About

We're Austin and Illiana Moncada. Here's why this site exists, who writes it, and how we make sure what you read here is actually right.

It started with a house full of dogs

Neither of us has ever really lived without one underfoot. Illiana grew up with nine dachshunds and two basset hounds, which is exactly as loud as it sounds. Austin's mom kept four at a time and fostered on top of that, so there was always one more passing through on its way somewhere better.

You don't come out of that without questions. Is this safe to give her? Why does he keep doing that with his paws? How hot is too hot to go out? We spent years typing those into a search bar and years getting back the same mush — a dozen sites repeating each other, none of them citing anything, half of them clearly written by somebody who had never actually lived with a dog.

That's the whole reason this exists. Not because the internet needed another dog blog. Because we kept looking for a straight answer, kept not finding one, and eventually it seemed easier to go dig them up ourselves and write them down properly.

So that's what this is. Real questions, checked against sources we'd trust with our own four, written by two people who will be asked the same thing by one of their dogs in about an hour.

Why we actually keep doing it

The fostering is the part that stuck with us. Watching dogs come through Austin's mom's house — most of them fine, a few of them not, every one of them waiting on somebody to take a chance — is why this doesn't feel like a side project. If this site ever gets big enough to put a voice behind a dog that needs a home, that is what we want to spend it on.

The rest of it is simpler than that. We like dogs. We like the strange, specific, slightly embarrassing questions people have about them, because we have all the same ones. Somebody has to answer them without hedging, and we would rather it was us than another page of filler.

We're in San Antonio, where "is it too hot to walk them right now" is a genuinely useful question about eight months of the year. That's part of why the site leans practical. Everything here gets filtered through what works in a real house with four real dogs in it — not what sounds right in theory.

What we care about

We care about our dogs a frankly unreasonable amount, and we're guessing you do too. That's the only thing this site assumes about you. Everything else follows from it.

Your dog comes first. Not the word count, not the affiliate link, not whatever would rank. If the honest answer to a question is "call your vet," that's what the article says, even though it's a worse article.
We're not going to scare you. A lot of dog content runs on panic, because panic travels. We'd rather tell you what's actually likely, be blunt when something genuinely is an emergency, and the rest of the time let you go enjoy your dog.
Every dog counts. We both came up around fostering and rescues, and it shows in what we write. Mutts, shelter dogs and the ones nobody can identify the breed of get the same attention here as anything with papers — they're who's in most houses anyway.
"We don't know" is an acceptable answer. When the research is thin or the studies disagree, we say so. Confident nonsense is how most bad dog advice spreads, and we're not adding to it.

How we research and fact-check

Neither of us is a veterinarian, and we're not going to pretend otherwise. Every article gets checked against primary sources — the AKC, ASPCA, AVMA, Cornell's College of Veterinary Medicine — and cited in the article itself when the claim matters. We write everything between us and we both read everything before it goes live. Where the research is thin, the article says so.

Read our full editorial standards → — including how we handle corrections, and where the photographs on this site come from.

How we make money

Being upfront about this felt important: some links on this site are affiliate links, which means we may earn a small commission if you buy something through them — at no extra cost to you. We only recommend things we'd actually give our own four, and a product being linked here is never why an article got written in the first place.

Found something wrong?

Tell us. If an article has a mistake, is out of date, or you just think we got something wrong, reach out through Contact & Corrections and we'll take a real look — and fix it if we should.

The two of us

We're Austin and Illiana Moncada. We write everything here between the two of us, in a house in San Antonio where somebody is always underfoot and the couch stopped being ours a long time ago.

Austin grew up with his mom's four dogs plus whatever she was fostering that month. Illiana grew up with nine dachshunds and two basset hounds. Neither of us has ever had a quiet house, and we are not trying to start now.