Last updated: 24 August 2026
Every review on this site follows the rules on this page. They don’t change for anybody.
I wrote this because the alternative — a line of small print at the bottom of each review — tells you almost nothing about whether you can trust what you just read. This tells you the whole method, and you can hold me to it.
Everything here was bought with my own money
Every product I’ve written about, I paid for. Food, treats, toys, harnesses, leashes, grooming tools, supplements, subscription boxes — all of it, out of my own pocket.
I have never been sponsored. I have never been given a free bag of anything in exchange for coverage. No company has ever paid me to write about their product, and none has ever seen a review before it was published.
Nobody has editorial input here but me.
I’m not out to catch anybody
This matters, so I want to be clear about it.
I don’t buy things in order to write bad reviews about them. I buy them because my dog has a real problem that needs solving — a coat that isn’t right, a joint that’s stiffening, a gut that isn’t settled, a piece of equipment that isn’t doing its job.
I read the advertising and, most of the time, I believe it. I hand over the money hoping it works, because I want the thing to work far more than I want a story about it not working.
The reviews come out the way they do because of what happened next, not because of how I went in.
I’m buying this on a fixed income, the same as a lot of you
I’m disabled. I live on a fixed income. Every product on this site came out of that money.
I’m saying it plainly because it changes what these reviews are worth to you.
When something doesn’t work, it isn’t an inconvenience to me. It’s money that was needed somewhere else — and I don’t get to make it back by writing about it. A subscription at forty or sixty dollars a month, strung out across a year by a company telling you to give it more time, is real money to somebody in my position. It’s real money to most of the people reading this.
That’s why these reviews take as long as they do and go into as much detail as they do. I’m not sampling products. I’m trying to solve a problem without wasting money I don’t have spare, which I suspect is exactly what you’re doing.
It also means my interests run the opposite way to most people who review this stuff. Affiliate commission is a percentage — the more expensive the product, the more the reviewer makes. Somebody on a fixed income has every reason to find the cheapest thing that actually works and say so.
So when I tell you a cheaper product does the job as well as an expensive one, understand that I’m arguing myself out of money by telling you.
I’d rather do that than take a cut of something you didn’t need.
I test things on my own dogs, over time
I’m not writing from a spec sheet or a press release. I’ve used these things, with my own dogs, in the actual conditions the product claims to handle.
For food and supplements especially, that has meant months — sometimes as long as a year on a single product.
And I want to say something about that year, because it isn’t diligence on my part. It’s a script.
You try a product for a month. Nothing changes. You go to cancel, and you’re told it can take three months to see improvement. So you keep paying. At three months, nothing has changed, and now you’re told it can take six. Then longer.
Think about what that would sound like anywhere else. Nobody takes a child to the doctor, accepts a prescription that may show no benefit for six to twelve months, and just keeps giving it. You’d go back. You’d ask questions. You’d want to know why nothing was happening.
For a great many of these companies, the six-month answer isn’t clinical caution. It’s a retention script, and the thing being retained is the subscription, not the dog’s health. Their receipts go up either way.
I’ve spent a considerable amount of money finding that out, and a fair proportion of it bought me nothing except the knowledge that something didn’t work — plus, more often than I’d have believed, customer service and pricing that were as bad as the product.
If I haven’t used it, I don’t review it. I might write about a category, or about what to look for, and I’ll say plainly that’s what I’m doing. But I won’t tell you a specific product is good because a manufacturer’s page says so.
With supplements, I check whether anyone has verified the contents
My vet cleared something up for me that changed how I look at every supplement on the shelf, and it belongs here because it’s now part of how I review them.
There is no legal requirement in the United States that a pet supplement contain what its label says.
The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act — the 1994 law that governs human supplements — does not apply to animals. Congress didn’t include them. So pet supplements have no legal category of their own: the FDA treats them as either animal food or, if they claim to do something beyond nutrition, as unapproved animal drugs that stay on the market because the agency chooses not to act.
Dr. Lisa Freeman, a board-certified veterinary nutritionist at Tufts, puts the consequence plainly: “Many supplements fail quality tests for potency and contaminants.”
There is a seal that means someone checked — the yellow NASC Quality Seal, from the National Animal Supplement Council. Members are independently audited every two years, have to run adverse event reporting, and are subject to random product testing by outside laboratories.
Nothing in law requires a company to have it. It’s voluntary, and it costs money, which means the companies most willing to sell you an empty promise are exactly the ones with no reason to sign up.
So from now on, every supplement review here says whether the product carries the seal. It’s the cheapest test you can apply in a shop aisle and it takes three seconds.
One honest caveat: NASC is an industry association funded by its member companies. It is the industry policing itself, not a regulator. The audit is real and the seal is far better than nothing — but I’m not going to hand you an industry body as though it were a government one.
And this is the part I want you to hear
For years I assumed the failures were mine.
