About Petfocial

The problem

When someone finds an injured stray, the information they need already exists. A nearby shelter takes intake on Tuesdays. A rescue lends humane traps against a deposit. A clinic holds subsidised surgery slots for trap-neuter-return groups. None of it is secret.

It is, however, effectively unreachable. It is spread across municipal PDFs, out-of-date pages, and phone trees — and the search that would find it requires already knowing the name of the program you are looking for. The information is not missing. It is unretrievable by the person who needs it, at the moment they need it.

What we do

Petfocial organises that information by place rather than by institution. Open a map, see what is near you, and see what each organization actually offers: the price, who is eligible, how to book, and whether they lend equipment.

Alongside it sits a live view of animals people have reported in the area — what was found, what condition it was in, and whether anyone has picked it up yet.

How we handle facts

A directory is only worth using if you can trust what it says. Our rule is that every displayed fact carries its own source and the date it was last checked. Not the record — the individual fact. A price confirmed by phone last week and an eligibility rule scraped from a page in 2024 are not equally reliable, and we do not present them as though they were.

Three consequences of that rule, which we hold to even when it looks worse:

• Unknown is shown as unknown. Never as an empty field, never as zero, never as a plausible default. Telling someone a service is free when it is not is the worst thing this product could do.
• Stale facts stay visible, and stay labelled. We degrade them to “call to confirm” rather than deleting them, because a stale phone number is still better than nothing.
• Conflicts are kept, not resolved silently. When what an organization publishes disagrees with what its staff told us on the phone, both are retained and the human account is ranked higher.

What we are not

We are not a veterinary provider and we do not give veterinary or legal advice. We do not take custody of animals. We do not sell ranking: the program listings are the mission and are never eligible for paid placement. Commercial listings, where they exist, are kept in a visibly separate section.

Who builds it

Petfocial is a product of Artifocial. If something on the site is wrong — a price, an address, a program that no longer runs — tell us and we will check it.