About Puppy Scale
Puppy and pet calculators that get the math right — growth, food, due dates and age, from real veterinary data, with honest ranges.
Who runs this site
Puppy Scale is an independent site run by an individual based in the United States. It is published under its own name, Puppy Scale, which is the author of every calculator and guide, and every one of them shows its arithmetic and its sources so you can check them yourself.
Puppy Scale is not a veterinary practice, a telehealth service, a pharmacy or a poison-control service. It is not run by a veterinarian and claims no veterinary credentials, and it does not give veterinary, medical or nutritional advice for an individual animal. It shows the arithmetic and reports what published veterinary sources and open research data say, with the sources linked. Your vet examines your pet and decides.
You can reach the site at hello@puppyscale.com. In an emergency, call your vet or an animal poison-control line — the numbers are on the contact page.
Why it exists
Many pet calculators online are wrong in ways that matter to the animal: puppy-weight tools that use a straight-line rule which overshoots small puppies, cat calorie tools that use dog factors, food tools that guess the calories in a cup, pregnancy tools that give every U.S. visitor a due date a day early, and toxicity tools that call a dangerous amount of chocolate “mild”. Puppy Scale puts the exact formulas, the published ranges and the open data in one place, with the source and the date next to every number — and says “Not modeled” where nobody knows.
How the calculators work
The calculators are free, with no account and nothing to install. They run entirely in your browser: the weights, ages and dates you enter are not sent to this site, not stored on it and never put in the page address. When you press a link that carries them to another calculator (“Turn these calories into cups”), they pass through your browser’s session storage and are deleted as soon as the next page reads them. Calendar files and printouts are made in your browser too.
Every answer comes with a range and the reason for its width, the date its sources were checked, “How the math works” with each rule and its source, and a note that it is an estimate, not veterinary advice. The arithmetic is covered by automated tests built from worked examples.
The data, and its licences
The puppy growth bands are derived from the openly licensed data published with Salt C et al. (2017), PLOS ONE (University of Liverpool DataCat 377, CC BY 4.0); the kitten bands from the data published with Salt et al. (2022) (DataCat 1456, CC BY 3.0); breed weights from Andersson et al. (2023) and Bannasch et al. (2021) (CC BY 4.0). Each page that uses them says so under the numbers. Our tables are our own summaries of that data, not the published model curves, and no chart from any other publisher is copied or traced. Every dataset, with its licence, version and the date it was last checked, is on Data and sources.
How the guides are made
- Each guide answers one question a dog or cat owner actually has.
- Facts come from primary sources — peer-reviewed papers, veterinary reference texts and guidelines, the poison-control services’ own pages, U.S. agencies — and each guide lists them with the date they were read.
- Every number in a guide is recomputed with the same tested rules the calculators use, and a separate review pass checks each statement against its cited source before the guide is published. The guides are researched and drafted with the help of AI writing tools working to those rules; they never claim veterinary credentials, testing or experience that do not exist.
- No guide gives a medication dose, and none tells you to treat a poisoning at home.
- Every guide shows when it was published and last updated; factual corrections are shown on the page itself, with the date.
The full process is in the Editorial Policy, and the limits of what the site can tell you are in the Disclaimer.
How the site is funded
Puppy Scale is free to use and will be paid for by ads. No pet-food, pet-insurance or veterinary company pays for anything on this site, and nothing here is a paid placement.
- Ads (Google AdSense): once AdSense approves the site, on the home page, calculator pages and guides, labeled “Advertisements” — never inside a calculator or its results, and never on the chocolate triage page.
- No affiliate links yet. If gear lists are added, every Amazon link will carry “(paid link)” right next to it. As an Amazon Associate, Puppy Scale earns from qualifying purchases.
The site never sells leads or contact details, never takes payment for a place in a list, and never links to medication, pharmacies, supplements with health claims or puppy sales. See the Privacy Policy for how advertising uses data and how to opt out.
Independence
Puppy Scale is an independent website, not a veterinary practice. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by any veterinary association, kennel club, poison-control service, university, pet-food or pet-insurance company named on this site. Names are used only to identify sources.
Get in touch
Spotted a number that changed, a mistake, a calculator that misbehaves or a question a guide doesn’t answer? Use the contact page or email hello@puppyscale.com.