What we published at launch, and what we deliberately did not

Perch & Purr covers cat gear for households with more than one cat: litter and litter tech, feeders and fountains, trees and shelves, scratchers and enrichment. This is a short note on what we published, and on the things we decided not to.

What we published

• Two running-cost pages that we could not find anywhere else: what an automatic litter box and a water fountain cost to run over a year, computed from manufacturers’ own listed prices with the arithmetic shown.
• A stability index for cat trees, so you can rank any tree from three numbers already on its listing rather than from a photograph.
• Capacity comparisons in categories where most manufacturers publish nothing, with the gaps left visible rather than filled in.
• A multi-cat spine. Every category page is written for a household with several cats, because that is where this gear is actually tested and it is treated as a footnote everywhere else.

The four things we did not publish

1. Test results. We have not tested any of this gear. Everyone in this category says they tested twenty litter boxes; we have not tested any, and we say so on every recommendation page.
2. Veterinary claims. We have no vets and no medical reviewers. Where a question is medical we point at the Cornell Feline Health Center or the Ohio State Indoor Pet Initiative and stop.
3. Invented numbers. Where a manufacturer does not publish a figure, the table says so. There are several visible blanks across this site and every one of them is deliberate.
4. Prices we cannot verify. Buy buttons show a live price where we have one and say “check price” where we do not, rather than printing a number that was true last month.

What is coming

The three categories we filled deepest at launch — litter, feeding and cat trees — are the ones where the arithmetic had most to say. Scratching, play and the multi-cat section will fill out next, and a beds, carriers and daily-care section is reserved and will open when it has something worth reading in it rather than a placeholder page.

How to read this site

Three things are worth knowing before you use any of the recommendations.

• Blank cells are information. When a table says “not published”, that is a finding about the manufacturer, not a gap in our research. In a category with no independent testing, whether a maker will commit to a number is one of the few quality signals available.
• Figures labeled as ours are ours. The cat tree stability index, the per-box litter load arithmetic, the extension of the n+1 rule to water and resting places — all of that is our reasoning, and we say so every time rather than letting it borrow somebody else’s authority.
• Free fixes come before products. Several of the pages here resolve without buying anything: more litter boxes, better placement, daily scooping, rotating the toys you already own. That is the honest order, and it is the order we publish them in even though we make nothing from it.

If we have got something wrong, tell us: the address is on the contact page and corrections are logged on the editorial policy page. And if you want to know how any of this is decided, how we pick is the page to read.