Methodology

Our source hierarchy

For any factual claim, we work down a strict order of evidence and use the strongest source available:

1. Primary law and government records — statutes, administrative codes, regulators' orders, court filings, and agency data. This is the top of the hierarchy and the source we quote for any claim about your rights or the law.
2. Recognized standards and professional bodies — for practice and process: the IAOPCC and CANA for crematory operating standards, the AVMA and veterinary hospice bodies for end-of-life care, Dr. Alice Villalobos's HHHHHMM scale for quality-of-life.
3. Reputable primary journalism — for specific events, and only outlets that do original reporting, cited by name and date.
4. Our own primary research — where no one else has the data, we collect it: our 118-provider price study, our 50-state law review, our ownership research.

What we don't treat as evidence for a factual claim: content aggregators, urn- and cremation-seller blogs, AI-generated summaries, and forum or review-site posts. They can point us toward a question; they are never the answer. And we name a business critically only on a government record — never on a review or a forum accusation.

How we grade our confidence

Not all evidence is equally solid, and pretending otherwise is how bad numbers spread. So we grade it. In our 50-state law data, for example, every state's entry carries an internal confidence level:

• High — we read the controlling statute or code section directly and link it.
• Medium — the statute sits behind a script-blocked portal or is ambiguous, so we rely on a government summary or a secondary source, and we say so.
• Low / none — no on-point pet law exists. Here we do the opposite of what most sites do: instead of dressing up a livestock or disease-control rule as a pet law, we record it as "no state law — local rules apply" and tell you to check locally.

The principle is simple: when the evidence is inadequate, we say so plainly rather than assert. "We don't know, and here's why" is a more useful answer than a confident wrong one.

Citations and numbers

• Every load-bearing fact links to its primary source, inline, so you can read it yourself.
• Every statistic carries its source and year (for example, "AVMA, 2024") — never a naked number.
• Prices are anchored to real data — our national medians and published-price ranges — never invented for a city we haven't measured.
• No fabrication, ever. We do not invent a customer, a testimonial, a review, an expert quote, or a credential to make a point land. When we say we checked something, we checked it.

Corrections and dating

We date our reviews, and we correct in the open — appending and dating a change rather than quietly editing the record. Where a situation can move (a criminal charge, a pending bill), we label a charge as an allegation and update the entry as its status changes. Spot something wrong? Tell us at editor@hallowedpaws.com and we'll look into it.

The independent red-team

Before a guide goes live, it clears an adversarial review that assumes the page is wrong and tries to break it, across four lenses:

• Fact & citation — does every claim actually match the source it cites?
• Search quality — is it genuinely useful, complete, and the best answer to the question, not filler?
• Answer-engine readiness — is it structured so an AI can extract and attribute it correctly?
• Honesty & voice — no fabrication, no fear-mongering, no euphemism, no implying we perform the cremation.

A fact or honesty defect blocks publication until it's fixed. And because the check is tied to each page's content, any later edit re-triggers the review — a guide can't drift out of standard without being re-checked. It's how we keep the bar the same on page 400 as on page one.

See the receipts: our full list of sources, our reporting standards for named people and businesses, and the data and citations for journalists.