What counts as a source

A source is a primary one: the study itself, the review that pooled the studies, or the institution that issued the guidance. Peer reviewed veterinary journals, veterinary schools, and the regulators who oversee these products. In practice that means places like the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, Frontiers in Veterinary Science, BMC Veterinary Research, the veterinary colleges at Cornell and Colorado State, and the FDA.

A source is not a brand website, a press release, a supplement retailer, a blog summarising a study it never read, or another article like this one. If the only thing standing behind a sentence is somebody else who wrote the same sentence, the sentence does not run.

When we describe a study we describe what kind of study it was and how many animals were in it. A trial of sixteen dogs is written as a trial of sixteen dogs. Research in rodents or in people is labelled as research in rodents or in people, because a result in a mouse is not a result in your cat.

Why we prefer research from 2020 onward

Veterinary work on these ingredients moved quickly after 2018, and a lot of what the older pet content on the internet repeats predates the trials that actually tested it. So the rule is simple: where recent veterinary research exists on a question, it is what we cite. Older work is used when it is still the standard reference on its topic, and it is dated in the text so you can see how old it is.

Every guide carries the date it was last reviewed, not just the date it first appeared. When a piece is updated because the evidence changed, the update is the point of the revision.

What stops a piece from publishing

These are automated checks that run on the draft, not a checklist somebody is trusted to remember. A draft that trips one is held and reworked. It does not publish and get fixed later.

• A health claim with nothing behind it. Cure, treat, prevent, heal, eliminate, and the rest of that family are held wherever they appear. A supplement is not a drug and we will not write about one as though it were.
• A species mix up. A piece that says it is for dogs and cats has to be genuinely about both, and an ingredient that is appropriate for one species cannot be filed under the other. Dogs are not small cats, and the place that matters most is a dose.
• A number with no citation. See dosing below.
• The old claim language. This site was built after a large library of pet supplement content was pulled for the claims it made. That exact language is held here by name so it cannot come back in through a rewrite.
• Copy that reads as machine output. Recycled section headers, manufactured suspense, and the stock phrasings of generated text are held. If it reads like a template, it is not finished.

Dosing needs a citation

A specific amount, in milligrams or per pound of body weight, may only appear in a guide when a named source states that amount. If the research does not give a figure, the guide does not invent a reasonable sounding one, and it does not repeat a figure it found on a label.

Any guide that discusses dosing at all also tells you to work the amount out with your vet, who knows your animal, their weight, their bloodwork and the medication they are already on. That line is not a disclaimer we bolt on at the end. It is the actual advice.

What we leave out

When the research on a claim does not hold up, we do not run the claim. We also do not run a section arguing with it. There is no value to you in a page that raises a thing a supplement cannot do, and no honest reason for us to raise it except to look even handed while keeping the keyword.

So a guide here says what the research supports and how owners actually use the thing. What failed the check is simply absent from the page. It is recorded in our own notes, because we need to know why a sentence went, but it is not content.

Safety information is a different category and it always stays. Side effects, drug interactions, the ingredients that are dangerous to cats, the symptoms that mean stop reading and call your vet. That is care guidance, and leaving it out to keep a page positive would be the worst thing on this list.

Nobody has signed off on these pages yet

A lot of pet health sites put a veterinarian name and a photograph at the top of every article. Ours are not reviewed by a veterinarian, so no name appears. The slot in our system is deliberately empty rather than filled with a line like "reviewed by our expert team", and the site is built so that an empty reviewer renders nothing at all: no blank byline, no pending state, nothing that could be read as a professional having checked the page.

When a licensed vet does review a guide, their name, their credentials and the date they reviewed it will appear on that specific guide, and only on the guides they actually read. Until then, treat this site as careful reporting on the research, and treat your vet as your vet.

Corrections

If a number here is wrong, a study is described wrongly, or a source does not say what we said it says, tell us: hello@thewildpet.com. We fix errors in the article itself rather than quietly deleting the page, and a correction that changes the meaning of a guide is noted on it.

Who we are and who owns us is on About. How the money works, and how to tell a paid link from an ordinary one, is on Disclosure.