I’d buy a supplement on the strength of the advertising and a wall of five-star reviews, give it months, see nothing, and conclude I was doing it wrong. Wrong dose. Wrong time of day. Should have given it with food. Shouldn’t have given it with food. They said it works and hundreds of reviews said it works, so the variable that must be broken is me.
It may simply have been that the ingredient wasn’t in the bag.
If you have been through that loop, it probably wasn’t your timing. That realization is worth more than any product I’ve ever bought, and it’s the reason this section exists.
I publish the bad ones
This is the part that matters, and it’s the part most sites quietly skip.
Some of these reviews are warnings. There are products I’d tell you not to buy and companies I’d tell you not to buy from, based on what happened when I bought from them. Those reviews go up alongside the positive ones.
A negative review doesn’t come down because a company asks. Not for a refund, not for a replacement, not for an apology, not for an offer of future product. If a company tells me something has genuinely changed, I’ll go and buy it again and test it again — and then I’ll update the review and say what changed and when.
I’m not interested in running this site as a permanent yes. Anyone can find a permanent yes; there are thousands of them.
What I earn, and when
Some links here are affiliate links, mostly Amazon. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. If you buy through one, I may receive a small commission and it costs you nothing extra.
Three things about that:
I only put affiliate links on things I’d actually recommend. If I’m telling you a product isn’t worth your money, there’s no link on it. No commission, no conflict, nothing for either of us to wonder about.
The recommendation comes first and the link comes second. I don’t choose what to write about based on what pays. I write about what I’ve bought, and if there happens to be a program for it, there’s a link.
I’d tell you the same thing without the commission. That’s the test I apply to every one of these, and if I ever couldn’t answer it honestly the link would come off.
This site carries no advertising and no sponsored posts. The full disclosure is in the terms and conditions.
What I won’t do
- Accept a free product in exchange for a review
- Take payment to cover something, or to cover it favorably
- Let a company see or approve a review before it’s published
- Remove or soften a negative review because a company asked
- Recommend anything I haven’t bought and used
- Link to a product I’m telling you not to buy
If I’ve had dealings with a company, I’ll say so
If I’ve had a dispute with a company — a returns fight, a warranty claim, customer service that went badly — that goes in the review, clearly, so you can weigh it. You’re entitled to know if I have a reason to be annoyed with somebody before you read what I think of their product.
The same goes the other way. If a company has treated me well, I’ll say that too, and you can weigh that as well.
Why this matters more here than on most sites
This site is read by disabled people, and by people who are about to become handlers and don’t know what they’re doing yet.
There is a whole industry selling paper and gear to disabled people — registries, certificates, letters, “official” ID cards, equipment that isn’t fit for the job it’s sold for. It works because a person who has just been told they might benefit from a service dog is exactly the person least equipped to tell a real product from a confidence trick.
I write about that industry a great deal. So the standard has to apply to me too, or it isn’t a standard — it’s just something I say about other people. That’s what this page is for.
If you’re a brand and you want to get in touch
You’re welcome to. I’m not trying to build a wall between myself and the companies I write about, and I’d rather hear from you than not — particularly if I’ve used your product and it worked. Corrections, updates, a reformulation, a change in sourcing, a new size: tell me and I’ll look.
What I can’t take is free product.
No samples, no “no obligation” boxes, no gifted subscriptions, no loaner equipment, no discount codes in exchange for coverage. Not because I think you’d be trying to buy me, but because once it’s happened, no reader can tell the difference — and their ability to tell the difference is the only thing this site has.
So: talk to me all you like. Just let me buy it.
If you want me to review something specific
Ask. Readers suggest things regularly, and it’s often how I find out what people are actually struggling with.
Asking doesn’t buy anything else. It doesn’t get you a preview, it doesn’t get a company favorable treatment, and it has no bearing on what the review says. If I buy it and it’s poor, that’s what goes up.
How you know I actually bought it
I keep the receipts, and I date everything.
For anything I’ve had a bad experience with, I keep photographs — the product, what went wrong, and when. If I tell you a harness failed after six weeks, I can show you the harness and I can tell you the day it arrived.
That isn’t about anticipating an argument. It’s that “I remember it not lasting long” is worth very little, and “bought 14 March, this is what it looked like on 2 May” is worth something.
Advertising and sponsored posts
There are none, and there won’t be.
No display ads, no ad networks, no sponsored articles, no paid placements, no paid links, no “brand partnerships.” The only money this site makes is affiliate commission on products I’ve bought and would recommend anyway.
If that ever changes, it will say so here first, in plain language, before anything appears on the site.
When I get it wrong
I will, at some point. When you find it, tell me and I’ll correct it and note that I corrected it. Corrections stay visible. A review that quietly changes its mind is worth nothing.
I’m a service dog handler of twelve years. I’m not a veterinarian, a trainer by profession, or a lawyer, and nothing on this site is professional advice. What I am is somebody who has spent her own money on this equipment and can tell you what happened.