established.
• Publish a testimonial, star rating or review count. We hold no first-party rating data and have no reviews that are real, so there are none on the site, and we will never quote another business's reviews as though they were ours.
• Accept payment for a placement, a review, or a change to an assessment.
• Present a stock photograph as our own setup. No image on this site shows an enclosure we own, and every illustrative photo is labeled.
• Attribute a figure to a body that does not publish it. This is the most common failure we found across the sites competing for these searches, and it is why every threshold here carries its issuer and a link.

How we source a figure

1. 1.Primary issuers only. A welfare or veterinary body for a threshold; the manufacturer's own specification sheet or listing for a product dimension. Never another publisher repeating a figure.
2. 2.Attribution at the point of use, with a link and the date we read it. Not in a bibliography at the bottom that nobody opens.
3. 3.A figure that is not published is recorded as not published. Several manufacturers do not publish bar spacing; those cells say so rather than carrying an estimate, and the product loses marks for it.
4. 4.Where two issuers disagree, both appear. We adopt the stricter figure as our own threshold and say that is what we have done. We do not average two figures into a number nobody published.
5. 5.Where our own threshold is stricter than a published minimum, it is labeled as ours with the reasoning, so you can use the published figure and disagree with us.
6. 6.Where the evidence is genuinely mixed, we say it is mixed. The clearest example is kiln-dried softwood bedding, where we report the uncertainty rather than picking a side for the sake of a cleaner sentence.

Corrections

We will get things wrong. Manufacturers revise specifications, issuing bodies update guidance, and arithmetic errors happen.

• How to report one: email contact@hayandhutch.com with the page and the figure. That is the most useful message this site receives.
• What we do: check the claim against the issuing body or the manufacturer's current listing. If it is wrong, we correct it on the page and update the page's modified date.
• What we do not do: quietly edit a page so it looks as though the error was never there. A visible date change is the signal that something was revised.
• Where a figure is repeated across pages, the correction is applied everywhere. Thresholds live in one place in this site's code precisely so that a single fix propagates rather than leaving stale copies behind.

When a recommendation is withdrawn

• Discontinuation or a long stock-out. A recommendation you cannot buy is not a recommendation.
• A specification revision that drops a product below a threshold. If the published figure changes, the assessment changes with it.
• A safety issue — a recall, a pattern of failures in a component, or a specification we got wrong.
• A change to a figure we cite. If an issuing body revises a threshold, every product assessed against it is reassessed.

Update cadence

• Every roundup is reviewed at least every six months, and product availability is re-checked at each review.
• Every page is reviewed at least annually, whether or not anything has changed.
• The four size pillars and the standards pages are re-checked against their issuing bodies annually, because published guidance does change.
• Every page shows its update date, and that visible date matches the date in the page's structured data. A page whose stated date and machine-readable date disagree is exactly the pattern we criticize elsewhere.

The distinction this site is built on

A published minimum is not a recommendation. Every figure we cite was set as a floor — the level below which housing is clearly inadequate — and none of the bodies that publish them describes its figure as the right amount of space for an animal to thrive in.

That matters editorially because it decides how we write. We will say a product clears a threshold; we will not say that clearing a threshold makes it good housing. The two are different claims and conflating them is how a minimum quietly becomes a target. Our full method, including where our own thresholds sit above the published ones, is in how we assess products.