Who writes our guides

Every guide on this site was written by one person, not a content team. Here is who, and what the basis for the advice actually is. It is narrower than a qualification and it is more useful.

What the basis is

No certification, no veterinary degree, no trainer's accreditation. Saying so is the point. Here is the actual experience the advice comes out of, all of it checkable against this site.

• Several thousand products assessed one at a time to arrive at the few hundred in the range. Each one judged on hardware, stitching, materials and whether the photographs matched the specification. Most were rejected. Our Craft sets out what gets something cut.
• The material on every product page read off the supplier record and off the item itself, then written up in plain language. Where it could not be established, the page does not guess.
• Every size guide on this site written from scratch, including where to put the tape measure, which is the part most sizing guides leave out and the only part that decides whether a collar fits.
• Every return and exchange reason read. That is where sizing advice gets corrected. It is a small dataset and it is the only feedback loop that matters, because a return tells you something a product page cannot.
• One opinionated pomapoo. Jake wears an extra small collar, 20cm to 28cm, which is a humbling measurement for an animal who believes he is a wolf. He is the reason the brand exists and the test case for more of it than he knows. His story is here.

What it is not

The useful half of a byline is the part that tells you where the advice stops.

• Not a vet, and not a qualified trainer or behaviourist. PAWD holds no certifications and neither does the person writing this.
• No laboratory testing. Nothing here has been tensile-tested or lab-assayed. We describe materials, we do not certify them.
• No claim we cannot show. No country of origin for a material, no tannery, no customer counts. The range is designed and selected in Sydney and made by a specialist pet accessory maker overseas, and we would rather say that plainly.
• Where the question is really about behaviour or health, the answer is a professional and the guide says so rather than selling you a different harness. The nervous-dog guide puts it this way:

A harness manages a reactive dog. It does not treat the reactivity. The thing that actually changes it is distance work with a behaviourist. Good gear buys you the safety margin to do that work. It is not a substitute for it.

From Choosing a Harness for a Nervous or Reactive Dog.

Corrections

If something in a guide is wrong, we would rather know than not. Email shop.pawd@gmail.com with the guide and the correction. No guide on this site is too settled to argue with, and the ones about sizing get revised whenever a return tells us something new.

The guides