The standards this site measures against

This section exists because of a gap we kept hitting while researching the rest of the site. You can read three thousand words about the best hamster cage on almost any site in this category and finish with no way to assess the fourth cage you find yourself looking at. The figure a product is supposed to clear is either absent, or stated without a source, or attributed to a body that does not publish it.

So every threshold this site uses lives here, with the organization that issued it and a link to the page we read it from. If you disagree with one of our recommendations, this is where you can check our working and decide we are wrong on the evidence rather than on taste.

Start here: how we assess products

How we assess products is the load-bearing page of this site. It sets out the order the filters are applied in, what our assessments are actually based on — published specifications rather than hands-on testing, and it says so plainly because it is true — where our thresholds are stricter than a published minimum, why we never print a price, how we make money, and what would make us drop a recommendation. Every roundup, review and comparison on the site links to it from a block above its first product.

The species pages

Hamster welfare minimums is the one to read if you have met the number 450 anywhere. It lists every published hamster floor-area figure we could verify — from a retailer's 144 square inches to a Swiss welfare body's 1,550 — names which well-known organizations publish nothing numeric at all, and explains what the 450 square inch figure actually is. The RSPCA, contrary to a great deal of published claim, does not publish a hamster floor-area minimum.

Rabbit welfare minimums is the opposite situation: two major bodies publishing the same figure. RWAF and the RSPCA both give 3m x 2m x 1m for two rabbits, and RWAF adds the rule that decides what you can buy — the footprint must be a single block, and platforms and tunnels do not count towards it.

The cross-species pages

Cage materials safety covers powder coating, galvanized wire and zinc, MDF, acrylic, glass and plastic tubs, and it separates what the evidence supports from what is inference. Powder-coated steel is inert once cured; softwood shavings are the one material with published physiological evidence against them, and that evidence concerns phenols rather than the wood.

Cage cleaning safety is about not poisoning an animal whose nose is in the substrate for twenty hours a day. Which products are safe, why ammonia-based cleaners are specifically wrong here, why bleach must never be mixed, and why a weekly full strip-out is usually the wrong routine for a deep-bedded enclosure.

Cage placement answers the two questions that come up most — can a cage go on the floor, should it be covered at night — and then gets to the factors that matter more than either: temperature against the published bands, drafts at enclosure height, direct sun through glass, and vibration from appliances.

How we handle a disagreement between sources

It happens more than you would expect. PDSA publishes 30cm as the minimum wheel diameter for a Syrian hamster; the San Diego Humane Society publishes 10 to 12 inches. Those overlap but do not agree, and an 11-inch wheel sits in the gap.

Our rule is to show both figures, name both issuers, take the stricter one for our own threshold, and say which we have done. What we do not do is average them into a number nobody published, or quote whichever one makes a product we like look better. Where the evidence is genuinely mixed rather than merely inconsistent — the kiln-dried pine question is the clearest example — we say it is mixed rather than picking a side for the sake of a cleaner sentence.

What we do not claim

For completeness, because in this category the absences are informative. We do not claim veterinary review, because we have no vet reviewer, while several competitors do. We publish no star ratings or review counts, because we hold no first-party rating data. There are no testimonials on this site, because we have none that are real. And every illustrative photograph is labeled as illustrative, because no photograph on this site is of a setup we own.

What we do have is a named author for every page — Ryder M. — cited primary sources at the point of use, and a published method you can hold us to. The corrections and update standards are in our editorial policy, and if you find a figure that is wrong, the email address on the contact page reaches someone who will fix it and re-date the page.