Editorial policy
A policy is only worth writing if somebody can hold you to it, so this one is specific about what we do, what we refuse, and how fast we fix things.
Last updated September 1, 2026
Independence
Peep & Pen accepts none of the following, and will not:
- Payment for placement, inclusion, or a favorable review.
- Free products, review samples or loaned units from manufacturers.
- Sponsored posts, paid links, or link insertions in existing content.
- Any editorial input from a manufacturer or retailer, including “fact checking” offers on drafts.
We earn affiliate commission and that is the entire business model. The disclosure page names every retailer we do and do not earn from. Commission is not a criterion in the rubric, is not a tiebreaker, and does not influence whether we recommend buying anything at all.
Claims this site will not make
This list exists because these are the claims the category is full of, and refusing them is most of what makes this site different.
- That we tested something. We have not used this gear. Products we claim to have tested: zero, stated on how we pick and repeated in every roundup.
- A credential we do not hold. No veterinary review, no expert panel, no “medically reviewed by”, no certification. Scooter M. is an enthusiast and the byline says so.
- Tenure. No “long-time keeper”, no “fifteen years”, no “veteran”. Interest is real; time served would not be.
- A price we have not verified today. Prices come from a live data layer with a 48-hour freshness gate and are never typed into a page.
- A customer rating or review count. Not published anywhere on this site, because we have no live rating data and a remembered star rating is a fabrication.
- A number we cannot attribute. Every specification, temperature, wattage and space allowance on this site carries a source. Where a maker publishes nothing, the page says so rather than filling the gap.
Sourcing standards
Sources are preferred in this order: manufacturer specification sheets and manuals; university extension services and USDA; federal agencies; the Energy Information Administration for electricity rates; and the live retailer data layer for prices only.
Explicitly not acceptable as a source: another affiliate site’s figures, a competitor’s stated price range, a forum post, or recollection. If a number cannot be attributed to a primary source, it does not ship.
Every arithmetic result on this site shows its inputs, so a reader can redo it. A bare result is just another number to distrust.
Corrections
We get things wrong. What matters is what happens next.
- How to report one. Use the contact form or write to info@peepandpen.com. A link to the manufacturer page the number should have come from is the single most useful thing you can include.
- How fast. Factual errors — a wrong wattage, a wrong dimension, a misquoted extension figure — are fixed as soon as we can verify the correction, and we treat them as the highest-priority work on the site.
- How it is recorded. A substantive correction is noted visibly on the page it affects, with its date. We do not silently edit a figure and move on.
- What counts. Wrong numbers, dead or wrong source links, arithmetic that does not reproduce, and specifications that have changed since we read them.
Update cadence
| When | What |
|---|---|
| Daily | Automated price refresh. Anything older than 48 hours stops rendering. |
| Quarterly | Specifications re-checked against current manufacturer listings; product links verified. |
| Each autumn | Every winter page reviewed before the season it applies to. |
| On any correction | Fixed, dated, and noted on the page. |
A page’s modified date is advanced only when its content genuinely changed. A price refresh never touches it — the refresh redeploys the whole site, and if it advanced dates then every page would claim to have changed every day and the freshness signal would become worthless.
Health, safety and legal content
Two categories get handled differently and deliberately.
Health content is not veterinary advice and is not monetized where a product would be tenuous. Anything systemic — a bird that is unwell rather than injured — is a call to a veterinarian or a state poultry extension office, and the pages say so in the body rather than in a footer disclaimer. Where we do name a treatment, we confine ourselves to label-directed uses and we say plainly where popular advice has drifted away from a label.
Legal content points at primary sources. The predator page cites the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and USDA APHIS directly on the protected status of raptors, because getting that wrong is a federal offense. It is a pointer to the law, not legal advice, and state rules add further restrictions we cannot enumerate.
Who writes and edits
Every page is written by Scooter M.. There is no editorial team and we are not going to imply one exists. About has the full framing, including what that byline does and does not claim.