About Ready for Puppy

Who writes this

My name is Yan. I have four dogs and I have spent most of my adult life around them.

Two of them are what Brazilians call vira-latas — street dogs, the ones nobody planned for. Three of the four are rescues. There is also a boxer, and a border collie, which is its own kind of education: a dog that will reorganise your entire week if you let it.

For several years I ran a boarding kennel, which is a different job from owning dogs. You learn what settles a nervous animal in an unfamiliar room, which equipment survives real use, and what actually happens at three in the morning when a ten-week-old puppy decides the crate is a prison. Before that I trained as a biologist and later moved into engineering — one taught me to read research properly, the other to distrust a claim with no number behind it.

Why a British site

Two reasons, and the first is simple: I have a lot of friends in the UK. Enough of them have sent me the same questions over the years — what crate, what size, is this subscription worth it — that writing the answers down properly started to feel overdue.

The second is a gap. Dogs are the same everywhere; markets are not. British prices, British brands, the particular set of subscription companies competing for your money, the sizes actually stocked in British shops — none of that transfers. Most advice a British owner finds online was written for an American market, with American products, in American measurements. That is the gap this site fills.

I write from Brazil. What travels is the part that matters: knowing dogs, and knowing how to work out whether a product is worth its price.

How recommendations are made

Specification, not marketing copy. Sizes compared against the breeds they are sold for. Prices checked in pounds, this month, including delivery. What British owners report in forums and reviews — taking seriously the complaints that repeat.

Where a recommendation comes from using something myself, the page says so. Where it comes from specification and research, the page says that instead. You should never have to guess which one you are reading.

And every comparison ends with who should not buy the product. A recommendation that suits everybody suits nobody, and it is usually a sign someone is being paid to like it.

How this site makes money

Some links here are affiliate links, marked as such, and they change nothing about what gets recommended. The Affiliate Disclosure has the detail.

Getting in touch

If something here is wrong, tell me and I will fix it — corrections go to the top of the pile. [email protected], or the Contact page.