🔍 How We Work
This page explains exactly how WhatPetShouldIGet.com decides things: how the quiz picks your match, where our cost numbers come from, how we rate a pet for kids, and what we do when good sources disagree. If you are a teacher, a shelter, or a parent deciding whether to trust us, start here.
🎯 How the pet quiz picks your match
The quiz asks 11 questions about your home, not about which animal you already like. Every answer adds points to the pets it suits and nothing to the pets it doesn't, and your match percentage is simply the points a pet earned divided by the most it could have earned from the answers you gave.
The questions map onto the same handful of things that actually decide whether a pet works out:
- Space — a hutch on a balcony and a house with a yard are genuinely different answers.
- Daily time — the honest one. Most pets that get rehomed were not too expensive; they were too much work on a Tuesday.
- Who does the care — this is a question about adult supervision, not about the child's skill. A young child with a hands-on adult scores better than an older child on their own.
- Budget — a bigger budget only removes penalties from expensive pets; it never pushes an expensive pet ahead of a cheap one that fits you better.
- Handling — wanting to cuddle a pet that hates being held scores negative. We would rather lose the match than hand a kid an animal that will be miserable.
- Noise and mess, allergies, how long a commitment you want, previous experience, and one question about the kind of animal you find exciting.
Allergies are a hard filter, not a penalty. If someone at home reacts to fur or feathers, furred and feathered pets are removed from your results rather than merely marked down.
Then you get to overrule us. After the questions there is a "must-haves" step — must be handleable, must be fine alone, must live in a pair, must not need daily attention. Those are applied as a filter after scoring, so they never quietly distort your percentages. Pets that fail exactly one of them still appear, marked with a ✗ so you can see what you would be trading away. If nothing at all passes your filters, we say so plainly and show your best overall match instead of pretending.
We tell you where your match is a stretch. The result card names up to two things your top pet scored badly on. A match is a starting point for a conversation, not a verdict.
Ties are broken deterministically, not alphabetically. A lot of answer combinations produce an exact tie for first place. We used to fall back to alphabetical order, which quietly handed a large share of those ties to whichever pet sorted first. Now the tie is broken by a value derived from your specific answers — so the same answers always give you the same pet (your result link never changes under you), but different answer sets spread ties across all the pets that genuinely tied.
The quiz is a matching tool, not an assessment of you or your family — there is no "wrong" result. When you reach a result we record the match and the answer positions anonymously so we can publish the match stats and find questions that aren't working; no name, account, or device identifier is attached. Our privacy policy sets out exactly what that record contains.
💰 How we estimate costs
We publish three different numbers and we keep them separate on purpose, because "cheap pet" almost always means "cheap to buy".
- Setup cost — the one-time bill before the animal comes home: enclosure, heating, lighting, filtration, carrier. For a lot of reptiles and fish this is the largest number in the whole table and the one people are most surprised by.
- Monthly cost — food, bedding, substrate, consumables, and routine supplies.
- Lifetime cost — the monthly figure carried across the middle of the species' realistic lifespan, plus setup.
Ranges are ranges for a reason: they reflect real retail prices at the time of writing, not a best case. Where a species is only humanely kept in a group, the cost covers the group rather than one animal — a single guinea pig is not a cheaper guinea pig, it is a welfare problem.
What our cost figures deliberately do NOT include: veterinary care beyond routine expectations. Emergency and specialist care is the single biggest source of variance in what a pet actually costs, it varies enormously by region, and exotic-species vets are both scarcer and more expensive than most first-time owners expect. Any site that gives you one confident number for lifetime vet costs is guessing. We would rather tell you to keep a real emergency fund.
The full dataset, with our workings, is published at the lifetime pet cost study — including a downloadable CSV. You are welcome to republish it with credit.
🧒 How we rate a pet for kids
Every pet carries a kid-suitability rating, and it answers one specific question: how forgiving is this animal of the way children actually behave — sudden noise, quick movements, an inconsistent routine, an enthusiastic grip. It is not a measure of how much a child will enjoy the pet.
