What the record knows, and how we know it.
Animal welfare is a serious field with real science behind it, and most of it is harder than it looks. These pages describe the four bodies of knowledge WhiskerMatch is built on: what is settled enough to design around, what is genuinely unsettled, and where we are still learning. A veterinarian or shelter director should be able to read them and respect the work. Where we do not know something, we say so.
Start with the one closest to your work.
Each page shows the mechanism, not a glossy summary: what the system actually does with the science, where the limits are, and what remains open.
Science
Veterinary medicine
What the record holds about an animal's health, who may write it, and what it never does.
Medical events, vaccinations, medications, weight and behavior observations are dated, attributed context. The system organizes them, routes their follow-ups, and holds publishing when a medical question is unresolved. It never diagnoses, prescribes, or interprets.
Read the page
Science
Trap-neuter-return
How colony work is tracked, stage by stage, and why colony locations stay private.
Colonies, cats, trap nights and monitoring run on an eleven-stage pipeline that allows real cats to skip steps and requires a written reason to move backward. Precise locations stay with the people doing the work; the public never gets a map.
Read the page
Science
Shelter operations
What the field knows about handoffs, follow-up and unknowns, and what we are still learning.
Intake structure, review gates, foster coordination, applicant review and follow-up queues. The central design decision: unknowns are first-class state, not blanks to be guessed, and every next step carries a name and a due date.
Read the page
Science
Adoption matching
How the ranking actually works, why it never shows a score, and what it cannot know.
A transparent preference ranking over known and unknown facts. Hard conflicts exclude; unknowns stay visible with warnings; internal points are ordering mechanics, never a verdict. The shelter decides, every time.
Read the page
How these pages are written.
Mechanisms, not slogans
Every claim describes something the system actually does, in the code, today. If a page says the record routes a follow-up, that is because a follow-up queue reads stored dates and states.
No borrowed authority
No invented studies, no statistics we did not measure, no consensus we cannot cite. Where the science is unsettled, the page says so plainly instead of picking the convenient side.
Unknowns are content
The honest limits are listed on the page, not buried. A reader who disagrees with our design choices should find them stated clearly enough to argue with.
This is a massive undertaking and we do not have it all figured out. We understand the problem deeply, we are working hard, and we are doing our best for the animals. These pages are part of building in the open: the work, the thinking, and what is still unknown, in one place.
We cannot do this alone.
If you are a veterinarian, a vet tech, a shelter director, a TNR practitioner, a researcher, a donor, or someone with capital and patience, these pages are written for you. Read the one closest to your work, and tell us where it is wrong. The fastest way to improve the system is an expert pointing at a real flaw.
Serious about the science? Bring one workflow.
The fastest way to test these ideas is a real workflow from a real organization. One conversation, one handoff, no sales sequence.