That is why some genuinely wonderful animals rate low. A pet can be fascinating, beautiful, and a poor fit for a seven-year-old at the same time, and we would rather say so. Where an animal is popular with families but we think that popularity is misplaced, the pet's page says that in plain words rather than burying it.
Care difficulty is tracked separately from kid-suitability, because they are not the same thing. Plenty of easy pets do not want to be handled, and plenty of handleable pets are hard to house correctly.
🪶 What "low maintenance" means here
It means low daily time, and nothing else. It does not mean cheap, it does not mean easy to set up, and it does not mean the animal can be left alone. Several of the lowest-daily-effort pets on this site have the highest setup costs and the least tolerance for getting the habitat wrong. When a pet is low-effort in one sense and demanding in another, we say which.
📚 Where our care information comes from
Every pet page and every habitat setup guide ends with a "Where this comes from" block listing the sources behind it — currently 500 citations across 102 pages, drawn from 368 distinct sources. Each one was opened and read; none were collected automatically.
We split them into two lists on purpose, and we will not merge them:
- Veterinary & welfare sources (382 of them) — veterinary bodies and vet schools, animal-welfare organisations, government regulators, and university extension services.
- Keeper & community sources — species-specialist care resources maintained by experienced keepers.
For several invertebrates and reptiles, the keeper resources are honestly the better husbandry reference — the specialist community knows more about a particular gecko's substrate than any general veterinary page does. But a site read by children must never present a hobby care sheet and a public-health agency as though they were the same kind of authority, so they stay visibly separate and you can always see which is which.
Source links are re-checked on a fixed quarterly schedule, and the "checked" date on those blocks tells you when that last happened.
⚖️ What we do when sources disagree
Often. Minimum enclosure sizes, whether a species should be kept alone or in company, and how much heat or humidity it needs are all genuinely contested, and the disagreement is frequently between two credible sources rather than between a good one and a bad one.
We handle two different kinds of disagreement in two different ways.
On husbandry requirements, we publish the more demanding figure. If one reputable body says an enclosure of a certain size is acceptable and another says it is too small, we print the larger one. The cost of being wrong in that direction is that a family spends more than they strictly had to. The cost of being wrong in the other direction is an animal that lives badly. There are places on this site where our stated minimum is larger than a major welfare organisation's published minimum, and that is deliberate.
On matters of fact — what a law says, what a study found — we go the other way and state the weaker claim. "Country X bans keeping this fish alone" and "Country X's animal-welfare agency says this fish should be kept in groups" are very different sentences, and we have had to walk back the stronger version of exactly that claim before. Where the evidence supports guidance rather than a rule, we call it guidance.
And where the disagreement is itself the useful information, we say the sources disagree instead of flattening it into false confidence.
🔄 How often this changes
Every guide shows the date it was last updated. Care recommendations genuinely move — housing standards in particular have shifted a lot in the last decade, and advice that was standard when today's parents had a hamster is now considered inadequate. We would rather revise a page than defend it.
Legal and zoning information is the shakiest thing on this site and we flag it as such wherever it appears: rules vary by state, by city, and by landlord, and they change often. Treat those pages as a starting point for your own check, never as the answer.
🚫 What we don't do
- Nobody can pay to change your quiz result. The match is decided by your answers and the pet data, and there is no sponsored placement anywhere in it.
- We don't sell your data, and we don't collect the kind worth selling. There are no accounts and no sign-up. The only things that leave your device are an anonymous record of a finished quiz run and, if you beat one, a game high score.
- We say "don't get this one" when we mean it. A pet-choosing site that likes every pet is useless.
- We point at shelters first. Adoption comes before buying, on every pet where adoption is realistic.
- We disclose the money. Some supply links are affiliate links and we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. They never affect which pet the quiz picks, or what a care guide says. Full detail in our terms.
✉️ Tell us we're wrong
If something here looks off — a cost that doesn't match your experience, an enclosure size you think is outdated, a claim we haven't backed up — please tell us. Corrections from vets, keepers, breeders, and rescue staff are the fastest way this site gets better, and we would much rather fix a page than be right about it.